Vintage Chicago Tribune: Oprah Winfrey — 10 moments from her Chicago years

Forty years ago this week, Oprah Winfrey appeared on Chicago television for the first time.

She was the new host for a morning program that had experienced a revolving door of on-air talent.

Since March 30, 1970, Bob Kennedy occupied the 7-8:30 a.m. time slot on WLS-Ch. 7. He was set to leave Chicago for ABC’s “A.M. America,” a national broadcast designed to compete with NBC’s “Today,” but died of cancer on Nov. 6, 1974.

With a name change to “A.M. Chicago” in January 1975, Kennedy’s possible replacements included Regis Philbin and “The People’s Court” reporter Doug Llewelyn (who would later produce “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults”). Instead, Sandi Freeman became co-host to an assortment of white male anchors — including Steve Edwards and Robb Weller — who occupied the rattan chair beside her.

In late 1983, WLS hired a new station manager from Los Angeles who set out to shake up the morning shift. Dennis Swanson told the Tribune that a solo woman host (we’re guessing it wasn’t Freeman) would be the most effective competition to the dominant force at 9 a.m. — Phil Donahue on WBBM-Ch. 2.

[ Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones and more: Chicago’s memorable daytime TV talk show hosts ]

“The first time I saw Oprah was on tape,” Swanson later said. “This young woman at the station named Debbie DiMaio had a tape of her. She said it wouldn’t show just how good Oprah was, but it’d give me an idea. I was intrigued, and since Oprah couldn’t get time off to come during the week, we brought her in Labor Day weekend, a holiday weekend. It was empty at the station. We had her go to the studio and do a couple of segments, and I’m watching it on the monitor in my office and thinking this is the best audition I have ever been associated with — that I had the answer to my ‘A.M. Chicago’ problem.”

Winfrey’s hiring was announced in the Dec. 2, 1983, Tribune: “She’s expected here in early January and brings credits that range from reporting and anchoring to touring in a one-woman show, ‘The History of Black Women through Drama and Song.’”

Within weeks of her debut, the 29-year-old Winfrey pulled her show into a virtual dead-heat in the ratings with Donahue.

Winfrey never looked back.

“My mandate is to win,” she told the Tribune in March 1984.

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” was nationally syndicated for 25 seasons from 1986 to 2011 and produced more than 4,500 episodes. It is among the longest-running and highest-rated talk shows in history with 47 Daytime Emmy Awards before Winfrey stopped submitting it for consideration in 2000.

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Jan. 2, 1984: Introduced with a parade

The first “A.M. Chicago” hosted by Winfrey was an hour-long show celebrating the University of Illinois’ appearance in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., later the same day. State Street was closed between Lake and Randolph streets for a procession that included the Glenbrook North High school marching band, the Blue Horizon color guard from Rolling Meadows High School and cheerleaders from Evanston Township High School.

[ Oprah had a Chicago audition to remember ]

“To my surprise, the show was a bit of a disaster,” Winfrey later said. “Nothing worked. Everything fell apart. I’m cooking — I don’t cook. I certainly didn’t cook then and certainly don’t cook on a hot plate on TV.”

One key element missing from Winfrey’s first show — an audience.

“I needed people. I needed to have you to gauge how things were going during the show, if you were responding, if you were laughing, if you were tracking with me,” she later said. “So after that first show, we put up some folding chairs in the audience. We brought in the staff. Secretaries. Anybody we could find in the building and filled the first rows with staff people and the rest with people off the street that we bribed with doughnuts and coffee.”

Ratings for the show jumped quickly.

[ Live wire at 'A.M. Chicago': Wingin' it with Ch. 7's Oprah Winfrey ]

“She’s up two points, and that’s a positive indicator of her reception,” Swanson told the Tribune in early February 1984.

Within two months, by the end of the February sweeps, “A.M. Chicago,” the worst-rated show on Chicago television at 9 a.m. on weekdays, was beating the highest-rated, “The Phil Donahue Show.”

It was renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before the 1985 season premiere.

Sept. 8, 1986: First nationally syndicated show debuts

Just seven months after Winfrey received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her professional acting debut performance as Sofia in “The Color Purple,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was broadcast at 9 a.m. CT to audiences outside Chicago for the first time.

