Long before radio executives started holding meetings about authenticity, engagement, community, female representation and creating a deeper relationship between personalities and listeners, Judy Markey was sitting behind a microphone at WGN Radio doing all of it without needing a consultant to give it a name. She talked about life. She laughed. She listened. She told stories. She disagreed. She wondered aloud. She allowed Chicago to sit at the table with her and Kathy O’Malley every day, and somewhere along the way the people listening stopped feeling like an audience and started feeling like friends.
On September 11, Chicago lost one of its Girlfriends.
Judy Markey has died.
She was 82.
And there are certain people in radio whose passing makes you realize that you’re not simply losing another broadcaster.
YOU’RE LOSING AN ERA
Before There Was A Microphone There Was A Pen
Judy Markey didn’t need radio to make her interesting.
Radio needed Judy Markey because she was already interesting.
Before Chicago knew her voice through WGN’s legendary 720 signal, readers knew her through the Chicago Sun-Times, where she spent roughly 16 years writing a syndicated column about the wonderfully ridiculous experience of being human.
Family.
Marriage.
Children.
Middle age.
Relationships.
Embarrassment.
Life.
The things that happen between the supposedly important things.
She could find the story there.
And that’s a gift.
Because anybody can write about the extraordinary.
Great writers can make you recognize yourself in the ordinary.
Judy could.
She also wrote for publications including The New York Times and Cosmopolitan and eventually became an author whose books included The Daddy Clock, Just Trust Me and collections built from the observational wit that had already made her a familiar Chicago voice. Her accomplishments ultimately earned her a place in Northwestern University’s Medill Hall of Achievement.
But then something happened that changed Chicago radio.
Somebody Put Judy And Kathy Together
Sometimes the greatest programming decisions begin with something considerably less sophisticated than a research study.
WHAT IF WE PUT THESE TWO PEOPLE TOGETHER
That’s essentially what happened.
Judy Markey and Kathy O’Malley were accomplished Chicago newspaper columnists.
They knew words.
They knew people.
They knew Chicago.
What they did not have was the conventional résumé somebody might expect before being handed significant airtime on one of America’s great radio stations.
And perhaps that’s exactly why it worked.
In 1989, WGN experimented with putting them together on the radio.
The experiment lasted 20 years.
😂
Programmers everywhere should probably write that down.
They Became Kathy And Judy
Not The Morning Zoo.
Not Chicago’s Maximum Talk Explosion.
Not some ridiculous acronym dreamed up in a conference room.
Kathy and Judy.
That was enough.
Because the product wasn’t a slogan.
THE PRODUCT WAS THEM
Two intelligent women talking.
That’s it.
Except it wasn’t.
They talked about relationships.
Families.
Sex.
Marriage.
Divorce.
Children.
Politics.
Celebrities.
Books.
Food.
Embarrassing things.
Serious things.
Things women discussed with friends but didn’t necessarily hear discussed on major-market radio.
And Chicago listened.
Boy did Chicago listen.
The program became the top-rated midday show in Chicago and earned major industry recognition.
Think about what that means.
Not successful for a show hosted by women.
Not respectable.
Not a nice little niche.
NUMBER ONE
And They Did It In Talk Radio
We need to understand the historical significance.
Talk radio was overwhelmingly male.
In many places it still is.
The stereotypical talk host was a guy behind a microphone telling everybody what he thought.
Judy and Kathy came along and demonstrated another way.
Conversation could be compelling.
Friendship could be compelling.
Listening could be compelling.
Women’s lives could be compelling.
Humor didn’t have to come from humiliation.
Intimacy wasn’t weakness.
And a conversation that sounded like two friends sitting at a kitchen table could absolutely compete with the loudest voices on the dial.
A 1999 industry examination of the show found Kathy and Judy leading their time period and producing the top cumulative audience among adults 35 to 64 while competing against some of the biggest nationally syndicated talk personalities in America.
Read that again.
These two newspaper columnists with no traditional radio background walked into WGN and eventually started beating professional talk-radio giants.
That’s not cute.
THAT IS GREAT RADIO
Then The Listeners Became Girlfriends
This may be Judy’s greatest radio legacy.
The audience developed a name.
The Girlfriends.
But it wasn’t some manufactured fan-club label.
It became a community.
People traveled together.
They attended conventions.
They showed up by the thousands.
They went on trips.
They called.
They shared things.
They grew older with Kathy and Judy.
Politicians figured out that appearing on the program mattered.
Authors knew it.
Celebrities knew it.
Chicago knew it.
Because when Kathy and Judy talked about something
THE GIRLFRIENDS WERE LISTENING
Judy’s family memorial remembers an audience so devoted that the relationship moved well beyond the radio studio into conventions and international trips.
