User:Jauerback/Sandbox 2

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[1] [2]

Part of it is indescribable. He has the ability to make people feel very comfortable when they listen to him. People can identify with him. It's a form of charisma. They either have it, or they don't. And the other thing is he has a terrific ability to tell stories and describe things very visually on the air. [Being a shock jock] was certainly what got him noticed, but he's been able to sustain and last because there's a lot more to his act than that... His whole soul is spread out before his audience. John Gehron[1]

"I canceled my season tickets the year of the strike . . . until this year. " Sox season tickets^[2]

Bears season tickets in Skyline Suite^[3]

In 1999, Janet, a non-practicing lawyer, filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Mancow Muller over lewd comments Muller made about her on his show. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, it was reportedly a seven figure one.^[4] Passed the bar on her initial try after first son was born. Before law school, taught junior high for seven years at Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Has been married nine years today. ^[5]

In 1998, Dahl tested the effects of Viagra with the help of two strippers, who joined him in his studio.

• exploits of Big Steve

[edit] SHOCKED JOCK - HIS PARTNER DUMPED HIM. HIS STATION DEMOTED HIM. HIS LISTENERS DESERTED HIM. WILL STEVE DAHL SURVIVE?

Chicago Tribune - November 6, 1994 Author: Steve Johnson. The mirror went up over the window in Steve Dahl 's studio in November 1993. It was intended as self-defense, a response to a humbling series of circumstances, but it also functioned as metaphor. With all the ceremony of someone cancelling dinner reservations, Dahl had been dumped that September by longtime partner Garry Meier and, when given the opportunity to patch things up, refused to give Meier the extra money that would have done the trick In the uproar that followed, Dahl was moved out of his slot in morning drive time on WLUP-FM, where he was part of a potent and potentially groundbreaking lineup, and over to the same company's AM station, WMVP, where there was no lineup, just 50,000 watts and a notion about building a sports talk station from scratch. To the reborn WLUP-AM, the theory went, Dahl would bring listeners and in the process reinvent himself, tailoring his musings to the sports crowd, working in regular guests from the sports world and keeping his mouth shut about the breakup. All this planning and pigeonholing went against the things, Dahl says now, that he knew had made him so successful for so long. But themes of loyalty and abandonment pump in his mind like pistons, and Meier's ultimate betrayal left him reeling, he says, "really, really devastated." Not since he was a teenager had he been this scared: of losing his fans, of losing his reduced but still fat salary, of losing any more of the allegiance of the first station management that had treated him well but one that had lost millions in the split. So for one of the first times in a contentious career, he just went with the program. He had jock heroes on, such as Cleveland Indians centerfielder Kenny Lofton and Chicago Bulls assistant coach Tex Winter. He talked, a lot, with Les Grobstein, an earnest-to-a-fault sportscaster who is no Garry Meier. Asked about Dahl during those immediate post-Meier days, a rival station executive likens his groping to "phantom-limb syndrome," where someone who has lost an arm will keep sensing it there, trying haplessly to use it. Dahl didn't need to see his first set of three-month ratings-in which he tallied a lowly 2.1 percent of the listening audience, less than half of what he and Meier had been getting-to know it wasn't working. Even Meier's new midday solo show on WLUP-FM was drubbing him. "It was real hard for me to find my way," Dahl says. "I was just freaked 'cause Garry and I had beaten Howard Stern. We had an unbelievably great new contract running another five years. And all of a sudden it just completely blew up. I was so taken aback by it that at one point I became thankful just to have a job, which isn't like me." In the meantime, there was this window in his studio that was a little like having a personalized version of "A Star Is Born" playing. Through it, Dahl (Kris Kristofferson) could see into the studio occupied by Kevin Matthews (Barbra Streisand), Dahl's onetime protege and the inheritor of the Steve and Garry morning slot on FM. Matthews' show is not unlike what Dahl's was when he first came to Chicago in 1978, all wacky characters and crazy phone calls. Dahl would look up and see Matthews' people cracking up, scurrying around, strutting like they owned the place. And there, on the other side of the glass, he was-the onetime king, progenitor of Stern and Brandmeier and scores of feeble imitators-relegated