Two giants pass
Jul. 3rd, 2009 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mojosmomNorm Pellegrini
Yesterday, I woke, as usual, to WFMT's Morning Program. Shortly after the regular newscast and a bit of music, the host, Carl Grapentine, announced that they had just been told of the death of Norm Pellegrini. Who, you ask, is Norm Pellegrini? For forty-three years, he was WFMT's program director, and it is no exaggeration to say, as the Trib's classical music critic John von Rhein does: If WFMT is a unique classical radio station in the nation and the world, it is largely due to Mr. Pellegrini's vision, influence, elevated taste and uncompromising principles.
I do not recall any other radio station being on in our house as I was growing up. Norm was, therefore, an enormous influence on my musical education. As an on-air host, his voice was instantly recognizable. The words "mellifluous tones" seem to have been invented to describe it.
Norman Pellegrini, 1929-2009: Legendary broadcaster fought for quality, class on the radio airwaves
With his vision, influence and taste, program director fought to preserve quality entertainment on WFMT-FM
By John von Rhein
Tribune critic
July 3, 2009
Although other people have played supporting roles in making Chicago fine arts radio station WFMT-FM a unique broadcast outlet that is respected around the world, one man saw to it that 98.7 FM would remain to this day an oasis of class, style and intelligence amid the rock-and-yak-dominated dial of commercial radio.
That man was Norman Pellegrini.
"The luckiest thing that ever happened to that station," the station's late co-founder, Rita Jacobs Willens, once said, "was when Norman walked through the door. He created WFMT. His standards were what made the place."
The station's longtime program director and one of the great figures in local broadcasting history, Mr. Pellegrini, 79, died Thursday, July 2, in St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago. The cause of death was liver and pancreatic cancer, according to his longtime partner, Donald Knight.
A Chicago native and lifelong resident, Mr. Pellegrini became WFMT's program director in 1953 and held the post until he was removed in 1996 amid a series of disputes with the station's corporate overseers.
He also was the longtime host of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's and Lyric Opera of Chicago's radio broadcast series, and produced and hosted countless other programs for WFMT even after his departure from the station.
If WFMT is a unique classical radio station in the nation and the world, it is largely due to Mr. Pellegrini's vision, influence, elevated taste and uncompromising principles.
He always maintained it wasn't enough for a classical radio station just to play recordings. So he created the special mix of classical, folk and jazz, live performances, commentary and spoken word that long has been the signature of WFMT, which went on the air in 1951 as a modest mom-and-pop outlet run by Bernard and Rita Jacobs (later Willens).
More than anyone else, Mr. Pellegrini gave the station its quirky intelligence, its willingness to treat listeners like thinking, culturally literate adults. If this struck some people as elitism, Mr. Pellegrini (who preferred the term "select" to "elitist" anyway) didn't care. He ran WFMT for a radio audience willing to support quality programming, and he fought doggedly throughout his sometimes rocky tenure to preserve it.
He also fought to give Chicago classical musicians and institutions their day in the WFMT sun, according them regular exposure on the station. He was a stickler for detail, and each broadcast he hosted or supervised was as near to perfection as could be managed.
"Norm inspired everybody who worked with him to do their very best, because that was how dedicated he was himself," said former WFMT program host Don Tait, who worked for the station for 35 years during the Pellegrini era. "He was the boss, but he made us all feel this was our radio station. He made us a community."
The same could be said of the tenaciously loyal family of listeners who have remained with the station as all other classical outlets in town have either gone under or sold out to rock or pop formats.
For decades Mr. Pellegrini and Ray Nordstrand, who came onboard as president and general manager in 1970 and died in 2005, ran the station as a team.
They could not have been more different in personality. Mr. Pellegrini was the artistic, outspoken and energetic one; Nordstrand the practical, soft-spoken, somewhat stolid businessman. But they worked beautifully together, Mr. Pellegrini taking care of the music, Nordstrand overseeing the finances.
Together they built on the Jacobses' core beliefs: quality and diversity of programming, excellence unsullied by gimmicks.
And they devised a policy that makes WFMT a virtual anomaly among U.S. broadcasters: the station airs only announcer-read ad copy, as opposed to prerecorded commercials -- a practice that costs the station hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue each year.
Mr. Pellegrini's towering rages were legendary among WFMT staffers and for many made him difficult to work for.
