Some budding celebrities retain publicists to generate buzz. Sig Sakowicz’s strategy was cheaper and more grass roots: He sponsored a die-hard group, most of them Polish women, and called it the Sig Sakowicz Mothers’ Fan Club.
Starting in 1954, the radio personality recruited dozens of fans to tout his show. In reciprocation, he espoused their causes, from charity cases to two-man police squads, and gave them access to stars and movers and shakers.
It worked like a feedback loop, with a bigger fan base drawing bigger names, until the club became a constituency of more than 2,400 for a proudly Polish figure who had made it in the mainstream.
“These were tough ladies,” said Wally Phillips, the retired WGN-AM morning-radio host. “They wanted to make sure he was treated right in the media.”
Sigmund Stanislaus Sakowicz, 80, died Saturday, Feb. 7, of complications from a broken hip and femur in a Las Vegas nursing home, said his son Rev. Gregory.
Mr. Sakowicz, who was born in Chicago, was a large man, about 270 pounds on a 6-foot frame. Flat feet kept him out of military service in World War II, his son said. Instead he worked at his parents’ tavern at Wabansia and Hermitage Avenues, where he once threw a drunk through a wall, his son said. At the bar, Mr. Sakowicz posted typewritten excerpts of letters from neighborhood servicemen stationed abroad. By 1942, the letters had been compiled into a newsletter; by the end of the war it was a 48-page paper mailed to more than 2,500 soldiers and paid for by donations into a barroom jug. He called it the “Sakowicz Jug.”
He graduated from Weber High School and took classes at DePaul University. When a local radio station interviewed him in 1943 about the jug, he was hooked on radio, his son said. By the 1960s his shows were on WGN-AM and WTAQ.
Ward Quaal, retired president of WGN Continental Broadcasting Co., said his colleagues warned him that Mr. Sakowicz was a “professional Pole” and a “professional Catholic” and told him to watch his step before hiring him. But his reach went well beyond Polish housewives, topping the Saturday evening ratings, Quaal said. His identity, however, was firm.
“My dad said many times there were two things he would not do: he would not change his last name–he was proud of being Polish–and never denied being Catholic,” said his son, who is pastor of St. Mary of the Woods Catholic Church.
Mr. Sakowicz moved to Las Vegas in 1972. In 1985 he returned to Chicago and was public relations manager for the Polish National Alliance from 1987 to the mid-1990s, said T. Ron Jasinski-Herbert, the alliance’s spokesman.
Mr. Sakowicz returned to Las Vegas, but broadcast on the alliance’s AM radio station until 2002, his son said.
Besides his son, survivors include three daughters, Christine Samaan, Pamela Menaker and Marya Sakowicz Witt; another son, Adrian; and eight grandchildren.
Visitation will begin at 4 p.m. Friday, followed by mass at 7:30 p.m., in St. Mary of the Woods Catholic Church, 7033 N. Moselle Ave., Chicago.