[ Gene Siskel's review: 'Color Purple' — Poweful, daring, sweetly uplifting (4 stars) ]

Rumors of potential first guests included her “Color Purple” colleagues — Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg or Quincy Jones — or even Carol Burnett, but Winfrey and her staff tried to woo another big name. They sent a mink teddy pair and a pair of rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses to “Miami Vice” star Don Johnson, who declined to appear. (Johnson apologized and returned the specs when he surprised Oprah on the first show of her farewell season in 2011.)

[ And God created Oprah: Before she was a media deity, Oprah Winfrey was a fledgling local talk show host with a shot at national stardom. An oral history of her pivotal first syndicated season. ]

“There was such pressure about what to do on the very first show,” Winfrey later said. “We couldn’t figure it out. We tried every celebrity. Nobody knew who we were. Everybody said, ‘Ofrey, who?’”

Instead, the show became, “How to marry the person of your choice.”

September 1988: Buys West Side TV studios as new home for Harpo Productions

With her daytime talk show tuned to by nearly half of all TV sets in Chicago most mornings, Winfrey branched out into real estate.

She became the first Black owner of a TV and film facility when she purchased with a group of investors the 30-year-old studios at 1058 W. Washington Blvd. on the Near West Side for an undisclosed sum.

The site formerly housed the Second Regiment Armory, which is where bodies were taken after the S.S. Eastland capsized while docked on the Chicago River in 1915.

[ Disaster on the Eastland: 1915 catastrophe on the Chicago River claimed 844 lives ]

Winfrey, who believed the property was haunted, chose the address for its potential.

“Industry in this city has to move west because there’s no place left to go,” Winfrey told the Tribune. “It’s a great area for development a great area for real estate investment, as well as a great creative investment.”

Feb. 22, 1989: The Eccentric opens

A cavernous space that formerly was a garage for a car dealership was converted into Winfrey’s namesake restaurant — a 500-seat brasserie with English, French, Italian and American themes.

Menu highlights included “Oprah’s potatoes,” which were mashed potatoes with horseradish, for $2.25.

Winfrey made it clear that she would not be just another celebrity with a passing fancy in the establishment.

“I have to check the bathrooms every half hour; they’re very strict about that,” she told the Tribune. “Besides peeling the potatoes, I do get to make the Perrier sodas — my favorite. But I won’t be answering phones because I can’t tell you how to get here.”

Little design touches like a sign that says, “Speak the Truth,” are what gave the restaurant its name.

“Eccentrics add the spice to life,” Rich Melman, whose Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises was a co-owner in the enterprise, said after the restaurant’s opening. “Oprah and I started talking about a restaurant a long time ago. She believes, like me, in restaurants as theater.”

[ Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises: How the Tribune reviewed 50 years of the restaurant group’s concept debuts ]

The Tribune gave The Eccentric 2 out of 4 stars for chef Michael Kornick’s cuisine.

“The Eccentric does a superior job with side dishes. Just about everybody feels compelled to sample a dish of Oprah’s potatoes, chunky mashed potatoes spiced with a bit of horseradish. Everyone seems to enjoy them, but whether it’s because freshly mashed potatoes have become so rare or because the potato-horseradish combination is really so special or because they’re the menu’s sole reference to the celebrity is anyone’s guess,” Tribune critic Mark Knoblauch wrote.

The restaurant closed in September 1995. Wildfire opened in its place.

Sept. 17, 1996: Oprah’s Book Club launches

“When I was growing up, books were my friends,” Winfrey told her audience. “One of the greatest pleasures I have right now in life is to be reading a really good book and to know I have a really, really good book after that.”

Her first selection was “The Deep End of the Ocean” by Jacquelyn Mitchard, a first-time novelist and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

[ Hitting the mother lode: Jacquelyn Mitchard scores big with a first novel about a family in turmoil ]

Mitchard’s gripping novel centered on the baffling disappearance of a 3-year-old from a crowded hotel lobby during his mother’s high school reunion. The idea for the book came to Mitchard in a dream.

“The real story is not the disappearance but how the family — parents, grandparents, siblings — can learn to live a full life around a wound,” she told the Tribune.

The book sold 100,000 copies before Winfrey recommended it, but leapt to the top of The New York Times’ hardcover list in Chicago and nationwide soon afterward. Some criticized Winfrey’s book choices, but others praised her for encouraging Americans to read more often.

“People with a wide public influence, like Oprah, giving opinions on books is a promising development for educators, even if we may want to quarrel with her opinion, Gerald Graff, director of the master of arts program in humanities at the University of Chicago, told the Tribune in 1997. “We shouldn’t gripe about the Oprah phenomenon. We should take advantage of it.”