"Somebody once said to me, 'It's that Sicilian temper of Norm's,' " Tait recalled. "Well, he was an idealist, and when he believed someone was betraying the station's ideals and standards, he didn't hesitate to speak his mind."
Mr. Pellegrini attended the University of Chicago and received a degree from Columbia College. He served as a member of the Illinois Arts Council and won special recognition from Billboard magazine and San Francisco State University.
He completed a cultural history, "150 Years of Opera in Chicago," following the 2002 death of its author, Chicago music critic Robert C. Marsh.
Mr. Pellegrini is said to have been especially proud of the honorary doctorate of humane letters he received from DePaul University in 1978. The citation read, in part: "By consistently offering the best, you have proved that a sizable and eager audience exists for the best."
A memorial service is planned for July 18 -- which would have been Mr. Pellegrini's 80th birthday -- at Mayfair Lutheran Church, 4335 W. Lawrence Ave., Chicago. Details are forthcoming.
--------------------------
Dempsey Travis
Later in the day, I saw the news of the passing of Dempsey Travis, another name not well-known outside Chicago, but a man whose life had an extraordinary impact on the city. Born into a blue-collar, working-class family, he rose to become a business leader and real estate developer who fought redlining and segregated housing, and worked to revitalize Chicago's South Side. Jazz buff, historian, author, he was also very politically active, and was instrumental in Harold Washington's election as the first black mayor of Chicago.
DEMPSEY J. TRAVIS: 1920-2009
Activist business leader dies
Helped set the stage for South Side revitalization
Tribune staff report
July 3, 2009
Yearning for a brand-new red tricycle, Dempsey J. Travis decided at the tender age of 5 to become an entrepreneur.
He took a job handing out business cards for a South Side barber, canvassing the busy thoroughfare of Cottage Grove Avenue until he was struck by a Model T Ford and fractured his left leg. The barber had instructed him to stand in front of the shop, but Mr. Travis didn't stay put.Over eight decades, that same daring ambition pushed Mr. Travis to overcome poverty, prejudice and poor schooling to become a self-made multimillionaire.
The only child of a stockyards laborer, Mr. Travis was a Horatio Alger, lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps figure who wielded his influence as a liaison between the business community and the political sphere to fight for social justice. The activist businessman, 89, died Thursday, July 2, in home, his family said.
As he rose to eminence as a South Side developer during the 1950s, Mr. Travis fought to increase access to the mortgage market for blacks; battled redlining, the practice of withholding home-loan funds from risky neighborhoods; and galvanized funding for the candidacy of his high school friend and Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.
"He was like one of those waves that just keeps crashing against this hard rock of resistance to change," recalled documentary film producer Jeff Spitz, who interviewed Mr. Travis, a 1949 graduate of Roosevelt University, for his Emmy Award-winning film about the integrated college in a segregated city. "He crashed against those rocks for a long time and he eroded some of the worst resistance."
To be sure, Mr. Travis had many faces: Jazz musician. Real estate magnate. Civil rights chieftain. Author. Historian.
Mr. Travis is credited with helping set the stage for the revitalization of neighborhoods on the South Side. Yet for all his self-assurance, he hesitated calling himself a role model, although he was no doubt one for the scores of blacks he inspired to pursue real estate as a career.
"He was a pioneer," said longtime friend Timuel D. Black Jr., professor emeritus of social sciences at the City Colleges of Chicago. "There had been black Realtors, but not any that had been as extensive as Dempsey."
Mr. Travis was born in Chicago's "Black Belt," the area between Roosevelt Road and 79th Street and from Wentworth Avenue to Cottage Grove Avenue, that took shape as the first wave of the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South moved to the industrial North early in the 20th Century.
Almost from boyhood, it seemed that Mr. Travis had a front-row seat to Chicago's black history, a perspective he would later memorialize in his trilogy "Autobiography of Black Chicago," "An Autobiography of Black Jazz," and "An Autobiography of Black Politics," the first of which he self-published in 1981 at the age of 61.
Mr. Travis graduated from Du Sable High School in 1939, where his classmates included singer Nat "King" Cole, publisher John H. Johnson and comedian Redd Foxx. He aspired to be a jazz pianist during the later Depression years and was drafted into the Army during World War II, serving four years in a segregated unit.
His service was marred by a racial incident at Camp Shenango in Pennsylvania, later renamed Camp Reynolds, in which white military police opened fire on a crowd of black soldiers. Mr. Travis was shot three times in the back and one of his friends was killed by a bullet through the head.
