Bruce DuMont, founder of the Museum of Broadcast Communications and a former television producer and host — including political talk show “Beyond the Beltway” and WBEZ’s “The Chicago Show” — has died.
He died Thursday at 81, the museum confirmed in a statement.
DuMont’s storied career saw him behind a microphone at local outlets including CBS, WGN, WTTW and WBEZ, though his affinity for on-air production made him a national star.
“Without Bruce’s perseverance in collecting and preserving Chicago’s television and radio history, there would be no institution like ours today,” officials with the Museum of Broadcast Communications wrote in a statement. “We extend our condolences to his family and friends, and we honor his extraordinary contribution to media history.”
DuMont told WBEZ in 2017 that he got his inspiration to pursue television on a visit to New York City for his 10th birthday — when he visited the set of “Captain Video and His Video Rangers” and got to sit in a prop spaceship.
In the years that followed, he and friends would create sets out of refrigerator boxes and other garbage they found in the alleyways of Logan Square, where the Connecticut-native grew up.
“I realized everything I had watched on television was made of cardboard,” DuMont said. “I fell in love with television that day, it was the defining moment of my life. I never wanted to do anything but be involved in television from that point on.”
He and a friend would also take advantage of bad weather to visit Nathan Hale Court outside Tribune Tower to be interviewed on TV for Ernie Simon’s nightly show, knowing no adults would want to stand in the rain for an interview. DuMont said he and his friend were given a box of Kraft Cheese and tickets to Balaban & Katz movie theaters for their time.
After attending Schurz High School and studying at Columbia College in Chicago, DuMont’s first solid radio gig came as a play-by-play announcer for the semi-pro Chicago Panthers team in 1964. There, the station manager at WLS FM told him he needed sponsors to get on the air, so he took to restaurants along Harlem Avenue in Niles to secure his spot.
Despite a childhood dream of wanting to be the voice of the White Sox — and a failed attempt to slide into the minor league radio scene — he made the switch to politics after booking his first feature in 1966. He had said he always had an affinity for the political due to the bonding him and his father did over talk radio.
A failed run at an Illinois Senate seat as a Republican in 1970 kept him on the air instead, and in the following years he hosted the weekly “Chicago Show” on WBEZ, which was later renamed for him. It largely focused on literature, but pivoted at the end of the decade toward politics, a sign of things to come.
By 1980, he was host of “Inside Politics” — a show he described as “by, for and about political junkies” — which was renamed “Beyond the Beltway” after national syndication in 1992. A few years later, as a producer for WTTW, he was the debut producer for “Chicago Tonight,” a weekly panel show that still airs.
In the late 80s, DuMont helped found the Museum of Broadcast Communications after seeing reels of the most important Chicago and American historical moments being tossed in the trash or recorded over, according to David Plier, chair of the Museum of Broadcast Communications.
Plier said not only was Mr. DuMont a dedicated storyteller and interviewer, but that he gave the world an “invaluable cultural resource” in establishing the museum — all a part of his legacy given that the museum now boasts more than 80,000 hours of archive footage and continues to educate broadcast students.
“Bruce saw an opportunity to really save broadcast history and use it to teach students about those moments in time,” Plier told the Sun-Times Thursday night. “He just had a passion for what he did and it shined through in every moment.”
In 1992, DuMont married Chicago political force Kathy Osterman, who died of cancer later that year.
Between 1987 and 2006, he hosted the “Illinois Lawmakers,” covering the height of the political season for Illinois from the state capitol. He later retired from the museum in 2017.
DuMont is survived by his husband, Kevin Fuller, his daughter and four grandchildren.
