Media: September 2024 • Rewound Radio
Once again, Rewound Radio (rewoundradio.com) is spending the entire Labor Day Weekend featuring classic shows from WLS and WCFL from the 1960s and 1970s. Ted Gorden Smucker is the man behind the plan.
“When I was a kid, I loved radio and TV,” Smucker explains, “and when I was probably around sixth, seventh grade or so, I got a cassette recorder, one of the first in our area, and I ended up recording a lot of things off the radio. I would record WLS, WCFL, and others. I recorded all these DJs who were playing the music I loved at the time, and I thought, boy, when I grow up, I want to do that. Well, I grew up and realized that I wasn’t going to make much money doing that, because I didn’t have the kind of voice or delivery that the that the big guys had, and then after graduation from college, I moved to South Bend and moved into television. And I worked in South Bend at WSB TV, which is the CBS affiliate there in sales for over 30 years, retired about three years ago.”
After he retired, Ted returned to his first love.
“I decided that I would revisit my old hobby of gathering and listening to recordings of the DJs that I listened to 40, 50, even 55 years before. I realized that there were a lot of guys that had collected these tapes, just like me. I started contacting those folks and making some swaps. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized that I had amassed a fairly good collection of Chicago air checks. Well, about three or four years ago, I started listening to Rewound Radio (rewoundradio.com), which every Saturday would play the DJ Hall of Fame and WABC air checks. They primarily focused on WABC because they were based in New York. I approached Allan Sniffen, who is the proprietor of Rewound Radio, and asked, ‘Are you ever going to make a weekend of WLS and WCFL like you did for WABC?’ He said, ‘If you want to do it, go for it.’ So, I started amassing as many air checks as I possibly could from Chicago, and this will be the third year that I’ve been doing this project. And each year, there seems to be more and more interest in it. It’s been exciting for me to be a part of that.”
This year’s celebration has taken on an additional significance.
“This year, WLS is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and WCFL is being inducted into the Illinois Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the 20th of October. So, this is a big year for both LS and CFL. I was fortunate to have gotten permission from Scott Childers to use some of the history bits that he and Jeff Davis had worked on for WLS’s anniversary. We also have some old WCFL interviews from 1979. And we’ve got Dick Biondi and Joel Sebastian and Jimmy P Stagg, who all are gone now, of course, but we’ll, we’ll play segments from them. In addition, Tommy Edwards sent me an Animal Stories to run that is not on any of the albums. Plus, Lisa Orkin, whose father was Dick Orkin, gave us permission to run a handful of Chicken Man episodes, so those will be fun for those who remember Chicken Man. You’ll recognize some of these other names, too. Fred Winston will be on. J.J. Jeffrey, John Landecker, Larry Lujack, Ron Riley, Steve King, and Kris Eric Stevens. Then on the WCFL side, we’ll have citizen Bill Taylor. Bill will be with us at the Rock and Roll Museum induction ceremony. Chuck Knapp, who worked at both LS and CFL, will be at the induction ceremony, too. “
If you haven’t heard about these Chicago weekends at Rewound Radio, it is like going back in time. Everything sounds just as it did when it originally aired, including the music, weather reports, and even the commercials.
“I get a lot of emails from people who listen, and the connections are amazing,” Smucker says. “I’m going to give you a couple of examples. Clark Weber’s daughter Peggy, the first year she listened to the rewound. She was in tears. It brought back so many memories, and she was so thankful. Sandy Bailey, Bill Bailey’s widow, has listened and is very excited about the next upcoming event because, again, she gets to hear her husband, who is no longer with us, on the radio again. It’s emotional for the families. John Landecker wrote me a note and said, ‘Ted, I cannot believe this. I don’t know how you did it, but this is just fantastic. It felt like I was listening to WLS back in the day. I was listening to Tommy Edwards, and I would have sworn he was on the air live right then.’ Well, I thought that was a real compliment. But what’s funny is Tommy and I were working together on a Lujack special later, and he said to me that rewind was incredible and then added, ‘I was listening to John Landecker, and I would have sworn he was on the air live right then.’’’
It will be on all Labor Day weekend at rewoundradio.com. You can also ask your Alexa device to play Rewound Radio, and she will.
-Rick Kaempfer
