Art Hellyer is Not Dead

Art Hellyer, said in a 1993 interview on 97.1 WNIB that he wasn't really a DJ he just "played music as a fill between commercials." Hellyer was a mainstay of Chicagoland radio starting back in the 1940s and lasting for five decades. His zany off-beat humor was part of what shaped our modern radio gestalt bridging the gap between guy s like J. Aku Head Pupule and the modern morning zoo. He was on air at WGN, WJOL, WLS, WMAQ, WJJD, WOPA, WIND, WAIT, WOWO, WCFL, WBBM and certainly others. His biography The Hellyer Say is not to be skipped. 

His first show was on WKNA in Charleston, WV in 1947 interviewing auto salesmen.  Despite behaving like Art Hellyer, he was not fired from that job. (In his book he actually devotes a whole chapter to what he was not fired for.) It was a theme in his career. His zany behavior got him ratings. WBBM famously fired him over a dress-code violation and then re-hired him. As he told the Chicago Tribune in 1996 more simply that he got fired "a lot."

"...I counted 14 times. It may have been more than that... I always said every one of my battles was over creative control. I wanted to be creative, and they wanted control."

It's hard to say which of his programs was the most important to his career as several of them held the number one slot in one decade or another. In the 1950s his program The Art Hellyer Show aka the Morning Madcap on 1000 WCFL-AM, again on 780 WBBM with his Supper Club shows in the '60s while also doing mornings at WAIT, Then again on WLS-FM in the '70s until they went progressive rock in 1969. He was number one again on 1160 WJJD-AM in the '80s. His time at WOPA straddles some of that doing WOPA Art Hellyer's Memory Lane in the mid sixties.

What probably got his career going the most was his time on on WCFL. There he was given carte blanche for the first time in his career and he more or less ran amok. He offended big sponsors, like Coca-Cola and General Motors but the listeners loved it.  In he did spend a few serious on air. He advocated for the seat belts in cars in the 1950s and in 1960 spent time explaining to listeners the importance of the then brand new Polio vaccine to quiet the anti-vaccination nuttters. In 2011 he made another come back of sorts and began Internet radio station Party 934. Not bad for a guy that one quipped that "...the average life of a disc jockey in Chicago is three years."

Daddy-O Daylie

Holmes "Daddy-O" Daylie had long career and one minor black radio first. He was the first African-American hosting a regularly scheduled radio show on a Chicago network owned and operated radio station. It has a couple qualifiers, but it counts. His radio career ran for almost 40 years, that requires no qualification. In Chicago his name is mentioned right alongside Jack L. Cooper, Al Benson and Sam Evans. Daddy-O first got on air at WMAQ in 1956. He was doing a late-night slot airing jazz and jive talk. More here. As Dempsey Travis once said, Daylie "was to rhyme what Michael Jordan was to basketball or what Redd Foxx was to comedy."

He was a Chicago transplant,born in Covington, Tennessee. He moved to Chicago in 1938 to live with an older brother. the kid had talent, he could rhyme, play piano, and play some basketball. He was even a Harlem Globetrotter.  Daylie ended up being "discovered" by a WMAQ legend, Dave Garroway, a newsman and big jazz fan. Garroway met Daylie tending bar at the El Grotto Supper Club in the Pershing Hotel in 1947. (One source says it was the Du Sable Hotel) Garroway told him that he should move his rhyming behind the microphone. By 1948 he had a show on WAIT-AM. By 1955 he was on WGN. More here.

It wasn't long before he started booking shows and doing a little A&R. He got the Ramsey Lewis trio their big break with Argo Records in 1956. He also discovered Nina Simone, and Gloria Lynne. He was a huge proponent of bebop. In 1958 Cannonball Adderly penned an ode to Daylie  "One for Daddy-O". That was probably his peak. He went back to WAIT-AM and while there picked a fight with MGM in 1955 over the movie Black Board Jungle. The name Daddy-O is used in the movie, and Daylie had trademarked it in 1948. MGM used the name in a derogatory way and he sued them for Libel asking for $700,000. It didn't go anywhere.

In the 1960s he was on 950 WAAF-AM doing mornings 9:00 AM to noon. In 1967 they changed calls to WGRT. He was cancelled in 1971, then reinstated shortly thereafter. Chicago missed him. They trimmed him back from 2 hours to 30 minutes. They said he talked too much. It was the only jazz morning show left in Chicago. It was old school, and Daylie was old school. In the early 1980s he moved to WJPC-AM which w2s owned by the publisher of Ebony Magazine. They aired a lot of R&B and gospel. Daylie held onto that until about 1986. He died in 2003 at the age of 82.