Long-time WLS engineer Ed Glab (right) works at a station remote.
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Ed Glab has had a remarkably consistent broadcast engineering career. For more than 40 consecutive years he has reported to work at WLS(AM/FM) in Chicago handling critical engineering duties. The 65-year-old is preparing for his final day on the job Friday, June 28, at the Cumulus-owned radio stations.
Glab holds an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. He turned summer relief work for the legendary Windy City stations into a full-time position in June of 1973. Glab went from fixing cart machines and tape decks to writing computer code during that span of 40 years.
“I have been truly blessed to have called these stations home for so long. I got to work through what I consider the second Golden Age of radio from the 1970s into the 1980s. We had a lot of fun back then,” said Glab, who worked alongside on-air Chicago legends like Steve Dahl, Larry Lujack and John Landecker.
“The remotes with those guys were legendary,” Glab recalled.
Glab was an aspiring on-air talent before deciding he liked the stability of a broadcast engineering career better. He’s spent most of his last week at work preparing others on how to do his job beginning next Monday, according to Scott Clifton, chief engineer at the stations.
“[Glab] has created a binder of how-to-type manuals on many software programs he has written for our operations,” Clifton told Radio World.
Read more about Glab’s lengthy broadcast engineering career, including his experiences in building the WLS(AM) studios 23 years ago at 190 State Street and what he would do differently today, in an upcoming issue of Radio World.
