As we’ve learned over the last five years, give Richard Irvin a stage and Aurora’s mayor/could-be next governor knows how to work it.
Like an NCAA coach getting his team ready for March Madness, Irvin used his fifth and possibly last State of the City address as a high-octane love-fest for his staff, aldermen and other community leaders, with far more applause and standing ovations than I’ve seen at any other production at the Paramount Theatre.
But at Two Brothers Roundhouse, right before the Tuesday evening event, I sat down with another high-profile cheerleader for Aurora, whose voice may be as familiar to you as the mayor’s and who spoke with a more understated but obvious pride about this city he once more calls home.
Cisco Cotto, who recently replaced legendary morning anchor Pat Cassidy for top-rated WBBM Newsradio, made the decision to move from Oak Park back to the place where he was born and raised a couple years ago, giving up a growing church he and wife Anna had started in 2011 for a longer commute and the chance to be nearer to his close-knit extended family.
The Cottos bought a house on Aurora’s West Side that was built in 1919, and Cisco – his real name, short for Francisco – soon discovered that the Aurora he came home to was far different than the one he left when he went off to college at Western Illinois University in 1993 to study radio and TV.
Gone was much of the street violence and negative headlines that dominated local news, as well as the empty buildings that tarnished the downtown and added to the perception Aurora was not the place you want to live, work or play.
Cotto quickly picked up on an unmistakable “vibrancy” going on here – with new housing and small business, including restaurants and coffee shops, sprouting up all over, and a growing sense of optimism about this once-maligned city.
And now, watching that momentum continue in this post lockdown period, he says, makes him “happier than ever” to be part of Aurora’s comeback, even if the commute now means leaving his house in the middle of the night so he can deliver the news to one million Chicago-area listeners starting at 5 a.m.
Cotto, as personable face-to-face as his voice is on the radio, decided to pursue a career in broadcasting after Emmy-winning sportscaster Michael King heard him speak at a chapel event at Aurora Christian School where Cotto was a sophomore and invited the teen into the broadcast booth at a Cougars’ game.
After graduation, Cotto jumped from station to station in Chicago, replacing “Mancow” Muller at WLS in 2010 before landing at WBBM in 2014, where he anchored the afternoon news for five years before getting the big January promotion.
Cotto relished the challenge of replacing Cassidy – and co-host Felicia Middlebrooks, who retired in 2020 – but also knew the pressure he was under when his boss handed him the top spot in January and told him, “Here you go … just don’t break it.”
So far, with ratings “still at number one,” Cotto says with a smile, “I did not break it … at least, not yet.”
The secret to his success, Cotto believes, is finding ways to connect to listeners by talking to them in ways that invite familiarity and trust, “to not sound like a broadcaster but like I’m talking to family.”
While radio pays most of the bills and takes up a major chunk of his day, Cotto, who met his wife on the first day of classes at Moody Theological Seminary in 2002 and recently completed his doctorate in ministry, also serves as campus pastor at Village Bible Church’s newest site in Naperville.
And he still finds time for three active kids, ages 12, 10 and 9, who “now put me to bed.”
Deeply religious and family-focused, Cotto is convinced “God led us back to Aurora.” And more than ever, he told me, he sees his hometown with that same bright future that I later heard laid out by the mayor to a large crowd on a big stage.
“When we moved here, we really did not know what was going on,” Cotto told me, and at first wondered if “we had made a mistake” giving up their vital Oak Park church and community.
“It was gut-wrenching to walk away,” he continued, but driving through Aurora’s historic downtown and diverse neighborhoods made them realize “we may have just lucked out.”
That’s because “there’s so much here already,” Cotto said. “And I really believe Aurora is now just on the cusp of becoming a destination place.
“There is an energy here … I am so excited about it.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
