When the Sound of Urban Chicago Sailed Around the World
Ernie Medina was a passionate Chicago music fan who joined the Merchant Marines in 1969. When Medina returned to his sister’s home near Glenwood and Ridge in Chicago he taped urban radio and favorite records on his Grundig TK2400 reel-to-reel tape recorder. Like an anchor in his soul, Medina dragged the machine on the USNS Wyandot when he returned to sea.
His son, Mike Medina, is a fine Chicago urban historian and musician who recently repaired the broken-down Grundig. Medina is a former airline mechanic who now repairs lab equipment at the University of Chicago. His father died in 2009 but he has heard a reborn spirit in the Chicago music experience of the early 1970s. The tapes reveal an inspiring world of jazz, pop, funk, Latin music, and soul.
Medina has posted eight historic segments on his WayOutWardell YouTube page. Most impressive is a three-hour segment from March 3, 1974, on WBMX (the Black Music Experience, 103-FM). There’s an ad from the Staple Singers for Jewel Food Stores (Yummy Soda Pop, Green Giant Whole Kernel Corn, each only $1), Pastor T.L. Barrett’s “The Wonderful Hour” is inspiration “broadcast in beautiful Black stereo,” and there’s a plug for the beloved Quiet Knight music room on the north side.
Earlier this year Medina digitized his father’s recordings. The tapes are four-track, so each reel has at most 12 hours of playtime per reel or 3 hours per track.
“He could put a lot together to pass the time,” Medina said in a conversation from his home in Woodlawn. “He circumnavigated the globe seven times with the Wyandot. They were delivering supplies to American entities. He would go to Guam, then McMurdo Sound (near Antarctica), Hamburg and Italy. He once dropped off medical supplies at the Pitcairn Islands (in the southern Pacific Ocean.) A June 1973 segment is from KJAZ in Alameda, CA., so Medina guesses his father was ashore during this period.
Ernie was in the Merchant Marines from 1969-73. The Wyandot dated back to 1944 when it was built as an attack cargo ship in Oakland, CA. Medina thinks his father recorded the long 1974 WBMX segment in Chicago. “He recorded over the reels when he was home,” Medina said. “It lines up to when he was based in Staten Island. The ship would come back and he’d do odd jobs making pizzas there. When he had time off he’d come to Chicago to visit his family, record that stuff while he was here. Then go back to New York, catch the ship and be gone for months.” He was not recording Chicago’s rock stalwarts WLS-AM or WCFL-AM.
Slide of the USNS Wyandot made by Ernie Medina (Courtesy of Mike Medina.)
Ernie’s family immigrated from Northern Mexico to Chicago. Ernie was born in Chicago and raised on the near north side. Ernie and his future bride Joann liked to hang out at places like the long-gone rhythm and blues club Crown Propeller Lounge (1951-59), 868 E. 63rd Street. Joann died in 2019. Ernie was a U.S. Navy veteran and retired as a civil servant with the Department of Defense.
The Grundig is from 1970, according to Medina. “It has some heft to it,” he said. “It’s like all that good German engineered electronics of the era. He also had an older short wave radio he took with him for live broadcast stuff. I have that but it doesn’t have recording capabilities. There’s a transistor AM-FM radio on the Grundig so he could tape whatever was being broadcast. With the LPs he probably had a cable that would go from the player to his Hi-Fi. There was nothing else to do. There was no TV when you were out at sea. Probably card games, reading, things like that.
“I knew about the tapes from the time I was 12 or 13 because he would play them in our house in Des Plaines. It’s an artifact that just ended. The tape player broke years ago. It just sat in a closet with his tapes and his stuff. It’s all in segments. There would be two hours of LPs then it would jump to the radio. I taped the radio and that’s what I put up on YouTube.”
Ernie Medina visiting Antartica (courtesy of Mike Medina.)
Medina’s project is the unearthing of a true time capsule. The 1972 “Latin Explosion Show” segment hypes a Prez Prado-Juan Gabriel-Roberto Jordan concert at the Aragon. WBMX is promoting “Beautiful Black Stereo.” Medina said, “It’s interesting, it is automated to some degree. There’s only station IDs and commercials. No one is announcing the songs. It is Black music across every genre’. Oh wow, here’s this Jamaican rock steady tune. Then there’s spoken word poetry. Then Johnny Mathis. There are a couple of bits of Yvonne Daniels.”