Today we’d call that community engagement.
Back then they called it
radio.
That Word Girlfriends Was Everything
Think about what it says.
Not listeners.
Not users.
Not consumers.
Not monthly active audio participants.
God help us.
😂
GIRLFRIENDS
Human beings.
That’s the lesson.
Radio has spent the last twenty years getting extraordinarily good at measuring people while occasionally forgetting how to know them.
Kathy and Judy knew them.
Or at least listeners felt like they did.
And in personality radio
THAT FEELING IS EVERYTHING
Judy Was Funny Because Judy Understood People
There is a particular kind of broadcaster who doesn’t need a joke sheet.
They don’t have to manufacture funny.
They simply notice things.
Judy noticed things.
She had spent years doing it as a columnist.
She could take some absurd little moment from everyday life and find the universal truth hiding underneath it.
That transferred beautifully to radio.
Because great radio isn’t always about having the most extraordinary life.
Sometimes it’s saying something ordinary in exactly the right way and causing somebody driving down Lake Shore Drive to yell
OH MY GOD THAT HAPPENED TO ME TOO
That’s connection.
That’s companionship.
That’s personality radio.
That’s Judy Markey.
And She Was Smart
This deserves emphasis because female personalities have historically been subjected to a particularly insulting contradiction.
Be funny but don’t be silly.
Be intelligent but don’t intimidate.
Have opinions but don’t be difficult.
Be attractive but don’t let anybody think that’s why you’re there.
Be confident but not too confident.
Be personal but not too personal.
Judy Markey didn’t need permission to occupy the microphone.
She belonged there.
She had the résumé.
She had the brain.
She had the curiosity.
She had the life experience.
She had the writing chops.
And eventually she had the ratings.
ARGUE WITH THE NUMBERS
Then WGN Ended It
May 22 2009.
After two decades, the daily run of Kathy and Judy ended.
And Chicago reacted.
Listeners didn’t merely complain online and move along with their afternoon.
Hundreds protested the cancellation.
Think about that in 2026.
Imagine canceling a radio program and having hundreds of people care enough to physically show up.
Not click an angry emoji.
Not post a meme.
SHOW UP
That’s the metric I want.
There is no Nielsen column for it.
No streaming dashboard measures it properly.
How many people love your personalities enough to leave their houses when you take them away?
Kathy and Judy knew the answer.
And Then Radio Did Something Radio Rarely Does
It admitted that maybe goodbye didn’t have to mean forever.
In 2013, Kathy and Judy returned to WGN.
Saturday radio.
The Girlfriends were back.
Older.
Listeners were older.
Chicago was different.
Radio was different.
But chemistry doesn’t have an expiration date.
The weekend incarnation continued until 2017. Judy’s family memorial records that second chapter as another four years behind the WGN microphone.
That meant Judy Markey’s relationship with WGN stretched across nearly three decades.
From 1989 to 2017 with the break in between.
That’s extraordinary.
But Her Life Was Bigger Than WGN
And this is where an obituary needs to stop looking at the résumé.
Because Judy Markey was never merely the woman who sat beside Kathy O’Malley.
She was a daughter.
A sister.
A mother.
A wife.
A grandmother.
A friend.
A traveler.
A writer.
A gardener.
A dog lover.
A woman who lived in Cleveland and Los Angeles and Chicago and New York and Washington.
A woman who spent years living overseas.
Rome.
Paris.
Amsterdam.
There’s a wonderfully Judy detail in her family story.
She chose Northwestern’s Medill partly because she could escape a foreign-language requirement after struggling with French in high school.
Then life sent her to Europe.
And Judy eventually learned Italian and French.
Come on.
😂
That’s a Judy Markey column waiting to be written.
The girl who ran from French ended up speaking it.
Life gets the last joke.
And Judy would probably appreciate that.
She Lived
That’s what comes through when you read about her.
Not simply that she accomplished things.
SHE LIVED
She traveled.
She wrote.
She raised children.
She loved dogs.
She gardened.
She had friendships that lasted decades.
She spent more than two decades enjoying Tucson as a second home with her husband Tom Collinger.
She laughed.
She listened.
She talked.
Lord knows she talked.
😂
And thank God somebody turned on a microphone.
Her Final Decision Was Also Her Own
Judy had experienced significant physical decline in recent years.
Her family says she ultimately traveled to Switzerland and chose a medically assisted death, a choice consistent with a position she had discussed and supported during her life.
People will have different religious, moral and personal feelings about that decision.
An obituary doesn’t need to resolve that debate.
It needs to recognize the human being.
Judy made her choice deliberately.
Her family knew.
Her closest people had the extraordinary and painful opportunity to say goodbye.
