Don McNeill; Host of Radio’s ‘Breakfast Club’

Donald Thomas McNeill, who created and for 35 years hosted “Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club,” a morning radio show broadcast throughout the United States and Canada and to American armed forces around the world, has died. He was 88.

McNeill, whose revered long-running Chicago-based show featuring a march around the breakfast table, died Tuesday in Evanston, Ill., of respiratory complications.

When the Radio Hall of Fame of the Museum of Broadcast Communications staged a tribute to McNeill’s program in 1993, a Chicago writer described the “Breakfast Club” as “pure, unabashed corn.”

It began with McNeill’s cheery “Good morning, Breakfast Clubbers” and featured visits from popular entertainers including singer Patti Page, comedians Groucho Marx and Jerry Lewis (who set fire to a commercial script while McNeill was reading it) and fighter Joe Louis; tall tales about neighbors Ott Ort and the Beerbowers by Aunt Fanny, played by Fran Allison of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”, and the host’s own humorous homilies such as: “Courtship makes a man spoon, but marriage makes him fork over.”

On a segment called “Memory Time,” McNeill read from the 100,000 poems and essays sent in annually by his fans. During World War II, he initiated the inspirational “Prayer Time,” and a “Sunshine Shower” segment urged fans to write to shut-ins.

When McNeill brought his show to Hollywood for two weeks in 1951, the baggage-car load of props included his famous 30-foot-high milking stool “to milk coconuts.”

“Corn is sentiment, sincere and unashamed,” McNeill once said. “Corn is the familiar, the tried and true. Every normal person likes corn. Cynics and sophisticates think they hate corn . . . but the tombstone of many a sophisticate bears a corny epitaph.”

The show was heard over the NBC Blue Network and later ABC, and eventually carried by 400 stations, with tickets to the live broadcasts as coveted as tickets to television’s “The Tonight Show” later became. McNeill’s show was simulcast by television for a time in the 1950s, but he remains an icon of radio.

Born in Galena, Ill., and reared in Sheboygan, Wis., McNeill majored in journalism and later switched to philosophy at Marquette University. He began working at a Milwaukee radio station and went on to others in Louisville, Ky., and San Francisco. With Van Fleming, he sang for West Coast stations under the name “Don and Van, the Two Professors.”

In 1933, McNeill was hired to take over a little-known Chicago morning show called “The Pepper Pot” for $50 a week and carte blanche on format. He changed the name of the hourlong program and introduced his calls to breakfast with a march around the breakfast table, complete with drumroll and trumpet fanfare, every 15 minutes. He scripted the show initially, but later switched to a spontaneous, unrehearsed format with heavy audience participation. He liked to say the program was really written by the audience.

One of the longest-running network shows in history ended Dec. 27, 1968, with McNeill’s well-known signature, “Be good to yourself.”

McNeill later taught communications at Marquette and Notre Dame.

Survivors include three sons, a sister, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.