In his 1992 autobiography, "I Refuse to Learn to Fail," Mr. Travis recalled overhearing the ambulance driver say to the medic, "Why the hell do we shoot our own men?" To which the medic replied, "Who said they were men?"
After the Army, Mr. Travis attended Roosevelt University, where he studied with an array of black students including Harold Washington, future U.S. Rep. Gus Savage and author Frank London Brown.
One evening in 1948, the students sat around debating a "Black Agenda" and agreed that Washington and Savage should run for political office. They vowed to support one another financially and spiritually and, just as they planned, Washington and Savage were elected to Congress 33 years later.
When it came time for Washington to run for mayor, Mr. Travis was "crucial" to his political success, recalled Laura S. Washington, former deputy press secretary to the late mayor. "He was one of the early donors at a time when Washington had to have the financial standing to be taken seriously."
Mr. Travis, a tall, restless man, founded Travis Realty Corp. in 1949. His first office had no furniture and he greeted his first paying client from a seat on an upturned bucket behind a crate he used as a desk.
He later founded Sivart Mortgage Co. and as president of both entities actively sold properties vacated during the white migration to the suburbs and worked to interest potential black buyers who were being displaced by massive urban renewal projects.
In 1957, Mr. Travis was president of the Dearborn Real Estate Board, an association of black real estate professionals in the Chicago area. Two years later, he became president of the South Side chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, coordinating a protest march led by Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph.
As a literary figure, Mr. Travis was an award-winning author who produced 21 books through his publishing entity, Urban Research Press. His most recent book, "Obama's Race to the White House," was published last year, shortly before President Barack Obama's election, said his niece, Matilda O'Conner.
Bedridden for the last few months, Mr. Travis continued his lifelong mission to fund the education of Chicago youth, O'Conner said.
"He was very giving," O'Conner said Thursday. "He didn't have any kids, so that's how he paid back society."
"Whatever I have done," Mr. Travis told the Tribune in 1992, "I have tried to do it extremely well, with great diligence, great intensity and a great feeling for the job."
Mr. Travis is survived by his wife of 59 years, Moselynne.
Services have not yet been set.
Yesterday, I woke, as usual, to WFMT's Morning Program. Shortly after the regular newscast and a bit of music, the host, Carl Grapentine, announced that they had just been told of the death of Norm Pellegrini. Who, you ask, is Norm Pellegrini? For forty-three years, he was WFMT's program director, and it is no exaggeration to say, as the Trib's classical music critic John von Rhein does: If WFMT is a unique classical radio station in the nation and the world, it is largely due to Mr. Pellegrini's vision, influence, elevated taste and uncompromising principles.
I do not recall any other radio station being on in our house as I was growing up. Norm was, therefore, an enormous influence on my musical education. As an on-air host, his voice was instantly recognizable. The words "mellifluous tones" seem to have been invented to describe it.
Norman Pellegrini, 1929-2009: Legendary broadcaster fought for quality, class on the radio airwaves
With his vision, influence and taste, program director fought to preserve quality entertainment on WFMT-FM
By John von Rhein
Tribune critic
July 3, 2009
Although other people have played supporting roles in making Chicago fine arts radio station WFMT-FM a unique broadcast outlet that is respected around the world, one man saw to it that 98.7 FM would remain to this day an oasis of class, style and intelligence amid the rock-and-yak-dominated dial of commercial radio.
That man was Norman Pellegrini.
"The luckiest thing that ever happened to that station," the station's late co-founder, Rita Jacobs Willens, once said, "was when Norman walked through the door. He created WFMT. His standards were what made the place."
The station's longtime program director and one of the great figures in local broadcasting history, Mr. Pellegrini, 79, died Thursday, July 2, in St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago. The cause of death was liver and pancreatic cancer, according to his longtime partner, Donald Knight.
A Chicago native and lifelong resident, Mr. Pellegrini became WFMT's program director in 1953 and held the post until he was removed in 1996 amid a series of disputes with the station's corporate overseers.
He also was the longtime host of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's and Lyric Opera of Chicago's radio broadcast series, and produced and hosted countless other programs for WFMT even after his departure from the station.
If WFMT is a unique classical radio station in the nation and the world, it is largely due to Mr. Pellegrini's vision, influence, elevated taste and uncompromising principles.