to radio nowhere and doing a show as uninspired as the best moments of Steve and Garry were brilliant. "There's no other radio station in the country where you could look up and see guys that are kicking your ass," says Dahl, who turns 40 Nov. 20. "You might in your head imagine that they're down the street doing something, and you hope you're doing a better job than they are. But when you can look up and see a studio full of people laughing and coming in and out . . . . It's like, geez, there's no way I could be doing anything that interesting-whatever that is. "So, yeah, I got a mirror." It was one of the best investments he has made. Now, when Dahl looks toward Matthews' studio, he sees, not the usurper, but a set of comforting icons: doughnut-size headphones atop thatch of gray-brown hair, Sammy Davis smirk encircled by razor stubble, and Hawaiian shirt stretching toward the island and points north, east and south, too. And he is reminded of what has always been his best topic: his considerable self. Even in Detroit, when he was a 22-year-old high-voiced California transplant radio whiz kid, Steve Dahl was talking about Steve Dahl, working his loneliness and then his girlfriend and future wife, Janet, into the show. Flush with Motor City success, he came to Chicago with a full cast of characters, conducting extended conversations between them, doing wacky stunts like calling Iran during the hostage crisis and berating the non-English speakers who answered, but always weaving the progressions of his life in, too. His first of three sons was born, more or less, on air. He also had the surgery that meant he would have only three children while he was on air. Janet, for whom the term "long-suffering" might have been invented, chewed him out on air for everything from drinking bouts to inadequate foreplay. He argued with bosses, conducted feuds with fellow disc jockeys, bemoaned the size of his waistband and manhood, mocked his brother , tormented his parents-all of it on air, floating out there for anybody with a radio and the curiosity to join Dahl as he shoveled up and sifted through the loam of his psyche. As Dahl's life-and Meier's role as foil-became a bigger part of the show, the characters and much of the shtick fell away. "It was embarrassing," is how Dahl explained it to Janet. And through stops at six Chicago stations, the proceedings evolved toward what they became in the later days with Meier and what they are now, with Bruce Wolf signed on as Garry Part Deux. To somebody who has listened only a little or not at all, it is a difficult thing to get across. Just as most of the best television nowadays is about television, "Steve Dahl and the Morning Team" is, in essence, radio about radio, specifically about an oversexed, underappreciated, hard-drinking radio host named Steve Dahl trying, against innumerable obstacles, to make a good life and put on a good show. "He's this guy always trying to create his own little Norman Rockwell portrait, and then someone draws graffiti on it, and sometimes it's Steve, or maybe it's the neighbor with his dog on his lawn," says television producer John Roach, a longtime friend currently on the outs with Dahl because Dahl thinks he sided with Meier. "It's great comedy. Steve gets it right to where it ought to be-and then someone moves something else in the picture." The picture is threatening to slip from its frame. It may have seemed like the career crisis came a year ago, but the real battle is happening right now, as Dahl struggles to prove he is not what the medium used to be. On the one hand, the addition in February of Wolf, a longtime WLUP radio and WFLD-TV sports broadcaster renowned for not taking sports seriously, helped Dahl find his radio legs again. With Wolf as more equal partner than Meier ever was, Dahl sounds supremely comfortable behind a microphone again, free of the sports straitjacket he had slipped into and even a little bit more humble. "Did you ever have a couple of goldfish?" WMVP and WLUP general manager Larry Wert asks. "One dies, and one looks sad until you put another one in the bowl? Steve definitely perked up. Bruce provided not only a comfort zone, but he uniquely was able to provide an equitable level of wit and intelligence and sarcasm." "Two jazz players," says WLUP's Jonathon Brandmeier, the highly regarded (even by Dahl) afternoon man for whom Wolf has long done sports reports. "It's creative sparking." On the other hand, the most creative show on Earth is no better than a debate over 12th Ward garbage pickup if the station can't demonstrate to advertisers that people are listening. And there's the rub: After an extraordinary 15 years spent at or near the top of the Chicago ratings, Dahl finds himself middle-of-the-pack. If the show is gaining momentum, it is doing so at a trot. In the most recent quarterly Arbitron ratings, which came out in early October, Dahl and