Pat Sajak's first broadcasting job was at the 250-watt foreign language radio station WEDC-AM on Ogden Avenue
CHICAGO — Long before he became a household name as co-host of ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ Pat Sajak was a witty Chicago kid who yearned to be in broadcasting because it seemed like an easy and fun way to make a living.
“It turned out I was right,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Television Academy.
Sajak was born in the Windy City and spent the first 20 years of his life here, attending Farragut High School and later Columbia College, always with an interest in the airwaves.
“I had a great aunt … she was a horse-racing handicap for a Chicago newspaper…. She loved radio and television, and when I’d be at her house, and I’d be there often because she lived down the street from us. … Instead of watching kids’ television or listening to music, she had radio talk shows on with broadcasters,” he recalled in an interview published this week on the official ‘Wheel of Fortune’ YouTube channel. “They really influenced me, and I kind of grew up in that environment.”
As a teen, he entered a disc jockey contest for WLS radio’s “The Dick Biondi Show” and was chosen the second week.
“I learned I liked it, and I learned I had a facility for it,” he said. “I wasn’t very good but I wasn’t horrible. And I wasn’t nervous about it. And that’s one trait that’s always followed me along. I’m very comfortable with it. I was from day one.”
Sajak said he later chose Columbia not to get a great education but because the college had a broadcasting department taught by local broadcasters, including the legendary Al Parker.
“He sort of took me under his wing and actually clued me into my first job,” Sajak said.
That first job was the 250-watt foreign language radio station WEDC-AM. The call letters stood for Emil Danemark Cadillac and the large studios were in a former Cadillac showroom on Ogden Avenue in the the Lawndale neighborhood (the site is now the Lawndale Christian Health Center). From midnight to 6 a.m., Sajak interrupted the Spanish music and commercials for five minutes each hour to deliver news headlines in English.
“It was really terrific because even though no one was listening, certainly no one who spoke English was listening. Even my parents, it was too late for them to listen. They were in bed. My father was in bed to get up early,” he said. “But … I was working in radio. And it was in Chicago, which sounds really cool even though, again, it was in a very small place. All these things sort of confirmed that I was heading along a path that I thought ultimately would be successful.”
Sajak later left the station and Columbia College to join the army. Opportunities to make a move from finance clerk to Armed Forces Radio eluded him, but a Chicago connection — Roman Pucinski, the congressman who bought a stake in WEDC in 1965 — proved to be an influence he needed.
“I wrote him a letter and I was grousing a little bit about the fact that I can’t seem to get this transfer, and I keep trying. And it’s funny what a nice, little chatty note from a congressman will do to people, and the next time I went and applied, miraculously the transfer occurred and there was an opening at the armed forces station in Saigon,” Sajak said.
He wound up getting the job, taking a slot on the ‘Dawn Busters’ morning show.
“The signature of that show is you would yell, as Robin Williams did in the movie, you would yell, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam!’ every morning. So at 6 a.m. that’s what I did for about a year and a half.”
Williams in the film portrayed Adrian Cronauer, who hosted the show prior to Sajak.
Sajak was discharged from the army in 1970 and found work in multimedia at the Pentagon. He’d later try his hand again in broadcasting at a small station in Murray, Kentucky. His persistence paid off again at a TV station in Nashville.
“I would go there about once a week and beg for work,” he said. “One time I went, probably the 12th time I barged in,… one of the staff announcers had announced he was retiring and they said, ‘OK, go down and do a tape for us.’ And I ran down and did something and they hired me.”
He stayed there for five years, working on talk shows and presenting the weather.
KNBC in Los Angeles noticed Sajak and recruited him to the west coast in 1977. It was only a few years later when he caught the eye of Merv Griffin and took over hosting duties on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ from Chuck Woolery.
Now, after 41 years and more than 8,000 episodes, Sajak has taken his final spin and handed the reigns to Ryan Seacrest.