He always maintained it wasn't enough for a classical radio station just to play recordings. So he created the special mix of classical, folk and jazz, live performances, commentary and spoken word that long has been the signature of WFMT, which went on the air in 1951 as a modest mom-and-pop outlet run by Bernard and Rita Jacobs (later Willens).
More than anyone else, Mr. Pellegrini gave the station its quirky intelligence, its willingness to treat listeners like thinking, culturally literate adults. If this struck some people as elitism, Mr. Pellegrini (who preferred the term "select" to "elitist" anyway) didn't care. He ran WFMT for a radio audience willing to support quality programming, and he fought doggedly throughout his sometimes rocky tenure to preserve it.
He also fought to give Chicago classical musicians and institutions their day in the WFMT sun, according them regular exposure on the station. He was a stickler for detail, and each broadcast he hosted or supervised was as near to perfection as could be managed.
"Norm inspired everybody who worked with him to do their very best, because that was how dedicated he was himself," said former WFMT program host Don Tait, who worked for the station for 35 years during the Pellegrini era. "He was the boss, but he made us all feel this was our radio station. He made us a community."
The same could be said of the tenaciously loyal family of listeners who have remained with the station as all other classical outlets in town have either gone under or sold out to rock or pop formats.
For decades Mr. Pellegrini and Ray Nordstrand, who came onboard as president and general manager in 1970 and died in 2005, ran the station as a team.
They could not have been more different in personality. Mr. Pellegrini was the artistic, outspoken and energetic one; Nordstrand the practical, soft-spoken, somewhat stolid businessman. But they worked beautifully together, Mr. Pellegrini taking care of the music, Nordstrand overseeing the finances.
Together they built on the Jacobses' core beliefs: quality and diversity of programming, excellence unsullied by gimmicks.
And they devised a policy that makes WFMT a virtual anomaly among U.S. broadcasters: the station airs only announcer-read ad copy, as opposed to prerecorded commercials -- a practice that costs the station hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue each year.
Mr. Pellegrini's towering rages were legendary among WFMT staffers and for many made him difficult to work for.
"Somebody once said to me, 'It's that Sicilian temper of Norm's,' " Tait recalled. "Well, he was an idealist, and when he believed someone was betraying the station's ideals and standards, he didn't hesitate to speak his mind."
Mr. Pellegrini attended the University of Chicago and received a degree from Columbia College. He served as a member of the Illinois Arts Council and won special recognition from Billboard magazine and San Francisco State University.
He completed a cultural history, "150 Years of Opera in Chicago," following the 2002 death of its author, Chicago music critic Robert C. Marsh.
Mr. Pellegrini is said to have been especially proud of the honorary doctorate of humane letters he received from DePaul University in 1978. The citation read, in part: "By consistently offering the best, you have proved that a sizable and eager audience exists for the best."
A memorial service is planned for July 18 -- which would have been Mr. Pellegrini's 80th birthday -- at Mayfair Lutheran Church, 4335 W. Lawrence Ave., Chicago. Details are forthcoming.
--------------------------
Dempsey Travis
Later in the day, I saw the news of the passing of Dempsey Travis, another name not well-known outside Chicago, but a man whose life had an extraordinary impact on the city. Born into a blue-collar, working-class family, he rose to become a business leader and real estate developer who fought redlining and segregated housing, and worked to revitalize Chicago's South Side. Jazz buff, historian, author, he was also very politically active, and was instrumental in Harold Washington's election as the first black mayor of Chicago.
DEMPSEY J. TRAVIS: 1920-2009
Activist business leader dies
Helped set the stage for South Side revitalization
Tribune staff report
July 3, 2009
Yearning for a brand-new red tricycle, Dempsey J. Travis decided at the tender age of 5 to become an entrepreneur.
He took a job handing out business cards for a South Side barber, canvassing the busy thoroughfare of Cottage Grove Avenue until he was struck by a Model T Ford and fractured his left leg. The barber had instructed him to stand in front of the shop, but Mr. Travis didn't stay put.Over eight decades, that same daring ambition pushed Mr. Travis to overcome poverty, prejudice and poor schooling to become a self-made multimillionaire.
The only child of a stockyards laborer, Mr. Travis was a Horatio Alger, lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps figure who wielded his influence as a liaison between the business community and the political sphere to fight for social justice. The activist businessman, 89, died Thursday, July 2, in home, his family said.