Wolf's 3.5-percent audience share placed them tenth in morning drive time among listeners most coveted by advertisers, those between ages 25 and 54. That's up three spots from the previous quarter's ratings, but it is a long way from Dahl's habitual spot in the top three. His overall audience share was still 2.1 percent, about the same numbers Howard Stern was earning for WLUP-AM when the station cut loose the gratuitously crude New York-based talker who has dominated other markets but couldn't make a dent when he went head to head against Dahl and Meier. Part of the problem is that WMVP, more than a year after its inception, remains unsettled and largely unknown. Except for Dahl and Wolf, the lineup is a hodgepodge of syndicated talkers, radio newcomers and hosts on irregular schedules. The only major Chicago sports franchise signed to a play-by-play contract is the Blackhawks. More significantly from Dahl's perspective, until October there was virtually no advertising promoting one of the three best known names-along with Brandmeier and WGN-AM's Bob Collins-still working in Chicago radio. He was convinced, depending on which moment you talked to him, that: (A) People still didn't know where he was; (B) They thought he was still doing all sports; or (C) They had come back to him, but the ratings just hadn't caught up. Bolstering (C) was the fact that in September readers of alternative Chicago newsweekly NewCity voted Dahl best talk-radio host. Tied with him was the guy doing the Budweiser ads that Dahl and Brandmeier used to get-Kevin Matthews, the guy on the other side of the mirror. Whatever the reason, management over the summer wanted Dahl to take yet another pay cut to reflect his mediocre numbers. The way they told him about this did not smooth things: On the last possible day, Wert called Dahl to tell him the station wouldn't be renewing his existing contract. The call came from a golf course. Where management was taking part in a charity tournament. Hosted by Kevin Matthews. But after much on-air moaning, Dahl, days before his contract was to expire, finally negotiated a new deal. He brought the new contract with him to a photo shoot at empty Comiskey Park in the last days of September. And later, at a nearby tavern, Dahl explained why he could live with the document sitting on the bar alongside his cheeseburger, shot of Jack Daniel's and Miller Genuine Draft. The base salary is about half of what he was making in the last days of Garry, or in the $450,000-a-year range, according to industry insiders. Ratings incentives mean that if he pulls his numbers up to about a 3.5 share of the overall audience, that could almost double. There is also an understanding that the station spend big bucks promoting him and Wolf as an entertainment, rather than sports, show, the genesis of the current "Bad Sports" campaign. "It's ultimately fair," Dahl says. "I got paid in the last year for what I'd already done. Now I have to get paid for what I'm going to do." Meanwhile, Dahl-who has already blown away two radio truisms: that talk won't work on FM and that young people will no longer listen to AM-has to watch the goings-on at WLUP-FM, a party to which he has been disinvited. Steve and Garry were to have been an anchor of the station's (nearly) all-comedy talk lineup, a first for FM and one that management hopes to syndicate nationwide. When the FM personalities convened at Poplar Creek Music Theatre in July for a concert labeled "Loopstock," after the station's nickname, Dahl could only joke, "We'll be part of MVPFest, where different sports guys get up on stage and start a rumor." For all the boundaries Dahl has stretched on the air, his home is practically gingerbread. It is a brick two-story in a calm and leafy place, a comfortable, but not show-offy, upper-middle-class west-suburban neighborhood. The driveway bears a Jeep, a minivan and a basketball hoop, and the back yard is all swimming pool. Janet, a non-practicing attorney, is a member of the local school board, having successfully run last year without hearing from voters a peep of objection, she says, to her notorious husband. The boys-Pat is 13, Mike 11, and Matt 9-play baseball and golf. Pat is student council president. Dahl coaches and sponsors two of their summertime baseball teams and, says Janet, dotes on them. "He wants the kids to go off and never have bad moments" 1/8to remember 3/8, she says, "and the kids exploit it because he loves them so thoroughly and he so wants them to love him. "He's a great dad, and he's not the best parent, because if Pat does something unconscionable, he wants to make up before bedtime. He needs to be able to hold a grudge." Bearing friendly, open faces that are the opposite of their dad's habitual guardedness, the boys wander in and out of the room as their parents are being interviewed. "Mr. Writer," says Mike, trotting up to a visitor at lunchtime, "do