It was a good news, bad news situation when Ed Schwartz arrived by ambulance at Northwestern Memorial Hospital one cold January afternoon earlier this year.
“The doctors told me the `good news’ was that I was still alive,” Schwartz recalls with bleak humor.
The bad news was that he was slipping away fast.
“I went from having an afternoon nap to being told that I was dying,” says the longtime Chicago radio talk show personality.
A short time earlier, Schwartz had fallen on the floor of his bathroom and found himself too weak to get up. The diagnosis: life-threatening pneumonia that put him in intensive care for several weeks and kept him in the hospital long after he was out of immediate danger.
In all, Schwartz spent two months in the hospital, another month at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago regaining the use of atrophied leg muscles and weeks more recuperating at home. It’s only recently that he was able to return full time to his regular midnight to 4 a.m. shift Sundays through Thursdays on WLUP-FM 97.9 after working reduced hours for several weeks on doctors’ orders. Last weekend, what was described as a return of some respiratory problems put him back in the hospital for tests, but a WLUP source expressed hope that Schwartz would be back on the air next week.
When he returns to the studio, it will be business as usual as the 47-year-old Schwartz fields calls from listeners, interviews everyone from celebrities and politicians to unsung community heroes, and doesn’t hesitate to rail against situations that strike him as unjust, occasionally putting his money where his mouth is. (Infuriated over the recent highly publicized Holiday Inn scheduling snafu that deprived DuSable High School students of a suitable place to hold their senior prom, Schwartz offered to personally foot the bill for another party to make it up to the kids.) But sitting in the living room of his one-bedroom, North Side apartment a few weeks ago, Schwartz makes it clear that life will never be quite the same for him again.
“When you’ve been through a health emergency like the one I went through, you start re-evaluating your whole life,” he says.
“I’ve been thinking about why I pulled through,” muses Schwartz. “I’m not super-religious, and we’re getting into a very ethereal area, but I would like to think that what goes around comes around. You hear that all the time, and maybe it’s true. I’ve never done something with the idea that by doing a good deed I was earning a credit in the `God bank,’ but I do think-at least, I hope-that maybe the positive things that I’ve done in my life and my career came through for me when I needed them.
“I’ve been given a second chance, and when you’re given a second chance, you’d be a fool not to take it. And if it means making some major changes, you would be a fool not to make them.”
Such as?
Schwartz gestures toward a new exercise bike that stands by the couch.
“Obviously, I have been overweight for a long time,” says Schwartz, whose weight has been a perennial source of concern to friends worried about his health.
“I didn’t find out until I was an adult that I had a thyroid condition that should have been treated,” he adds. “And because of my job, I’m locked to a chair more hours than I care to admit, and that puts you behind the eight-ball in terms of exercise. So that has been a bogeyman health problem all along. I don’t know how much I weigh now-I don’t want to know-but I’ve lost 130 pounds and I’m working on losing more, and it’s the toughest thing in the world to do.”
In some ways, Schwartz acknowledges, his lifelong struggles with his weight may have contributed to the heartfelt empathy he invariably brings to his dealings with people both on and off the air-a trait that has made him one of the city’s most popular radio personalities.
“This is a man whose heart is as big as he is, maybe bigger,” says longtime friend Beverly D. Decker, executive director of the Chicago Anti-Hunger Federation. Over the past 12 years, Schwartz’s annual Good Neighbor Food Drive crusades have garnered more than 2 million pounds of canned goods and nearly $1 million for city food pantries and soup kitchens.
“Ed is very honest with his listeners, and his integrity is without question,” Decker adds. “He really cares about people.”
“I would hope that I would have that caring and understanding anyway,” Schwartz says. “I’ve always admired people who dedicate their lives to helping others; most of my friends are cops and firemen and nurses and doctors and paramedics. But yeah, probably (the struggle with weight) has played a part in how I view people. Our society is real quick to judge people on the way they look rather than on who they are or what they have done, and it’s very unkind. Every time I see a big guy do something well, I cheer for him.”
Radio a lifelong love
For Schwartz, there was little question about what he wanted to do with his life. Growing up the son of a grocer in what he describes as “a typical, hardworking, blue-collar neighborhood” on Chicago’s South Side, young Eddie was a “radio junkie” by the time he was in grade school.
“My grandparents bought me a very expensive portable radio when I was around 9, and I would listen to stations from faraway places,” he recalls. “I fell in love with the concept of radio and knew that I wanted to do something in broadcasting. But I never saw myself as an entertainer or performer; I always saw myself working behind the scenes.”
By the time he finished high school, Schwartz had landed his first radio job, working as a gofer at WLS. While attending area colleges, he joined WIND as music librarian and later worked as a producer at the station before launching his first overnight talk show in 1973. In 1982 he took up residence at WGN, where his late-night talk show regularly garnered higher ratings than many afternoon shows at other Chicago stations and Schwartz solidified his reputation as a talk show host with his finger on the pulse of the city.