As he rose to eminence as a South Side developer during the 1950s, Mr. Travis fought to increase access to the mortgage market for blacks; battled redlining, the practice of withholding home-loan funds from risky neighborhoods; and galvanized funding for the candidacy of his high school friend and Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.
"He was like one of those waves that just keeps crashing against this hard rock of resistance to change," recalled documentary film producer Jeff Spitz, who interviewed Mr. Travis, a 1949 graduate of Roosevelt University, for his Emmy Award-winning film about the integrated college in a segregated city. "He crashed against those rocks for a long time and he eroded some of the worst resistance."
To be sure, Mr. Travis had many faces: Jazz musician. Real estate magnate. Civil rights chieftain. Author. Historian.
Mr. Travis is credited with helping set the stage for the revitalization of neighborhoods on the South Side. Yet for all his self-assurance, he hesitated calling himself a role model, although he was no doubt one for the scores of blacks he inspired to pursue real estate as a career.
"He was a pioneer," said longtime friend Timuel D. Black Jr., professor emeritus of social sciences at the City Colleges of Chicago. "There had been black Realtors, but not any that had been as extensive as Dempsey."
Mr. Travis was born in Chicago's "Black Belt," the area between Roosevelt Road and 79th Street and from Wentworth Avenue to Cottage Grove Avenue, that took shape as the first wave of the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South moved to the industrial North early in the 20th Century.
Almost from boyhood, it seemed that Mr. Travis had a front-row seat to Chicago's black history, a perspective he would later memorialize in his trilogy "Autobiography of Black Chicago," "An Autobiography of Black Jazz," and "An Autobiography of Black Politics," the first of which he self-published in 1981 at the age of 61.
Mr. Travis graduated from Du Sable High School in 1939, where his classmates included singer Nat "King" Cole, publisher John H. Johnson and comedian Redd Foxx. He aspired to be a jazz pianist during the later Depression years and was drafted into the Army during World War II, serving four years in a segregated unit.
His service was marred by a racial incident at Camp Shenango in Pennsylvania, later renamed Camp Reynolds, in which white military police opened fire on a crowd of black soldiers. Mr. Travis was shot three times in the back and one of his friends was killed by a bullet through the head.
In his 1992 autobiography, "I Refuse to Learn to Fail," Mr. Travis recalled overhearing the ambulance driver say to the medic, "Why the hell do we shoot our own men?" To which the medic replied, "Who said they were men?"
After the Army, Mr. Travis attended Roosevelt University, where he studied with an array of black students including Harold Washington, future U.S. Rep. Gus Savage and author Frank London Brown.
One evening in 1948, the students sat around debating a "Black Agenda" and agreed that Washington and Savage should run for political office. They vowed to support one another financially and spiritually and, just as they planned, Washington and Savage were elected to Congress 33 years later.
When it came time for Washington to run for mayor, Mr. Travis was "crucial" to his political success, recalled Laura S. Washington, former deputy press secretary to the late mayor. "He was one of the early donors at a time when Washington had to have the financial standing to be taken seriously."
Mr. Travis, a tall, restless man, founded Travis Realty Corp. in 1949. His first office had no furniture and he greeted his first paying client from a seat on an upturned bucket behind a crate he used as a desk.
He later founded Sivart Mortgage Co. and as president of both entities actively sold properties vacated during the white migration to the suburbs and worked to interest potential black buyers who were being displaced by massive urban renewal projects.
In 1957, Mr. Travis was president of the Dearborn Real Estate Board, an association of black real estate professionals in the Chicago area. Two years later, he became president of the South Side chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, coordinating a protest march led by Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph.
As a literary figure, Mr. Travis was an award-winning author who produced 21 books through his publishing entity, Urban Research Press. His most recent book, "Obama's Race to the White House," was published last year, shortly before President Barack Obama's election, said his niece, Matilda O'Conner.
Bedridden for the last few months, Mr. Travis continued his lifelong mission to fund the education of Chicago youth, O'Conner said.
"He was very giving," O'Conner said Thursday. "He didn't have any kids, so that's how he paid back society."
"Whatever I have done," Mr. Travis told the Tribune in 1992, "I have tried to do it extremely well, with great diligence, great intensity and a great feeling for the job."
Mr. Travis is survived by his wife of 59 years, Moselynne.
Services have not yet been set.
