Brought to you by Dorothy Litwin

From an early age, Dorothy Litwin loved five things: books, music, radio, films, and her education.

She isn’t sure why she loved these things, only that she differed from her older sister, who was “very much into the clothes and make-up side of life.”
However, she never anticipated that her love would amount to a career in television, more or less because when she was a child, that medium did not exist yet.

But while she was working for the Army to save up every penny so that she could attend one of her three dream schools – Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago – the first commercial television station was making its way to the Windy City. And their paths would soon intertwine.

In 1939, Paramount Pictures, at the request of John Balaban (co-owner of Balaban & Katz Theaters Inc.), acquired an experimental television license that would become W9XBK – at that time, television’s channel two. It would later become television’s channel four when the Federal Communications Commission changed VHF frequencies.

Flash forward four years, that experimental television license would become the first commercial station in Chicago – WBKB (now known as WLS-TV, or ABC 7 Chicago).

The station was housed in the State Lake building, 190 N. State St., and broadcast out of the building’s fourth floor – the Navy occupied the first three floors as a training school.

When Litwin arrived for a job interview in 1945, she was quickly offered a job on the crew. Pay was small, only $25 a week, but offered all the B&K movie passes you could want – “A dream for me, since I loved films,” Litwin said.

“I thought I would give it a try for one school year and then return to Northwestern to get my degree,” Litwin said. She had been attending the Evanston university in pursuit of a degree in radio, where her professor told her that television was “just a fad and it wouldn’t amount to anything.”
She fell in love with the job so much, she didn’t finally complete her degree until the mid-1970s.

Litwin served a variety of roles throughout her time at the station – working the dolly for programs that included the Albright twins, a quiz show or an interview with the head of the Chicago Health Department – and was so excited after her first day that she ran home to tell her parents, “Someone should produce a listing of all the shows so people would know what was on and when.”

With no formal schedule, the station heavily relied on “man on the street” interviews. When those were exhausted, she said they would normally point a camera out to Lake Street to show those watching a live view or even would show a couple of crew members playing checkers.

“We had a lot of freedom back then,” she said. “And we were required to be on a certain amount of hours every day.”

Litwin quickly learned the ins and outs of television work – how to operate the cameras, work the sound equipment, build sets, and give studio tours.

After a while, she even started developing her own programming ideas. One of those ideas involved getting a local children’s theater production to perform for the station (of which Sheldon Patinkin, cousin to actor Mandy Patinkin, was part).

Litwin continued to work at the television station for two years before accepting a job with WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, which was owned by the Milwaukee Journal.

“We were a group of young women – I was 20 or 21 – who were so-called ‘experts’ in this new medium and were asked to help with the many new stations going on the air around the country. I was offered the position of film director,” she said.

WTMJ went live on Dec. 3, 1947. During her time at that station, Litwin was encouraged to write and develop her own shows in addition to planning film programs. Some of the programs created under Litwin’s direction included “Movie Magic,” “The Children’s Corner,” and profiles on various businesses throughout the city. R.E. Aikens, of Waukesha, who had been involved with the movie “The Birth of the Nation,” also contacted her about potentially exploring silent films.

Within two years, Litwin moved to Cincinatti to join the city’s new television station, WKRC-TV. She wrote and developed her own shows once again for about a year before moving back to Chicago to be with her husband. That would mark the end of her television career, at least for a while.

“I worked for Malcolm Howard advertising, where I was involved in making commercials for Jim Moran, the Courtesy Man. I also worked for Schwimmer productions, spent time selecting films for the Jim Moran show over at WGN-TV, and later worked on the Chicago portion of ‘Your Show of Shows’ with Jack Carter,” Litwin said.

While working with Carter, Litwin met a number of celebrities (the norm for that program), including Vincent Price and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
In the mid-1960s, Litwin began working for the Illinois Arts Council, getting “all my fingers into different things” like event organization, film editing, and public relations. One of her biggest projects transformed the recently closed Niles East High School into a performing arts center.
“Oakton Community College was set to open a satellite campus there, but I was able to get the lease on the auditorium, the art rooms, the dance studio, and the practice rooms,” she said.

She spent the next months fundraising, programming the place, and getting the necessary pieces in order to open the center.

“I started contacting these different agencies to try and book programs – and I got to know the William Morris Agency people well because of that,” Litwin said.

Litwin would remain at that performing arts center for the next 18 years until her retirement.

Looking back, she’s proud of her career. “It’s very, how do you say, serendipitous? I was always in the right place at the right time to experience all of these adventures.”

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