He grew up on a farm near an Ohio town that was “no bigger than the size of your hand,” and now, seven decades later, Mike King sits on top of the world in offices in the tower under the Wrigley Building clock.
He looks out a window at a lovely view of the river below and says, “I owe all this to radio.”
He fell in love with the medium as a high schooler, when he visited a local radio station to seek sound effects equipment for a play he was directing. “I don’t remember the name of that play, but I do remember being in awe of the station,” he says. And so hooked, he eventually went to work as an engineer at KYW in Cleveland.
“Radio was magic then,” he says. “There wasn’t any sort of format. The deejays had to be creative, had to entertain. We all did.”
He came to Chicago in the 1960s, hired by WCFL at the time that station was engaged in a rock ‘n’ roll radio war with WLS. Those were heady and often raucous days. But eventually, “because I was 40 and getting tired of working for people who looked and acted like they were 16,” King became a commercial production engineer. It was in that role that he met and became friendly with P.K. Wrigley and his son Bill, who one day asked King, “Why aren’t you in the business for yourself?”
And so in 1987 he started Audio Recording Unlimited, consisting of two studios on one floor of the Wrigley Building tower, which until then had been used primarily as a storage area. He had three employees. Now his operation occupies parts of five floors and he has 12 full-time employees.
ARU has made thousands of commercials for radio and television, done work for movies and corporations. Its library has more than 300,000 musical themes and something in the neighborhood of 100,000 sound effects.
King has raised seven daughters with two wives and beams when he talks about his first great-grandchild.
But he gets almost giddy talking about what he believes will be his professional legacy: “I did most of the engineering for Chickenman.”
Chickenman, as those of you of a certain age will instantly recall–to the accompaniment, no doubt, of “He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!”–was a daily radio serial born on WCFL’s Jim Runyon show in 1966, a clever satirical spoof of the then-popular “Batman” TV show.
It was created and voiced by Dick Orkin, the station’s production director, and was so popular that it was eventually syndicated and twice revived after its initial run. There are 273 episodes, some of which have been played on NPR’s “This American Life,” and many of which can be heard now on satellite radio.
“I can listen to them today and know exactly what I was doing at that time,” says King, a big smile across his face. “Sound doesn’t just have the ability to set an image. It can take you back in time.”
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rkogan@tribune.com