you like roast beef?" Except that some of this becomes material for mass consumption, it is indeed Rockwellesque, if Rockwell had tried to paint more shades of gray into his canvases. Janet complains in conversation that she can't coax so much as a date out of her famous husband; sometimes this frustration spills out onto the air. "You are a blob," she tells him and Chicago one morning. "And I'm sick of watching you watch TV." On another morning, still in full summer, she launches into what can only be labeled a rant, mocking and vengeful, against Meier and his solo show, which has been tumbling in the ratings. It is at once bitter and lyrical, a love letter in the "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" vein. And it is to Dahl's credit that he both recognizes that it might harm his ongoing contract negotiations and replays it to start his show the next day. "That was beautiful," Dahl says off the air of the tirade against Meier, estranged godfather to their oldest son. "People always make jokes about getting married. Since (the breakup), I really understand why it's the nature of things. I couldn't have made it through any of this without her." Back behind the mike, he tells the heartwarming tale of how losing a wallet leads to Janet's discovering that he snuck out on the family vacation to visit a strip club. And he frets aloud that he doesn't want his wife to make good on her frequent threats to go back to work-she's pondering doing volunteer legal work-because meeting other people will make clear what a "heinous bastard" he really is. "It all does bleed together," says Janet, 44. "I don't even feel exposed, and I probably should feel exposed." She worries mostly about the show's effects on the children as they get older: "They know they might be able to go to a Bulls game and have a cool seat because their dad's working for this radio station, but there's gonna be someone who comes up and says, 'Your dad is a jerk,' or, 'My parents say that your dad is vile.' And it's probably going to get worse as they move into high school and the kids are more into rebellion, cliquing." Now, however, it doesn't really come into play. Janet tries to listen to the show closely, calling with critiques, some on air, some off; Dahl sometimes phones her during commercials to ask, "Was that OK?" When things were going badly last winter, Pat was setting the alarm for 5:30 so he could struggle along with his father. Later, he would always try to make a positive comment about that day's show. But now, to the boys, Dad is back to being aural wallpaper in the morning. "Kids don't really listen to that kind of radio," Janet says. "If he were on WBBM-FM, that kind of thing, he'd be a big hero. But they're sort of out of the loop. In fact, one little girl brought my son a picture of Roger Ebert and said, 'Here, I brought you this because your dad was in the paper.' " Dahl says he thinks he looks more like WXRT-FM disc jockey Terri Hemmert. `Steve and Garry' show," Downers Grove-reared comedian Emo Phillips said during a roast of Dahl a few years back, "is like trying to get free cocaine at a party. You wait around for 41Z2 hours, and you're lucky to get a few good lines." But listening is also like venturing out to see improvisational comedy, a Chicago tradition into which Dahl fits as easily as he does into its heritage of radio pioneering. Because it is all happening on the spot, when something clicks, the magic is magnified. And the fact that it is personal only increases the listener's stake in the show. Talking about what he does, Dahl harkens back to the Los Angeles disc jockeys he would listen to growing up. "Their opinion mattered to me and helped shape my opinions," he says. "For a long time when I started in radio, I never got the sense that I was accomplishing anything other than playing a bunch of records and giving the time and making a couple of wise-ass comments. In Detroit, that's when I thought that I had accomplished something, when people come up to you and say stuff-I sound like (former Chicago sports-radio blusterer) Chet Coppock here: 'I tell you, when they come up to me and say . . .'-but they really do do this, and it amazes me and it humbles me and reinforces the respect I have for radio. "They come up to me and say stuff like really bad things have happened to them, and they couldn't have gotten through it without me. And I have always felt that part of the reason that I always have been successful is that I really do care about getting on and talking about things. To try to be funny and entertain people. To try and communicate and to be honest with people, just to get some sort of dialogue going, and to actually communicate with them." Many radio hosts now talk about themselves, of course, but the medium's intimacy makes it easy to ferret out where the person stops and the fa ade starts. With Dahl, old and new friends say, there