Tuesday morning marked an interesting first for me while behind the microphone broadcasting my weekly radio show, which happens to share the same name as this Tribune column.
For the previous nine years when broadcasting my WJOB 1230 AM radio show Of Notoriety with Phil Potempa, my studio surroundings have always been in the station’s leased space in the Purdue Northwest Commercialization Manufacturing Excellence Center at 7150 Indianapolis Boulevard in Hammond, which had been home for the media company under Vasquez Development for 13 years.
As WJOB celebrates its 102nd year of continuous operations, owner and on-air morning radio personality Jim Dedelow decided “it was time to return to the radio station’s roots,” since even during their decade-long relocation, the broadcast company had always continued to own and maintain the existing studio space at 6405 Olcott Ave. in Hammond across the road from what once was Woodmar Shopping Mall.
After my Tuesday inaugural broadcast in the cherished homebase studios, which were constructed in 1956, I crossed paths in the reception lobby with Schererville attorney and former Lake County Democratic Party Chairman Jim Wieser, 74, who was waiting to be interviewed by Dedelow.
“I feel like I’m back home again, being in this station after so many years at the other location,” Wieser told me.
“My first time being interviewed in this same building for a radio show was 50 years ago, when I was running for Highland Town Council. I was 27 years old, and it was 1975 when I was interviewed by Larry Peterson. And anytime I was ever interviewed by Larry, I never felt comfortable with him because he asked such tough questions. If you didn’t answer him directly, he’d nail you.”
Recalling the roster of many broadcasting greats whose voices have traveled along the WJOB airwaves, Dedelow said Tuesday that Peterson taught him how to read newscasts when he first began working at WJOB in 1985, before departing for a financial career in downtown Chicago.
“Peterson had a style that wasn’t as aggressive and even hostile as we have in 2026, but he definitely used a ‘velvet hammer’ when necessary,” Dedelow said.
“The first license issued to a radio station in the Calumet area was in 1923 to Hammond-Calumet Broadcasting Corporation, with Dr. George F. Courier and Lawrence J. Crowley as the licensees, with the broadcasting model it would be a radio station for allowing voices to be heard.”
The original radio station structure was in downtown Hammond at 402 Fayette St., right at Hohman Avenue before it moved to 449 State St. for a time before the “new studios” were built at the present location in 1956 on Olcott Avenue.
While many associate the iconic Hammond-born and raised broadcaster Jean Shepherd with starting his career at WJOB in 1945, he only spent a short time doing sports commentary for the station before departing for better broadcast opportunities in Toledo, Ohio, and then on to New York.
Street signs in the Woodmar neighborhood of South Hammond designate the intersection address for WJOB radio station’s transmitter and studio building, erected in 1956 and now including an additional sign honoring late broadcaster Irv Lewin. (Philip Potempa/for Post-Tribune)
Irv Lewin, who began as an on-air personality at WJOB in the early 1960s, had a far longer and illustrious local career at WJOB before his death from cancer in August 1995 on his 81st birthday. As the co-owner of Lewin Brothers Clothing Store in East Chicago, Lewin’s career as a radio name blossomed under the guidance of later station owner Julian Colby. Lewin also served as the Northwest Indiana campaign manager for presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy, which garnered him two in-person studio visits for on-air interviews with Kennedy in the early 1960s, helping catapult Lewin’s clout and emerging radio name.
Peterson was Lewin’s 30-year broadcasting colleague and eventual successor behind the microphone with his “Afternoon Party Line Show.”
In 2002, when George and Norma Stevens’ St. George Broadcasting purchased WJOB after 13 years of ownership by M&M Broadcasting, drastic changes included Peterson disappearing from the airwaves as well as other popular programs such as “Bargain Bonanza” and on-air personalities like Gregg Doffin, Wally Skibinski’s “Polka Hour” and news personalities like Thurm Ferree, Mike Bonaventura, Vincent Gino, Jessica Morgan and Laura Waluszko.
When Dedelow purchased the station with partnership investors in 2004, WJOB was saved from going off the airwaves and likely bankruptcy. With new on-air talent like Chicago’s WBBM radio personality Ric Federighi as morning show host and Steven “The Preacher” Glover in the afternoons, the station prospered with new audience growth and influence.
Dedelow plans to continue further growth in the station’s next century while never letting listeners forget the airwaves’ roots and names who helped the station’s reach grow.
“WJOB had East Chicago native and newsman Frank Reynolds, who went on to host the national ABC Nightly World News, as a news talent, as well as Felicia Middlebrook of WBBM starting out here and Steve King of the ‘Steve and Johnnie Show’ who went on to a 26-year radio run on WGN,” Dedelow said.
On Wednesday, King, 81, said he was pleased to see WJOB return to the address he remembers so well.
“Am I wrong, or is that the same studio I broadcast from when I got my first start in radio at WJOB, in 1966?” King said.
“I believe the control board would have been in front of where I see Jim [Dedelow] seated, turntables would be to his right, reel-to-reel tape recorders would have been to his left, and the newsroom, complete with teletype machines, would have been the room seen over his shoulder. I had great conversations in that studio with Irv Lewin, Larry Peterson, Cosmo Currier, blues legend Jimmy Reed’s wife, Mary, and Jimmy’s son, and many more. If those walls could talk, indeed.”
Philip Potempa is a journalist, published author and weekly radio host on WJOB 1230 AM. He can be reached at philpotempa@gmail.com.
