As born-and-bred Chicagoan Rich King, 69, who goes through his valedictories with his retirement from WGN-TV looming on June 15, can look back on a career that was intertwined with many notable names in the city’s broadcast history

They don’t make broadcasters like Harry Caray, Jack Brickhouse, Franklyn MacCormack and Carl Greyson anymore.

And if the truth be known, they don’t make good-guy sportscasters like Rich King anymore, either.

The two groups are inexorably tied. As born-and-bred Chicagoan King, 69, who goes through his valedictories with his retirement from WGN-TV looming on June 15, can look back on a career that was intertwined with many notable names in the city’s broadcast history.

King knew of practitioners of “Sleepless in Chicago”… or Baltimore, or any places the White Sox visited when he teamed with Caray on the WBBM-Radio broadcasts in 1980-81. Or when he ran news copy up to the mellifluous-voiced “Meister Brau All-Night Showcase” host MacCormack at WGN-Radio.

“They were giants of the industry,” King recalled. “Those guys were full of life. They lived a good life.”

So does King. But some of his persona that gave him seniority and the ability to choose his manner of retirement in his hometown was developed playing off these colorful characters.

One time, King and Caray broadcast a night game at old Comiskey Park, knowing he’d have to catch a 7 a.m. flight the next day to Baltimore.

“I got to the airport at about 6 a.m., and Harry was there,” King said. “He was wearing the same clothes he had on the night before. I asked him what happened. He said, ‘I was out on Rush Street all night long. I didn’t even bother going home.’ He didn’t sleep at all.

“I figured he’d get some sleep on the plane. But he and (Sox coach) Bobby Winkles always played gin rummy on the plane. They played gin and he was drinking Bloody Marys on the plane. Then I’m at the ballpark at 5 p.m. and do some pre-game stuff. Here comes Harry, and I asked him if he got any sleep. He said he hasn’t, that he had gone to lunch at one of his drinking spots.”

You’d figure Caray would be dead on his feet after the game. You’d figure wrong.

“It’s a long game that ended around 11 p.m.,” King said. “Joe McConnell and I were dog-tired from getting up real early to catch the plane. We’re at the hotel at 12:30 a.m. We see Harry running out to get a cab. I asked him where he was going. ‘We’re going to Little Italy to get some sausage.’ Here’s a guy who had never slept … and I’m dying.”

King had to stay awake in his first job out of the University of Illinois-Chicago at WGN in 1969. He wrote five-minute newscasts for MacCormack’s show. The popular host, well known for the poetry he recited on the show, was a holdover from radio’s golden age in the 1940s. He had creative ways to pass the time on his 11 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. shift, which ran six nights a week, taking only Mondays off.

MacCormack was well-stocked with Scotch and ordered-in chicken. Imbibing, he sometimes developed hiccups later in the shift. One MacCormack recording from 1963 had him hiccupping through an entire 5 a.m. newscast without missing a beat, then assuring his listeners “I could have danced all night.”

Working the late hours permitted King to rub shoulders with Greyson, another famed WGN baritone announcer. Greyson anchored the venerable “Nightbeat” post-midnight newscast on WGN-TV. Put any film of a liberal politician or student demonstrators on “Nightbeat,” and Greyson would stare an angry hole through the monitor.

Earlier on his WGN shifts, King was charged with producing Blackhawks home broadcasts from Chicago Stadium. In those years, Hawks owner Arthur Wirtz, grandfather of Rocky Wirtz, showed his family’s paranoia about live broadcast coverage cutting into the season-ticket base. The elder Wirtz forbade the first period from being aired … on radio!

King had to sign on the broadcasts at 8:15 p.m. with a highlights segment (Lloyd Pettit broadcast the first period for posterity) leading into the second period. He was strapped if the first period was scoreless. “We’d have to put on a great save or something,” he said.

Once King got to cover games and practices as a WBBM-Radio reporter later in the 1970s, he began developing the close relationships for which he was noted. He typically was the only radio reporter daily at Halas Hall in 1977. King got to chat with head coach Jack Pardee in his office, access unthinkable today.

“Walter Payton and Michael Jordan, you could talk to them off the record some,” he said.

Jerry Reinsdorf, Tony La Russa, Bill Veeck, Dallas Green and Jim Finks lent their cooperation to King’s his old weekend-morning “Sportsline” show on WBBM-Radio and WGN-TV segments. They far outnumbered the bad guys, who seemed to be concentrated on the late 1970s Cubs.

“Dave Kingman was a mean guy,” King said. “He would tell you vicious things. He didn’t understand writers took stuff off the radio. He thought I was giving stuff to the papers. He said, ‘I’m done with you.’

“(Manager) Herman Franks was tough. Even veteran writers like Dave Nightingale were afraid of Franks. Often there was a five-minute lull before anyone asked him a question after the game.

“And Bobby Murcer was kind of rough for a while.”

Still, King prevailed in the end. Covering athletes straight-on, and not dwelling on personal lives, won him friends and influenced people.

“Just report he facts,” he said. “I never went out of the way to criticize a guy. Most guys understand that. I always stuck to the sports end of it.”

Turning down chances to take supposedly better jobs in New York and Atlanta, King will finally move “out of state.” In retirement, he’s re-locating across the state line to Chesterton, Ind. Wife April’s hair-styling salon is in Highland.

Rest assured, though. King’s heart will always be a Chicagoan, having worked in a kind of golden age of both athletes and broadcasters.

—  Longtime broadcaster Rich King to sign off  —