In 1951, during the early days of Chicago’s classical station WFMT-FM (98.7), broadcaster and then recently transplanted University of Chicago student Mike Nichols joined the station’s staff as its first announcer. Two years later, in cramped quarters on the second floor of Chicago’s Hotel Guyon at Washington and Pulaski, he began hosting a program of his naming that endures to this day: “The Midnight Special.”
Now helmed by Rich Warren and promoted as “Chicago’s and … the world’s weekly aberration of folk music and farce, show tunes and satire, madness and escape,” it has endured for more than six decades.
During the New York-bred Nichols’ three-year tenure, many folk musicians — including, initially, blues singer/songwriter Big Bill Broonzy and banjo player Fleming Brown —performed live on his airwaves.
According to a 2003 Sun-Times story by writer Dave Hoekstra, Nichols also played records by comedian/political songwriter Tom Lehrer and singer/actress Eartha Kitt, whose “RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt” hit shelves around the time Nichols began hosting. But live performances helped the program stand out.
“One time he heard bagpipes out his window,” Nichols’ “Midnight Special” successor Norm Pellegrini told Hoekstra. “There was George Armstrong playing bagpipes, and he invited him to play on the show.”
By 1956, after a year or so of traveling to and from New York (and leaving “Special” duties to Pellegrini in his absence, as per a recent account by Warren), Nichols was back in New York full time and soon to be nationally famous as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May. And though he’d appear as a radio performer (with partner Elaine May on NBC’s “Monitor” program), his hosting days were done.
