Chicago museum offers broadcast memories : 20th-Century culture and history captured through radio, TV and advertising are preserved.

Just beyond the Chicago Cultural Center’s ornate marble entrance is a closet. But this is not just any closet. If you take the dare of the sign dangling from the doorknob reading “OPEN AT YOUR OWN RISK,” out thunder memories of the days when families crowded around the Emerson listening to the crash of Johnson Wax cans and whatever else Fibber McGee jammed behind the door.

This 19th-Century building, once the city’s main library, now embraces the Museum of Broadcast Communications, a repository of 20th-Century culture and contemporary American history as captured through radio, television and broadcast advertising.

Anyone who remembers the classic radio comedy “The Fibber McGee and Molly Show” should get a kick out of the vintage black and white TV sets and radios that look like major pieces of furniture. Further down memory lane is the tribute to Edgar Bergen, perhaps the only ventriloquist who found fame on radio. Both Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, were natives of Chicago. It seemed appropriate to Bergen’s wife, Frances, (they are “Murphy Brown’s” real parents) that the wooden McCarthy, Effie Klinker and hayseed Mortimer Snerd be enshrined here.

For those indifferent to the days before Walkmans, there is the fully functional newsroom equipped with working TV cameras and TelePrompTers. News anchor wanna-bes can test their on-air presence in borrowed blue blazers. There’s even a floor director to cue the neophytes. As you take your turn, remember that Dave Garroway and Mike Wallace, to name only two, got their starts in Chicago.

It costs a mere $19.95 to be a newscaster, but you also get a videotape of your performance. This and the tourist shop called “Commercial Break,” are the only places where you can spend money in the museum, where the admission is free.

Although the broadcast museum has had a home in Chicago for five years, it has come out of its own closet. Once stashed off the beaten path, the museum now is on Michigan Avenue, just a stone’s throw from Chicago’s Art Institute and Orchestra Hall.

The museum was the brainchild of Bruce DuMont, a local political correspondent and nephew of television pioneer Allen B. DuMont. In 1978, while producing a local news show, he was stunned to learn how old footage was stored. “Everything was in such disarray and treated with so much disrespect. Things were piled up and there was no point of reference,” he recalls.

After years of door-knocking and political maneuvering, DuMont’s orderly dream is a reality that includes a public archives collection with more than 6,000 television shows, 49,000 radio broadcasts and 8,000 broadcast commercials--including the one that taught the world to sing. That and the ad that taught the world to spell, at least the word B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

The past is easily accessible through a bank of computers that even the most computer illiterate can understand. And the collection grows daily. Nightly newscasts are indexed so that anyone can, say, go back to their birth date to see what else happened that day.

Students and professors sit at TV and radio carrels for research. For his upcoming movie, Spike Lee came to the museum to see footage on Malcolm X. But browsers are always welcome. Most often, visitors request the Beatles, Elvis on “The Steve Allen Show” and the Kennedy assassination.

Strolling through the museum, one can’t help but notice Chicago’s vital role in broadcasting. Burr Tillstrom, the hands behind Kukla, Fran and Ollie, got his start here. Jack Benny and Walt Disney grew up in these parts. WBBM’s-TV camera, the one that captured John F. Kennedy’s charisma during the first televised presidential debate in 1960, is on display.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications is not only overflowing with nostalgia but also mirrors 20th-Century values, quirks and humor. There are plenty of memories.

Stopping on his lunch hour, Scott Rylowicz, 32, found himself looking to the past. “I like the stuff that reminds me of my childhood,” he said. Even the radio programs that predate him have special meaning. “I picture my dad as a kid. This was their entertainment. I’d like to bring my kids here to see if they are as interested as I am.”