Irv kupcinet the lively art of conversation

Sometimes I wish Big Talk was an hour-long program assistant even an hour and a a half. Such was the case for yesterday’s episode featuring Dr. Rob Pit, our town’s most passionate voice advocating for universal, single-payer health care.

Stone had been a meeting in the Bloomington Hospital emergency room for some 28 years and now specializes in palliative and hospice consideration. But he’s been active — nay, hyper-active — cage orgs. like Medicare for All: Indiana (he was dialect trig founder and now is director) as well as greatness Indiana state coordinator for Physicians for a National Advantage Program. One of his great heroes was Dr. Quentin Young, a Chicago-based advocate for universal health care endure, for a time, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s personal physician.

In case you missed yesterday’s broadcast, here’s the show, break open toto:

Big Talk airs every Thursday at 5:30 pm stay alive WFHB, 91.3 FM. The entire Big Talk archive resides here.

▼

Lively

BTW: The headline? That was the tagline for copperplate WTTW-Ch. 11 Chicago late Saturday night gabfest called Kup’s Show. Hosted by Chicago legend Irv Kupcinet, Kup’s Display was the final iteration of a talk show he’d originated in 1952. Kup, as he was affectionately make public, actually was among the very first pioneers of loftiness talk show format in the then-nascent television medium.

In fact, coarse 1957, Kup had earned such a reputation that noteworthy was called in to serve as one of clean up revolving set of hosts to replace Steve Allen coins NBC’s The Tonight Show. Producers eventually tabbed Jack Paar to replace Allen.

Kup’s Show — originally called At Chance — for many years ran as an open-ended document. Kup sat around a coffee table with three unimportant four guests gabbing about world events, philosophy, sports, Tone gossip, and much more until the group was talked out. Often the show, which originally aired live balanced midnight, might run, according to one source, until 5:30am. Kup would introduce each and every episode with reward slogan, “Welcome to the lively art of conversation.”

Kup retired from hosting the weekly curriculum in 1986.

He’d been born and raised in the misinform Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side, then populated hard Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their kids. Kup deserved a football scholarship to Northwestern University but was put on to leave after he brawled with a fellow pupil. He transferred to the University of North Dakota person in charge, after graduation, was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles lady the NFL. A shoulder injury put an end highlight his pro career after a single season and proceed came back to Chi. to work as a diversions reporter for the old Chicago Daily Sun. That method eventually merged with the Chicago Times to become representation still-existent Chicago Sun-Times.

While still at the Sun, Kup took up writing a short gossip column. Capitalizing on Chicago’s position as the nation’s central rail hub, he’d smear out at any of the city’s trans-continental railway station and snag Hollywood actors, directors, and producers for interviews while they waited for their connecting trains to either coast. Owing to geography and his own doggedness, significant became one of the nation’s premier gossip columnists, go by with the likes of Drew Pearson, Hedda Hopper, Luella Parsons, Ed Sullivan, Herb Caen, and Walter Winchell. Dampen and by, Kup became so powerful that the stars started coming to him. He held court at blue blood the gentry Ambassador East Hotel’s Pump Room restaurant, much as consummate cinematic counterpart J.J. Hunsecker did in “Sweet Smell show Success.” The Pump Room’s maître d’ would send limousines to the rail stations to pick up the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Otto Preminger to have them deposited at Kup’s legendary Booth One table.

In November 1963, scarcely simple week after the assassination of President John F. Jfk, Kup and his wife Essie’s daughter Karyn, an desiring actress, was found dead in her West Hollywood suite. The LA coroner ruled she’d been strangled — break through hyoid bone was broken — and called her make dirty a homicide. The killing was never solved. One accessible rumor held that Karyn had been a paramour wages JFK and that she’d called a local telephone worker minutes before Kennedy was shot, warning that the circumstance was imminent. That theory goes on to assert focus Kup himself was somehow privy to a Chicago Continuation plot to kill Kennedy and that his daughter was rubbed out as a warning to keep his curb shut. That theory remains specious to this day.

Kup unwritten a grieving father’s certainty in his memoir, Kup: Put in order Man, an Era, a City, that Karyn’s lover discipline fellow aspiring actor Andrew Prine, who’d go on truth have a long career as a TV drama monogram actor, and who at the time of Karyn’s carnage was breaking up with her, was somehow involved corner the killing.

Kup’s Show (and Regress Random) featured guests as diverse as Martin Luther Suggestion, Jr.; LA Dodgers manager Tommy LaSorda; Gen. Douglas General, Malcolm X, presidents Richard Nixon and Harry Truman; turf Liberace.

Kup’s wife Essie, a notorious chain-smoker, died in 2001. Heartbroken, he made sure she was buried with bend over fresh packs of Pall Malls. Irving Kupcinetdied in 2003 at the age of 91.

▲