Big Daddy Graham, WIP radio overnight host ...RIP

 

Edward Gudonis, the fun-loving Philadelphia radio icon and longtime 94.1 WIP sports talker, better known to listeners as "Big Daddy Graham", died Wednesday evening, 8 September 2021, at home. 

He was 68.MORE | VIDEO

HOWARD MILLER

 

 

Howard Miller was WIND's program director from 1945 to 1949. In 1950, Miller started a longtime run as Chicago's top rated morning DJ. Miller would remain Chicago's top rated radio personality until leaving the station in 1968. Miller, a Chicago radio personality from the 1940s through the 1970s, who was extraordinarily popular as a pre-rock 'n' roll disc jockey and later as a controversial conservative radio commentator and TV talk-show host. Over the last decade, his Miller Broadcasting has owned radio stations in Rockford, Geneva and Kewanee in Illinois and in Gainesville and Melbourne, FL. "He had a showmanship and a charisma that blurted out through the radio," said political commentator Bruce DuMont, a friend and a former producer for Mr. Miller's radio show. "He did not have that mean-spirited atmosphere of some today. He grew up with his audience. He started as a major player in the pre-rock 'n' roll days of radio and records and got involved in people's growing interests in taxes, welfare cheats and crime. He created techniques such the `The People's Lobby.' It urged listener participation in the political process and has since been imitated by others such as Rush Limbaugh." Mr. Miller was the son of Judge Harry B. Miller, a prominent Republican in the era of Mayor William Hale Thompson. A graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Mr. Miller served in the Navy in World War II and attended the Kent College of Law before finding a career in radio. He joined CBS as a staff producer in 1945 and then became program director at WIND for four years. In the mid-1940s, he bought his first radio station, WGIL in Galesburg, and became the youngest radio station licensee in the country. He was with WBBM in the fifties and had a DJ show which was heard in quarter hours daily on the CBS Radio Network originating at WBBM in Chicago, a CBS owned station at that time. He interviewed celebrity recording artists of that era.