“I don’t think there is anybody on the radio in Chicago that knows the city the way Eddie does,” says WGN-TV weatherman Tom Skilling, who worked with Schwartz at WGN radio for five years. “Before I knew him I used to listen to his show whenever severe weather would roll through the area, because he would open up the phone lines to listeners and you could get an overview of what was happening in terms of storm damage and power outages.
“Eddie also has a way of talking one on one with people and sharing anecdotes about himself in a way that is very endearing,” Skilling adds. “You feel that you know him.”
But friends and fans who thought they knew Schwartz got a surprise in the spring of 1992 with the announcement that he had accepted an offer to join WLUP-AM because he wanted a “new challenge.” Not only was the Loop’s target audience younger than the one Schwartz had commanded on WGN, several of the station’s air personalities, notably Steve Dahl and Garry Meier, delighted in poking fun at Schwartz’s weight, broadcasting style and “do-gooder” impulses on a regular basis.
“This was a station where some of the guys had excoriated him on the air,” says Skilling. “I think Eddie was a little apprehensive.”
“We both took some risks,” says Larry Wert, vice president and general manager of WLUP/WMVP, who made the decision to pursue Schwartz. “We knew his audience skewed much older than ours, but Ed had built up a comfort zone with late night listeners, period, and we decided to take a chance with each other.”
Last fall, WLUP-AM became the all-sports station WMVP-AM 1000 and Schwartz switched to WLUP-FM.
“I never thought I would be on FM,” he says. “It’s a whole different world. AM radio has a much longer reach, particularly at night, so you become a local radio show for people hundreds and even thousands of miles away. That doesn’t happen with the FM signal.”
As for his relationship with Dahl, now a morning air personality on all-sports WMVP, “I did everything I could to reach out to Steve, but he wasn’t buying,” Schwartz says. “I even walked up to him once in the studio where he was broadcasting and gave him a hug.
“I think that my showing up at the Loop blew his mind. All those years I was one of his major targets, and now I was a major colleague. I guess he felt threatened, and there was no need for that.” (Dahl, contacted by the Tribune, said that he “was not interested in commenting” on his relationship with Schwartz.)
What his listeners get
The phone rings; Schwartz’s producer is on the line about a possible guest for an upcoming show. Schwartz likes the idea, but balks when told that the guest, a local media personality, wants to do the interview by telephone from his home.
“I think he owes it to the audience to come into the studio,” he huffs. “I want my guests on my turf.”
Schwartz himself typically arrives at the WLUP studio nearly an hour before air time, invariably toting a plastic supermarket bag full of articles and news items he has clipped during the day. “I make notes all day long on topics worth discussing, but I don’t like to be overprepared, because that makes you predictable,” he says.
Still, there are some things that listeners can count on not hearing on his show.
“I can express strong opinions and get argumentative sometimes, especially if a listener interprets something I said completely out of context or puts words in my mouth, but I don’t think that just because I have control of the microphone I should be able to say things that hurt people maliciously,” he says. “I have been astounded at some of the cruel things I’ve heard Howard Stern and others put on the air. Sometimes you give pretty strong opinions, but you’ve got to measure the maliciousness behind it.”
When his shift ends, a wide-awake Schwartz often spends several hours checking out “what’s happening” throughout the city, cruising the neighborhoods in his 15-year-old beater.
“Nothing flashy for me. I could afford a new car, but why do I need one?” notes Schwartz, who earns a six-figure salary but says he has never been motivated by money.
“I’ve probably never earned what I could have earned over the years,” he says thoughtfully. “Probably I’ve made a mistake in that regard. There were times when I was offered big bucks for jobs that involved working afternoon or morning shifts and I turned them down because I enjoy working nights. But money was never that important to me. As long as I can pay my bills and save a little bit I haven’t really been money hungry.”
Ed the romantic
When Schwartz does go home, he breakfasts alone, surrounded by heaps of books, videos, albums and a 20-year accumulation of baseball caps, photos, awards and assorted geegaws presented to him by fans and civic groups. “Don’t call it clutter,” he warns jokingly. “I know where everything is.
“I would like to get married and have a family,” muses the self-described romantic, who still has a soft spot for the 1960s Mamas & Papas hit “California Dreamin’ ” because it brings back memories of teenage trysts at the beach.
“The girl I used to hang out there with called me up on the air a while back,” he says with a smile. “It surprised the heck out of me.
“Right now, I would thank my lucky stars if I bumped into somebody who could deal with my lifestyle,” Schwartz adds. “I’m looking for a female companion who is smart, who reads, who wants to know about the news of the day. To have someone like that as a sounding board, someone to share things with, would be the best thing in the world for a guy like me.”
