Johngy Meets The Swirsk (Chuck Swirsky)

Chuck Swirsky was doing sports talk radio before there was sports talk radio. Swirsky hosted a late night sports talk show on WLUP in 1980 and '81. My friend Tom Skalski and I would stay up listening on our old clock radios and then discuss and debate things we heard the next day.
In 1990, while I was at Lerner Newspapers, we had a promotional booth at Schaumburg Fest. As I wrote in a previous post, we had a silly cardboard replica of a front page of our Schaumburg Voice. People could come to our booth and get a picture while holding it, thus looking like they were on the front page. It was very cheesy, but it wasn't my idea.
My odd brain kicked in when I saw Swirsky at WGN's stage. I approached him during a commercial break and asked him to pose with the sign. He quickly agreed, I flipped him the sign and took the picture.
Of course, the Powers That Be at Lerner at the time didn't think enough of it to run it in our paper in the fest recap. While I realize Swirsky wasn't a major celeb, he was big enough to grab a little attention if we had run the photo.
Lerner's loss is a Johngy's Beat gain. Hey, I knew a star when I saw one! For the first time ever, I now present The Swirsk on the front page of the Schaumburg Voice!

Chuck Swirsky in Schaumburg, IL-Summer 1990.