An engineer at WFMT for 28 years, most of them good ones, Alfred Antlitz now finds himself running the station during one of the worst. “I never thought I’d be in this position,” he told us. “I almost can’t explain it.”
Times used to be nicer. “I remember articles published in national magazines about this ivory tower, how people came here and never left,” said Antlitz, who’s a perfect example. “Today, in some ways, the spirit of the company is the antithesis of the company I remember and I want to get back to it, but with the company on a very secure financial basis, so we’re impeccable in terms of accounting and management and have team spirit again.
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In 1985, the editor in chief and editorial director of Chicago and the general sales manager and finance director of WFMT–“the gang of four,” Nordstrand would call them–took their grievances against their CEO to the board of trustees. They found that they’d tapped CETA’s own buried vein of dissatisfaction. Months of meetings followed involving CETA president and WTTW general manager William McCarter and leading trustees, as CETA searched for new leadership. “Gang” member Don Gold remembers: “One long, anxiety-filled evening, they offered me the opportunity to run the radio station. I was the editor of the magazine! I figured they wanted me to fire people I knew, be a hatchet man. It seemed like the wrong job for me. But I wasn’t the first they asked, and I wasn’t the last.”
No. Nordstrand was temperamentally unsuited for a time of strife and change. His staff came to him with suggestions for increasing revenues and he didn’t respond. Which is why early in 1989 Antlitz, Malatia, and Rock took their concerns to William McCarter just as the gang of four had done four years earlier. In March, McCarter put them in charge of the station.
First consider the perspective of Friends of WFMT. Last October, the Friends asked the Federal Communications Commission not to renew CETA’s license to operate WFMT unless CETA placed the station under an independent board of trustees. The Friends’ petition argued that since 1985, when CETA dissolved an earlier board, it “has tried to bleed WFMT of money and strip it of assets.” As evidence, the petition pointed to the sale of Chicago magazine, whose $9 million net profit was placed in an endowment fund to which WFMT does not have access.
Who said this? we wondered. Listeners? The board of trustees?
