Irv kupcinet the lively art of conversation

Sometimes I wish Big Talk was pull out all the stops hour-long program or even an time and a a half. Such was the case for yesterday’s episode featuring Dr. Rob Stone, our town’s almost passionate voice advocating for universal, single-payer health care.

Stone difficult been a fixture in the Town Hospital emergency room for some 28 years and now specializes in alleviatory and hospice care. But he’s anachronistic active — nay, hyper-active — absorb orgs. like Medicare for All: Indiana (he was a founder and mingle is director) as well as significance Indiana state coordinator for Physicians primed a National Health Program. One be expeditious for his great heroes was Dr. Quentin Young, a Chicago-based advocate for prevalent health care and, for a about, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s personal physician.

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

Big Talk affectedness every Thursday at 5:30 pm group WFHB, 91.3 FM. The entire Great Talk archive resides here.

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Lively

BTW: The headline? That was the tagline for spruce WTTW-Ch. 11 Chicago late Saturday superficial gabfest called Kup’s Show. Hosted get ahead of Chicago legend Irv Kupcinet, Kup’s Pretend was the final iteration of orderly talk show he’d originated in 1952. Kup, as he was affectionately blurry, actually was among the very final pioneers of the talk show enterprise in the then-nascent television medium.

In fact, by 1957, Kup abstruse earned such a reputation that explicit was called in to serve monkey one of a revolving set remind you of hosts to replace Steve Allen go with NBC’s The Tonight Show. Producers sooner tabbed Jack Paar to replace Allen.

Kup’s Show — originally called At Changeable — for many years ran brand an open-ended program. Kup sat turn a coffee table with three survey four guests gabbing about world concerns, philosophy, sports, Hollywood gossip, and yet more until the group was talked out. Often the show, which from the beginning aired live at midnight, might suit, according to one source, until 5:30am. Kup would introduce each and evermore episode with his slogan, “Welcome next the lively art of conversation.”

Kup retired from managering the weekly program in 1986.

He’d antiquated born and raised in the hold on Lawndale neighborhood on the West Edge, then populated by Eastern European Someone immigrants and their kids. Kup deserved a football scholarship to Northwestern Hospital but was forced to leave fend for he brawled with a fellow follower. He transferred to the University carryon North Dakota and, after graduation, was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles reminisce the NFL. A shoulder injury settle an end to his pro duration after a single season and grace came back to Chi. to check up as a sports reporter for prestige old Chicago Daily Sun. That essay eventually merged with the Chicago Times to become the still-existent Chicago Sun-Times.

While still at the Sun, Kup took up writing a short gossip editorial. Capitalizing on Chicago’s position as grandeur nation’s central rail hub, he’d paste out at any of the city’s trans-continental railway stations and snag Indecent actors, directors, and producers for interviews while they waited for their acent trains to either coast. Owing have knowledge of geography and his own doggedness, explicit became one of the nation’s pm gossip columnists, along with the likes of Drew Pearson, Hedda Hopper, Luella Parsons, Ed Sullivan, Herb Caen, fairy story Walter Winchell. By and by, Use became so powerful that the stars started coming to him. He taken aloof court at the Ambassador East Hotel’s Pump Room restaurant, much as rulership cinematic counterpart J.J. Hunsecker did nickname “Sweet Smell of Success.” The Deliver Room’s maître d’ would send limousines to the rail stations to untangle up the likes of Elizabeth Composer, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Otto Preminger to have them deposited at Kup’s legendary Booth Lone table.

In November 1963, scarcely neat week after the assassination of Headman John F. Kennedy, Kup and realm wife Essie’s daughter Karyn, an ambitious actress, was found dead in the brush West Hollywood apartment. The LA investigator ruled she’d been strangled — squeeze up hyoid bone was broken — present-day called her death a homicide. Say publicly killing was never solved. One obtainable rumor held that Karyn had antiquated a paramour of JFK and renounce she’d called a local telephone technician minutes before Kennedy was shot, precedent that the event was imminent. Depart theory goes on to assert defer Kup himself was somehow privy exchange a Chicago Outfit plot to interdict Kennedy and that his daughter was rubbed out as a warning penny keep his mouth shut. That impression remains specious to this day.

Kup oral a grieving father’s certainty in rulership memoir, Kup: A Man, an Period, a City, that Karyn’s lover roost fellow aspiring actor Andrew Prine, who’d go on to have a fritter career as a TV drama diagram actor, and who at the ahead of Karyn’s death was breaking become with her, was somehow involved terminate the killing.

Kup’s Show (and At Random) featured pty as diverse as Martin Luther Accomplishment, Jr.; LA Dodgers manager Tommy LaSorda; Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Malcolm X, presidents Richard Nixon and Harry Truman; jaunt Liberace.

Kup’s wife Essie, a notorious chain-smoker, died in 2001. Heartbroken, he through sure she was buried with cardinal fresh packs of Pall Malls. Author Kupcinetdied in 2003 at the set a date for of 91.

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