Winfrey’s book list now stands at 103 selections. Her most recent recommendation is “Let Us Descend” by Jesmyn Ward.

Sept. 9, 2004: ‘You get a car! You get a car!’

Among all of Winfrey’s memorable episodes, this one inspired a classic meme.

In the 19th season premiere of her talk show, Winfrey brought 11 members of her Chicago studio audience to the stage and gave them a new car, worth about $28,000. Then she told the audience that she had one more car to give out. Her staff distributed boxes to each audience member and Winfrey instructed them to open the boxes at the same time. Squeals ensued as Winfrey shouted that everybody is getting a car.

“You get a car! You get a car! ... Everybody gets a car!”

In all, Winfrey gave away 276 Pontiac G6s — a retail price collectively worth about $8 million at the time. Producers loaded the audience with people who desperately needed the new cars. It was the scream heard ‘round Chicago in 2004.

The ratings were incredible — the show drew its largest audience for an opener since 1996.

Oct. 18, 2006: Asks Barack Obama if he will run for president

When Barack Obama appeared on Winfrey’s show in October 2006, he was a member of the U.S. Senate who had just released his second book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.” (It was not an Oprah’s Book Club pick, but former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” became the 80th selection.)

Winfrey asked him on the episode: “If you ever would decide to run within the next five years ... would you announce on this show?”

“I don’t think I could say no to you, “Obama responded. “Oprah, you’re my girl.”

In her first-ever foray into politics, Winfrey gave Obama her endorsement for president when she appeared on “Larry King Live” in September 2006. She repeated her support in September 2007 and December 2007.

[ In Obama's words: 20 memorable quotes from Chicago appearances ]

Obama chose the Old State Capitol in Springfield — the home of Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech — instead of Winfrey’s stage to announce his candidacy for president on Feb. 10, 2007.

When Obama appeared on stage in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, to celebrate his election he declared, “Change has come to America.” Winfrey, who was one of more than 100,000 people who had gathered there to celebrate the victory, wept. Although she was with Stedman Graham and best friend Gayle King, Winfrey cried on an unknown man’s shoulder.

May 25, 2011: Last show — No. 4,561 — airs

Winfrey announced on Nov. 20, 2009, that her show’s 25th season would be its last.

The reason?

“I love this show. This show has been my life,” Winfrey told viewers. “And I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye. Twenty-five years feels right in my bones and it feels right in my spirit.”

Winfrey had also recently launched her own 24-hour-a-day venture, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which followed her successful magazine, “O: The Oprah Magazine,” in 2000.

The penultimate shows in her final season were filmed at the United Center, which featured surprise guests Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and Aretha Franklin singing “Amazing Grace.”

The last show was “all Oprah,” one audience member said after it was taped.

Famous friends were part of the audience — filmmaker Tyler Perry, actress Cicely Tyson, TV journalist and former California first lady Maria Shriver, financial advisor Suze Orman, plus Winfrey’s longtime companion Graham and close friend King — but an emotional Winfrey did all the talking.

“You and this show have been the great love of my life,” she said.

Finally, Winfrey stepped off the stage and passed through the crowd of standing audience members and staffers lining the hallways and populating the large staircase just inside the building’s main entrance.

May 7, 2014: Harpo Studios sold to Sterling Bay

Harpo Productions hired a real estate firm in October 2013 to evaluate selling some of the 3.48-acre Harpo Studios campus.

The deal closed for $30.5 million the next year. The biggest chunk of the purchase price was for the 103,000-square-foot studio and office space at 110 N. Carpenter St., which is where Winfrey’s eponymous talk show was filmed until it ended its run in 2011.

Structures on the site were demolished starting in July 2016 to clear the way for McDonald’s new corporate headquarters, which opened in June 2018. The building in Chicago’s Fulton Market district sold for more than $412 million in October 2020.

Oct. 16, 2018: Sells final piece of real estate owned in the Chicago area

The four-bedroom, 2,250-square-foot Colonial-style house in near west suburban Elmwood Park sold for $375,000.

In the Chicago area, Winfrey previously sold a four-unit, 9,625-square-foot duplex in Water Tower Place in 2015 for $4.625 million. In 2012 she sold a never-occupied, eight-room, 4,607-square-foot co-op unit in the building at 199 E. Lake Shore Drive in the Gold Coast for $2.75 million.

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