February 4 “Memory Club” movies become simply “Memory Movies” with the showing of “Look Who’s Laughing” (1941) starring Fibber McGee and Molly, Bergen and McCarthy and Lucille Ball.
February 18 Memory Movie is a “radio” double feature, “Take It or Leave It” (1944) starring Phil Baker plus “Nick Carter, Master Detective” (1944) starring Walter Pidgeon.
March 9 Chicago Tribune names “101 Good Things About Chicago.” Compiled by writer Clifford Terry, Chuck Schaden is Number 7 on the list of “good things” which includes the Oak Street Beach, the Seven Seas Panorama at the Brookfield Zoo, the Auditorium Theatre, the Chicago Cubs bleachers, and Phil Donohue. About Chuck, Terry writes:
Return with us now to those years when Lucky Strike Green was going to war and Chiquita Banana was nudging everyone never, ever to put tropical fruit in the refrigerator. Drawing upon his incredible collection of 40,000 old radio tapes, Schaden — personable, enthusiastic, but never campy host of Those Were the Days — polishes up the golden moments of Jack Benny and Rochester, the Great Gildersleeve and Peavy, the First Nighter and Lux Radio Theatre, Inner Sanctum and Lights Out, and GRAND CEN-TRAL STA-TION —crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily!
April 8 & 15 Abbreviated editions of TWTD follow WNIB broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera. Program runs from the end of the opera until 7 p.m.
April 8 Memory Movie is “Broadway Through a Keyhole” (1933) starring Walter Winchell, Russ Columbo and Abe Lyman and the orchestra.
April 24 Suburban Trib columnist R. Bruce Dold writes:
The brown-haired man with short bangs and a full beard sat in a Des Plaines savings and loan office. In the 1930s and 1940s he might have been a Bolshevik. In the 1950s he might have been a beatnik. In the 1960s he might have been a peacenik. In the 1970s he is an executive from Morton Grove. But don’t tell Chuck Schaden that.
Weekdays, Schaden is a public relations executive with Northwest Federal Savings, which has an office in Des Plaines. But on Saturdays, he is the merchant of Fibber McGee and Molly, Eddie Cantor, and Bob Crosby and the Bobcats. It is on Saturdays that Schaden retreats to a sound studio where he broadcasts Those Were the Days on WNIB.
Schaden is a 42-year-old nostalgia merchant. He broadcasts his programs and sells his own radio commercials. He owns Metro-Golden memories, a nostalgia shop in Chicago; publishes the Nostalgia Newsletter; and sells cassette tapes from The Hall Closet of his Morton Grove home.
Schaden’s audio love affair dates back to the 1940s, when he was growing up in Norridge with a radio virtually plugged to his ear. …When television became popular, Schaden like many others, abandoned radio for the new medium. But television didn’t spur his imagination as well as radio. …by the time Schaden returned to radio, the old programs had disappeared. Listeners had deserted radio for television and phonographs. “I flipped,” Schaden said. “I began seeking collectors with shows.” [He] has since found some 40,000 of the old programs, mostly from collectors.
Schaden finally broke into radio on little 1,000 watt WLTD-AM in Evanston in 1970. He left a newspaper job for his first program, which aired old-time radio shows…
Schaden gradually established a makeshift nostalgia network, airing programs on WTAQ in LaGrange, WWMM in Arlington Heights, and WBEZ in Chicago. In 1975 he moved his programs to a five-mornings-a-week slot on WXFM in Chicago and a Saturday afternoon show on WNIB in Chicago.
June 3 Memory Movies at North West Federal screens its first movie in 3-D, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954) starring Richard Carlson and Julie Adams. 3-D glasses are provided.
September 9 Memory Movie is a double feature, “The Falcon in Hollywood” (1945) starring Tom Conway plus “Dick Tracy’s Dilemma” (1947) starring Ralph Byrd.
Sally Rand, star of the Century of Progress Exposition – 1933 and 1978
November 11-12 “Salute to Chicago’s Century of Progress.” A Special Event at North West Federal’s Clyde B. Reed Auditorium. Guest is dancer Sally Rand, who describes the World’s Fair and tells of reaction to her controversial performances there. Program includes films, slides and memorabilia.
November 18 Inspired by TWTD, Lyons Township High School freshman Steve Darnall launches Radio’s Golden Age on WLTL-FM in LaGrange, Illinois. The program has a school-year run until May 5, 1979.
