Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of Spike O’Dell’s appointment as host of WGN-AM’s morning program, but “the only date that sticks in my mind is Feb. 8,” he says of the day a year ago when morning host Bob Collins died.
The air crash death of the beloved Chicago radio icon thrust O’Dell into the news-talk station’s top spot (considered to be one of the premier jobs in radio nationally) at a time when WGN needed guidance after losing its leader so suddenly and shockingly.
On Feb. 8, 2000, then-afternoon host O’Dell first told listeners of an aircraft collision near the Wisconsin border. As further details trickled in, O’Dell faced the difficult task of telling listeners that Collins, one of O’Dell’s best friends, was the pilot of one of the planes.
After only a couple of hours of sleep, O’Dell was back on the air, hosting the morning show in Collins’ place while coming to grips with his own grief and that of the station, the city and the state.
“First of all, one of your best friends dies tragically,” O’Dell says in his office recently, a few hours after signing off, “and then your life is thrown into a tumble because of that. You go from one lifestyle — getting up at a certain time and living your day that way — and you go to another one that is just totally opposite.
“So with all of that happening and trying to learn how to do this, if we happen to pull it off, it will be somewhat of a miracle.”
O’Dell is apparently pulling it off fairly well. Arbitron fall quarterly ratings show he’s No. 1 overall in the morning with an 8.7 share, unchanged from the summer ratings book. However, the figure is down from the 10.4 share that Collins had during the same period a year ago, when Collins was the dominant personality in mornings.
“It’s partially Spike and it’s partially the power of the radio station,” says program director Mary June Rose. O’Dell came to WGN (like the Tribune a property of Tribune Co.) in 1987 from a top-40 radio station in the Quad Cities and took the afternoon slot despite the radical change in formats because, he says, “you don’t say no to these call letters.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do now, is earn my stripes,” says O’Dell, 47. “I’ll probably feel like I’m earning my stripes until the day I say I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m always trying to do a little bit better. You’ve got to.
“I think that listeners always, and especially fans of any host, develop a very strong one-on-one affinity with a host. And so anybody like Bob, who has been there a long time, and is taken away in such a tragic way, I think that has the kind of impact on listeners that’s not dissimilar to losing a friend or, to some extent, a family member,” says Al Peterson, news-talk radio editor for Los Angeles industry newspaper R&R magazine.
“Once again, here I go into this audience thing, this family thing that we all talked about a year ago,” O’Dell says. “The listeners and I, we laugh together, we holler at each other sometimes, we have disagreements and agreements, good times, bad times.
“And having said all that, they do cut you a break. And I think, yeah, it was easier for me to do this than to bring somebody in from the outside that they had never heard of.”
“To be able to do that and to make that transition, it takes an extremely deft touch, and I think that Spike was certainly the right guy to be able to do that,” Peterson says.
Some observers believe that this patience from WGN listeners in the aftermath of Collins’ death also extends to John Williams, who took over O’Dell’s afternoon slot, and Steve Cochran, who replaced Williams at middays. Many at the station doubt that such rapport would have worked if WGN had enlisted an outsider to replace Collins, even if the station had waited a month or six months.
“We have that big old picture of Bob in the hallway, and every time you walk by it, it’s weird,” says Sunday morning host Dean Richards. “You think of the trauma that we all went through personally and professionally. . . . I think we made it through it better than any of us thought we were going to make it through it, really.”
“It’s been harder probably on Spike than on anybody, because nobody wants to get that job under those circumstances,” Rose says. “And you never want to follow the legend . . . because how do you ever live up to that?”
Tom Petersen, the station’s news director, and morning news anchor for both O’Dell and Collins, thinks O’Dell has “accepted the challenge” of handling mornings.
O’Dell is quick to point out that he couldn’t make listeners forget Collins — and doesn’t want to. He notes that listeners remember Collins even in their compliments to O’Dell. “Everybody will send you a nice piece of e-mail, `Way to go, Spike, good job stepping in there. You’re not Bob, but . . . you’re doing a great job’ or whatever,” O’Dell says.
“That really doesn’t bother me, because those are big shoes to fill. I’ve not even begun to put my feet in those shoes yet. Hopefully, some day I can get them in there.”
Another reason O’Dell, who has been in radio for 23 years, almost 14 of them at WGN, continues to believe he has to prove himself is because he feels he is still making the transition from afternoons, which has a less rigid pace and format, to mornings, which, on WGN, is more news and issues-oriented.
Rose says O’Dell is working hard, keeping abreast of the news, planning show features and discussing with her how each broadcast went almost as soon as he’s off the air.
“I think probably five or six months into it, I realized that this is a different animal than the afternoon show was,” he says, “which is why, to this day, I have more respect for Bob Collins. Because I know what he went through, and what he did, how well he did it for so long, and made it look like he was hardly breathing hard. This is a tough job.”
O’Dell should have many morning broadcasts in front of him. He recently signed a three-year contract with WGN and hopes he can work mornings for a few years longer than that. But it isn’t his desire to retire at the station.
“I’ll get out of the way, let somebody younger try it,” he says. “I’d like to do it three, four, five years maybe. And then, hopefully, be able to be in a position where you can get out of the way. Maybe keep your hands in radio somewhere, at the small retirement community you’re going to move to, or something.”