And on September 11 2026
Judy Markey’s remarkable life ended.
But Her Voice Didn’t
That’s the strange miracle of broadcasting.
The person dies.
THE VOICE DOESN’T
Somewhere there is an aircheck.
Somewhere there is a cassette.
Somewhere there is a recording of Kathy laughing at something Judy said.
Somewhere Steve Bertrand is delivering the news while the Girlfriends wait to jump back into the conversation.
Somewhere Judy is interviewing an author.
Somewhere a listener is calling.
Somewhere somebody is driving through Chicago in 1997 and Judy Markey is keeping her company.
Hit play
and she’s alive again.
That’s what radio leaves us.
VOICES
Radio People Please Understand What Judy Markey Proved
You do not have to scream to matter.
You do not have to manufacture outrage to generate ratings.
You do not need to turn every disagreement into warfare.
You don’t have to pretend to be somebody larger than life.
Sometimes being completely recognizable as a human being is larger than life.
Judy proved conversation could win.
Friendship could win.
Women could win.
Humor could win.
Intelligence could win.
Vulnerability could win.
Local could win.
And two newspaper columnists sitting behind microphones could become one of the most beloved programs in one of America’s greatest radio cities.
Chicago Radio Is A Little Quieter Tonight
Not literally.
The transmitters are still running.
WGN is still at 720.
The studios are still there.
The microphones still work.
The commercials will run.
The news will happen.
Somebody will hit the top-of-hour ID.
Radio always moves forward.
It has to.
But Chicago radio is built from ghosts.
Wally Phillips.
Bob Collins.
Roy Leonard.
Spike O’Dell.
The voices that once floated through kitchens and cars and garages and offices.
People who became part of families they never actually met.
Now another chair joins that invisible studio.
JUDY MARKEY
And Somewhere There Is A Girlfriend Crying
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Some woman who listened in 1989 is older now.
Maybe much older.
Maybe she listened while getting children ready for school.
Maybe she listened after dropping them off.
Maybe Kathy and Judy were playing while she cleaned the house.
Maybe she listened at work.
Maybe she drove to one of the conventions.
Maybe she traveled with the Girlfriends.
Maybe she called the show once.
Maybe Judy made her laugh during a terrible divorce.
Maybe the show kept her company after her children left home.
Maybe she lost her husband.
Maybe she was lonely.
Maybe she simply liked hearing two smart women talk.
And today she heard that Judy died.
For that listener this isn’t celebrity news.
SHE LOST SOMEBODY SHE KNEW WITHOUT EVER MEETING HER
That is the peculiar intimacy of radio.
Television enters the room.
Radio sits beside you.
The On The Dial Perspective
There will never be another Judy Markey.
And radio should stop pretending people are replaceable.
Shifts are replaceable.
People aren’t.
You can replace noon to three tomorrow.
You can insert another show.
You can update the imaging.
You can change the clocks.
You can hire another personality.
You cannot manufacture twenty years of Tuesdays.
You cannot manufacture thousands of conversations.
You cannot manufacture somebody hearing your voice while raising children who are now raising children.
You cannot manufacture trust accumulated one ordinary day at a time.
That takes life.
Judy gave radio a tremendous portion of hers.
So Let The Microphone Stay Open For One More Minute
No music.
No commercial.
No sweeper.
No weather.
No promo.
Just silence.
Because somewhere in that silence is a woman laughing.
A newspaper columnist who wandered into radio and discovered she belonged there.
A mother.
A wife.
A grandmother.
An author.
A traveler.
A Girlfriend.
A woman who helped kick open a door for women in talk radio and then spent twenty years demonstrating that she hadn’t been hired merely to make history.
SHE WAS HIRED BECAUSE SHE WAS DAMN GOOD
Judy Markey was 82 years old.
She lived enough life for several lifetimes.
She wrote it down.
She talked about it.
She laughed at it.
She invited Chicago into it.
And Chicago loved her back.
So tonight, somewhere around the city, perhaps an old radio is sitting on a kitchen counter.
Turn it to 720 AM.
Let that enormous WGN signal roll across Chicago the way it has for generations.
And imagine, just for a second, that somewhere inside the static between yesterday and today you can still hear two Girlfriends talking.
Kathy says something.
There’s a pause.
And then Judy laughs.
God what a beautiful sound that must have been.
Rest well, Judy.
The column is finished.
The microphone is off.
The Girlfriends will take it from here.
And Chicago will remember.
Judy Markey
1944 2026
A Writer
A Broadcaster
A Trailblazer
A Girlfriend Forever
On The Dial
#JudyMarkey #KathyAndJudy #WGNRadio #ChicagoRadio #RadioLegends #OnTheDial