is little difference between the public and the private self. "Steve is a classic radio guy," his wife says. "Really insecure and hiding behind a microphone and overcoming." He is a stew of sexism and hypersensitivity, of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. In late August, news anchor Laura Witek reads a report about how well things are going for David Letterman as he reaches his one-year anniversary with CBS. "Kill yourself now," Dahl interjects. "Go out on top. Look at me. I'm going to go out on the bottom." He says he values loyalty almost higher than anything, yet he seems to have few longstanding friends. Those who try to leave his orbit are almost inevitably excoriated. Even Wolf, when he left the notoriously unstructured Steve and Garry show in early 1993 because he got tired of waiting around for 30 minutes to do a brief sports report, got the cold shoulder. He tried to call Dahl to smooth things over, but, says Wolf, "he never called me back." Through the years, Dahl has offended most every interest group, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Catholic Church to, famously, White Sox fans. He can be, at his worst, a boor, a bigot, a bastard to those whose celebrity doesn't equal his. But he seems constitutionally incapable of being fake. "I always used to get ticked off when I would get lumped in with Howard Stern as being a shock jock," Dahl says. "I guess I did shock people, but I did it unintentionally. It comes out of who I am." And whether out of fear of his power or fondness for his lack of artifice, people seem willing to forgive. John Gehron became famous, for a time, as the devil in Dahl's world. Operations manager at WLS during Steve and Garry's tumultuous five-year run on AM and FM there, Gehron was the heavy, the guy who had to enforce the station's corporate rules about what you couldn't say on the air, how many commercials and songs you had to play per hour. Gehron doled out suspensions; Dahl and Meier conducted walkouts; Dahl and Meier feuded bitterly with the station's top jock, Larry Lujack. When the duo left for WLUP in 1986 and Lujack retired a year later, the station went into a tailspin. Yet Gehron, now a top executive at American Radio Systems in Boston, speaks of Dahl with something resembling affection. "Part of it is indescribable," Gehron says. "He has the ability to make people feel very comfortable when they listen to him. People can identify with him. It's a form of charisma. They either have it, or they don't. And the other thing is he has a terrific ability to tell stories and describe things very visually on the air." Dahl has moved leagues beyond shock, Gehron says. "That was certainly what got him noticed, but he's been able to sustain and last because there's a lot more to his act than that. . . . His whole soul is spread out before his audience." Indeed, once you become willing to share with 500,000 people the fact that you couldn't talk your wife into carnal relations the night before-and are able to convince them that this is not only true but something they should be interested in-worlds open up. "People really forget one thing about Steve Dahl," Brandmeier says. "He opened up the door for the freedom to create." Approaching that open door, Brandmeier says, "the dumb guys said, 'We'll blow up disco.' The smart ones said, 'I'll just be myself.' " The son of an electronics parts manufacturer's representative and a homemaker, Dahl grew up in an unstructured home in La CaNada, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb northwest of Pasadena. By 9th grade, he had begun hanging out at an underground radio station. When he got a full-time job there at age 16, he didn't officially drop out of high school. "I convinced my parents and the school that I would do an independent work-study thing," he says. "I never got around to it." A succession of California disc-jockey jobs followed, all before age 21. Along the way, he got his GED and, at 18, married a woman he met after she called him to request "Suzanne," Leonard Cohen's tale of a troubled relationship. ("I should have paid more attention to that song," he says, in explaining the short-lived marriage.) Executives were telling him all along he'd never make it: His voice was too high. Discouraged, Dahl quit radio for about six months, hoping to become a recording engineer. He never got much beyond making tapes of popular songs for play on airplanes. In the meantime, he was trying in the worst way to get back with his ex-wife, who by then was dating the program director at an L.A. station where she worked. "I was, like, stalking her," he says. "I was 19. I had moved back in with my parents. I had a Subaru, a bad attitude. I would, like, park in front of her house and wait all night. Crazy. Very bad. About as low as you can get." She told him about a morning radio gig in Detroit. Dahl never figured it out till later, he