McNeill, Don(ald) Thomas

(b. 23 December 1907 in Galena, Illinois; d. 7 May 1996 in Evanston, Illinois), host of the radio show the Breakfast Club, one of the longest-running programs in radio network history.

Don McNeill was born in Galena, Illinois, but he grew up mainly in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In 1926 he entered Marquette University in Milwaukee to study journalism, hoping to become a newspaper editorial cartoonist. But during his sophomore year, with the failure of his father’s furniture manufacturing business, he found it necessary to look for a job to pay his way through college. The position he found was as an announcer at a Milwaukee radio station, at a salary of $15 a week. He also worked as radio editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, which was the newspaper that owned the station. The job did not last long. Years later, McNeill recalled that the “manager fired me and said I had no future in radio.” In 1930 he received a B.Phil, degree from Marquette.

After graduating from college, McNeill took a position in Louisville, Kentucky, as a staff announcer for a local radio station. There, he met Van Fleming, a singer with whom he formed a radio comedy team called “Don and Van, the Two Professors.” They met with success in Louisville, but when they lost their sponsor they headed for San Francisco, where their routine was broadcast over several NBC outlets on the West Coast. When they were unable to get enough work to sustain themselves, the team broke up and McNeill headed back to the Midwest.

In September 1931 he married Katharine (Kay) Bennett, a Marquette University classmate whom he had met at the college’s annual Christmas party. The couple moved to New York City, where McNeill looked for a job in radio. Unsuccessful in his quest, McNeill and his wife returned to Milwaukee. A short while later, he went to Chicago alone to look for a position. In 1932 he auditioned for master of ceremonies and writer for the Pepper Pot, an early-morning NBC Blue Network Chicago-based network program that was not doing well. He was hired for a $50-a-week salary. The station also had him working as a writer for Saturday Jamboree, a weekly one-hour program, as well as announcing schedules five days a week. His wife joined him in the Chicago area, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

The first thing McNeill did was to change the name of the Pepper Pot to the Breakfast Club; he also organized it into four segments that were designated “calls to breakfast.” The show premiered on 23 June 1933, and after preparing the script for the next two months, McNeill asked the network for permission to run the program without a script. Because they thought the Breakfast Club had a small audience, they acquiesced. For the rest of its many years on the air, except for commercials and musical selections, the show essentially was unrehearsed and extemporaneous. The formula worked, and the Breakfast Club was a huge success. At its peak it was broadcast on more than 400 stations and listened to by an estimated four and a half million people. Each year McNeill received more than a million pieces of mail from his audience, and much of the content of the show came from these letters.

The Breakfast Club aired five mornings a week for the next thirty-five years. Beginning in 1937, it was broadcast before a live audience, sometimes from the Drake Hotel, the Terrace Casino in the New Morrison Hotel, and other Chicago locations. McNeill involved his audience in the show by interviewing some of its members and by getting them up and marching them around the studio—called a march around the breakfast table—to introduce each of the four calls to breakfast. Tickets to the program were in great demand not only in Chicago but in other locations as well when he took the show on tour for a month each year. Members of the program’s regular cast were Fran Allison (later famous for work on the television puppet show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie), Sam Cowling (comedian), Eddie Ballantine (conductor), and Carol Richards and Dick Noel (vocalists). Some of the famous guests who appeared on the Breakfast Club were Patti Page, Johnny Desmond, Joe Louis, Thomas Hart Benton, Jane Russell, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, and James Stewart. Jim and Marian Jordan, who were later to achieve fame as “Fibber McGee and Molly,” appeared as “Toots and Chickie.” McNeill’s wife and their three sons often were heard, especially in a Christmasseason holiday show that aired for many years.

During World War II McNeill broadcast a series of interviews with workers in the factories producing military goods, and he introduced “Prayer Time” as a feature on the show, in which listeners were asked to join in silent prayer, “each in his own words: each in his own way, for a world united in peace.” This feature proved popular, and it was retained from then on.

On 22 February 1954 the Breakfast Club was brought to television as a simulcast. McNeill did not work well in the new medium, and while the show was televised for a few years, it was not successful. The radio audience declined in the 1960s and fewer stations carried it, which meant fewer sponsors. On 27 December 1968, after nearly 7,500 broadcasts, one of the longest-running programs in the history of network radio came to an end. McNeill signed off in his usual way, with the words “Be good to yourself.”

After retirement McNeill continued to live in his home in Winnetka, Illinois. He taught communication arts at Marquette and Notre Dame universities, represented a Florida land development company, served as a director of the Sears Foundation, and was on the advisory boards of Marquette, Notre Dame, and Loyola University of Chicago. He died of heart failure at Evanston Hospital in Illinois at the age of eighty-eight. He is buried in All Saints Cemetery in River Grove, Illinois.

Don McNeill was not only one of the most popular and successful personalities from the golden age of radio, he also was an important innovator. The format he developed for the Breakfast Club often has been credited for laying the groundwork for popular late-night television talk and entertainment shows such as the Tonight Show.

The papers of Don McNeill are located at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While there are no biographies of McNeill or full-length studies of the Breakfast Club, substantial information can be found in John Dunning, Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, 1925–1976 (1976), and in Current Biography (1949). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Chicago Sun-Times (both 8 May 1996) and the Los Angeles Times (9 May 1996).

Ivan D. Steen