The late great Yvonne Daniels
Medina recovered 38 minutes of “Daniels Den” that aired in September 1972 on WSDM-FM. Daniels (1937-1991) was the daughter of vocalist Billy Daniels. In 1967 she was a member of the first all-female radio team for WSDM (that was relaunched as “The Loop” in 1977). Her compatriots included Penny Lane and future television newsperson Linda Ellerbee, who DJ’d under the name “Hush Puppy.” By 1973 Daniels was the first woman host on WLS-AM.
“ I remember my Dad would listen to her on WNUA-FM in the car,” he said. “So I was familiar with Yvonne Daniels’ voice and the stuff she played. Hearing that from the early 1970s was pretty cool. I’ve read that she was the only DJ that was allowed to program her own music.” His posted segment includes a pastiche of styles that range from the mellow “How Many Broken Wings” from Les McCann and Roberta Flack to Petula Clark’s “Let Me Be the One,” recorded in 1971 by the Carpenters. Medina said, “She introduces an obscure band called Funk, Inc. They were on Prestige Records and were kind of an entity back then but few people know them now.” Funk, Inc. formed in 1969 in Indianapolis.
Medina continued, “Yvonne Daniels goes, ‘Here’s a new one (“Chicken Lickin” instrumental) from Funk Incorporated,’ and I have my dad’s album of that. I would come across things like, ‘That’s where he heard this for the first time.’ Kind of cool. On the WSDM stuff, there’s a song by Lani Hall, who was the singer in Brasil 66 (from 1966-71) and later married to Herb Alpert. I’ve forgotten some of it, but my dad knew her when she was living in Chicago before she got big. Probably from Old Town, so we had all the Brasil 66 records in the house when I was little.”
Indeed, Sergio Mendes heard the Chicago native in 1965 when she was performing at Richard Harding’s Mother Blues in Old Town. “I couldn’t figure out why they were singing in Portuguese and my dad knew her from Chicago,” Medina said. “I figured they were from Brazil. I’m sure that’s why some of that is here, ‘That’s my friend singing!’ There’s a segment of a WEDC-AM show called ‘Latin Explosion’ featuring DJ Juan Montenegro. He still does that show. He’s in Sarasota. I explained this to him and he couldn’t believe it. He said it was when he started doing radio. It was a cross-section of Latin jazz and Afro-Cuban music; the older stuff like Prez Prado and then there’s (Puerto Rican boogaloo bandleader) Ray Barretto.”
(Montenegro, 76, said that current Latin Explosions can be heard between noon and 2 p.m. Wednesdays on Columbia College’s WCRX 88.1 FM)
The WEDC studios were at 5475 N. Milwaukee Avenue and the station was owned and operated by the family of the late Congressman-Alderman Roman Pucinski. His grandmother hosted a popular Polish language show on the station. Ernie did not tape that.
Ernie landed in the Merchant Marines after working as a margin clerk on Wall Street. “He worked for a brokerage firm at the Board of Trade which is how he met (future finance columnist) Terry Savage,” Medina said. “They were friends. He got an offer to move to New York to work for a different brokerage firm. Then the guy he worked for asked him to essentially keep a second set of books. He wasn’t going to jail for this guy. So he quit.” Ernie had worked in the engine room of an aircraft carrier while serving in the Navy. It was the only skill he could fall back on after leaving Wall Street.
“And the guy who kept the second set of books was Maurice Stans (1908-1998) who became the secretary of commerce under (President) Nixon,” Medina said. In 1975 Stans pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the reporting sections of the Federal Elections Campaign Act and two counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions. “The way my dad described it is that he was keeping a second set of books there and funneling the money to where hush money came for Watergate,” Medina said. “That story was burned into my brain because it was a life lesson.”
Not the Watergate tapes, but the Chicago radio that Ernie taped to go on the water. (Courtesy of Mike Medina.)
I’ve known Medina for some minutes now, but I did not know where his WayOutWardell tagline came from.
“I was looking for a handle early in the YouTube era,” he explained. “It was the title of a record I was listening to at the time, a saxophone player named Wardell Gray (1921-1955, died of a heroin overdose.). The name of the record was ‘Way Out Wardell.’ It could have been ‘Rubber Soul,’ but I probably would have been buried in Beatles questions.” In a way, that’s okay because, for Medina, his father’s sonic memories are “In My Life.”
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