says, but the job was with a station owned by the same company that she worked for. "I don't even think I was good enough to get the job, but I got the job," he says. "It was like, send me to Detroit." The station was in turmoil, and "I was given the opportunity to start experimenting again. I started to catch on." Suddenly, he began to feel like he was figuring out how to do good radio, funny and real and relevant, like the disc jockeys he'd admired but with a modern, anarchistic sensibility like that of "Saturday Night Live." One of his listeners was Janet. She was a junior-high-school English and drama teacher in a Detroit suburb, and she also happened to be dating-casually, she says-a friend of Dahl's, an advertiser on his show. "From the very first time I saw her, I was gonna figure out a way," he says. The way came when Dahl's friend asked him to keep an eye on her when he went out of town. Dahl invited her to a broadcast he was doing from the camel area of the zoo on a Wednesday-hump day. It seemed to go well, but he wasn't sure how well. He was elated when she called him that night. "I took that as a good sign," he says. "I went over, and basically I never left." "I thought he was kind of pathetic and needed mothering," she says. "He was just alone in Detroit, and he'd had a very short marriage that blew up. He seemed needy, and I'm a nurturer, so I guess I kind of adopted him. "The major effect of 1/8the first marriage 3/8 was he was looking for a wife that he would know would never leave him, would never cheat on him, would never lie to him. He was looking for a hard-rock Midwest family, and he found one. He knows that I will always be there. Not that he doesn't take hideous advantage of it and all-but he knows." Dahl almost never came to Chicago. Tantalized by his 7.2 audience share, WDAI-FM here had offered to double his salary to $50,000. But Janet didn't want to leave her family, and Steve didn't want to leave Janet. So he went back to his Detroit station manager. "I said, 'Look, just give me $35,000 and I'll stay. A 7.2. Millions of dollars,' " Dahl says. "He said, '- - - - you. Go to Chicago. Fall on your fat face.' " Dahl did three live farewell appearances and bought Janet an engagement ring. "That was how I used to do it," he says. "We needed a vacuum cleaner? I would do a wet T-shirt contest, get $350. It was very simple." In Chicago, things began to get more complicated. His "Rude Awakening" solo show that began on 'DAI in 1978 earned him media attention but never hit big in the ratings. By Christmas, the rock station had announced plans to go disco, and Dahl was gone. He spent a few months in limbo, until a consultant convinced WLUP-FM to take a chance on this attention-getter in the morning. Garry Meier, then going by the radio name "Matthew Meier," was the 'LUP overnight jock and one of the few people at the station-where the culture was rock music, not talk-who was nice to Dahl. He also happened to be funny, Dahl noticed, as they chatted during their shift changes. Meier soon became the morning newsman. Dahl, meanwhile, had built up a mighty resentment of disco records, the seeds of the only social-protest movement to ever cost the White Sox a ballgame. Talking about the July 12, 1979 "Disco Demolition" now, Dahl seems surprised by it still, this radio stunt between games of a White Sox doubleheader at the old Comiskey Park that turned into a near-riot. After Dahl had finished blasting a pile of disco records in center field and left the playing surface, young fans stormed onto it, wreaking havoc with the field and causing the never-played second game to be awarded to the Detroit Tigers. "I had no clue that it was going to be anything other than a mild embarrassment," he says. "It's a blessing and a curse. I do think there are people out there that might like listening to me that probably have never ever bothered or can't get the right attitude together because of that. But better that it happened than not." His ratings at WLUP were strong almost from the start and shot up after the Comiskey event. Dahl became a borderline national celebrity and seemed on his way to becoming bigger. A parody single he recorded, "Do Ya Think I'm Disco?" cracked Billboard's top 65. Dahl put a syndicate together and got the show running in Detroit and Milwaukee, where it did well. "It was going on in El Paso and Los Angeles, like, on Monday, and on Friday they fired me," he says. The 1981 sacking remains mysterious. Management said something vague about violating community standards. Even when he returned to WLUP in 1986, after the tenure at WLS, he tried to get a straight answer about the firing and couldn't. It's clear Dahl considers WLUP his radio home. Until last year, he was sort of happy there. "Now," he says, "I have to have a psychiatrist come with me when I go pee because I pass so many people who hate me for so many different things.

[edit] Returning to his routes - Steve Dahl hopes Route 66 magic rubs off on sons

Chicago Sun-Times - June 19, 1997 Author: DAVE HOEKSTRA

A journey down Route 66 is a road to self-discovery.

Almost 80 percent of the 2,448 miles of pavement, strung together as a Chicago-to-Los-Angeles roadway in 1926, remains. Driving across the Mother Road, as John Steinbeck labeled it in The Grapes of Wrath, is a spiritual experience. Man is rapidly humbled by the elements, nature and the rich history of Route 66.

Radio personality Steve Dahl and his three sons will tackle Route 66 in an 11-day journey that begins Sunday, just off the original road at Rick's Burritos, one of Dahl's boyhood haunts in Pasadena, Calif. The odyssey concludes with a live broadcast July 3 at Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket, 645 Joliet Rd. (630-325-0780) on old Route 66 in Willowbrook.

Dahl will drive a 30-foot Itasca Sunrise motorhome, made by Winnebago. It is equipped with a kitchen and cable TV. The Dahl family clearly is not out to replicate the experience of the Joad family of Steinbeck's novel, set during the rugged Dust Bowl migration along the two-laner.

Dahl will do his afternoon radio show on WCKG-FM (105.9) from assorted outposts along the road. He'll file daily reports for the Chicago Sun-Times. He'll call in daily to the WBBM-Channel 2 morning news. And the kids, Dahl hopes, will behave. Up until now, their longest road trip has been between Chicago and Detroit.

"I've been wanting to do this for about 10 years," Dahl said at his suburban home. "But I wanted to hold off until the boys were old enough to be helpful and self-sufficient." Dahl's oldest son, Pat, is 16, followed by Mike, 14, and Matt, 12.eep this as spontaneous as I could," he said.

Dahl, 42, is a child of the Mother Road. His mother's parents migrated from New York to California down Route 66 with daughter Carol. Dahl's father, Roger, came from Minnesota down the old road to Southern California, where he found work selling electronic components.

"We used to take a lot of car trips," Dahl said. "I remember going through the desert with the Jackson Browne `Saturate Before Using' bags (evaporative water bags seen on Browne's 1972 album) on the radiator. We'd have to travel at night, all that stuff. Our family explored the western end of Route 66. But I really got more into it when I settled here (in 1978) and started understanding what Chicago meant to the expansion westward."

Chicago has been the great American transportation center of the 20th Century. It was a natural idea, then, to connect the working-class migratory road to the rainbow dreams of Los Angeles.

The road is sprinkled with native Illinois characters that Dahl is sure to encounter: the tender but tough Lucille Hammons who has run a gas station; general store; sandwich shop for 55 years in Hydro, Okla., just west of Oklahoma City, or eclectic painter Bob Waldmire, who operates the ramshackle Old Route 66 Preservation Foundation in Hackberry, Ariz. Dahl's sons need to keep their ears open and listen for the heartbeat. The road is full of precious stories.

"I regret it took me so long to appreciate older people," Dahl said. "Just (like) my father-in-law, who flew B-17s over Germany in World War II. No one in his family really talked to him about that. I'd like this trip to open a few doors that way for my boys, in understanding they can learn from people who have already been there.

"I also want them to see some of the country the way it was when I was a kid. Their idea of fun is going into a fast-food restaurant and sitting down and eating. I think they'll like the diners, the old stuff."

Dahl will hit such Route 66 landmarks as the

movie-star-influenced El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, N.M., and the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. Everything is big at the 38-year-old restaurant and dance hall. In outrageous roadside tradition, it advertises BIG Free Continental Breakfast, BIG Brass Beds, etc. But the most famous hook is that anyone who downs a BIG 72-ounce steak in one hour gets the meal for free.

Dahl will have occasional guests, including singer-songwriter John Stewart. He's a longtime fan of the former Kingston Trio member, who wrote the Monkees hit "Daydream Believer." Stewart discovered Route 66 a few years ago and recently released "Rough Sketches (from Route 66)" on Naperville's Folk Era label. By coincidence, he'll be signing the CD in Flagstaff, Ariz., while Dahl is in town.

Dahl will be a happy camper if he hits all the cities in Bobby Troup's 1946 classic song "Route 66," made famous by Nat King Cole:

It goes through St. Louie, Joplin, Missouri

Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, N.M., Flagstaff, Ariz., don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino!

"We will forget Winona, of course," Dahl said. "Mike and Matt performed the song for their show choir in junior high. I thought it was `Go to St. Louie, go through Missouri,' so we're skipping Joplin, too." And Dahl gave off a high-beam smile, the kind when something sweet is down the road.

Dave Hoekstra traveled Route 66 in 1992 and 1996. Caption: Radio host Steve Dahl hits the road Sunday to explore Route 66 with his sons, Pat, 16 (from left), Matt, 12, and Mike, 14.; MAP; SEE Roll Microfilm; Credit: RICH HEIN

Edition: LATE SPORTS FINAL Section: SECTION 2 FEATURES Page: 41 Index Terms: route 66; LIFESTYLES ; RADIO Record Number: CHI1096870 Copyright 1997 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc