A Cordial Good Night

Dilettante need not be a pejorative word. In its archaic sense, it meant someone with an amateur interest in many things, and amateur, in its root sense, means a lover. Milt Rosenberg qualified on both grounds. As Terence said “Nothing human is alien to me,” Milt might have said that nothing intellectual was without interest to him. He seemed to know a fair amount about everything. During any given week he might have on his show Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Milton Friedman, a film actor, an astrophysicist, and a Chicago machine politician—and he would keep the conversation humming along nicely with all of them.

The name of the show was Extension 720, and it ran on the Chicago Tribune’s radio station, WGN. (The call letters WGN stand for World’s Greatest Newspaper, the Trib’s description of itself, which needs to be taken with a stalactite of salt.) I don’t know how commercially successful Extension 720 was, but it must at least have made its nut to remain on the air all those years. The first hour of the show was given over to interviewing the guest, the second to taking calls from the audience. Each evening it ended with Milt wishing his audience “a cordial good night.”

Milt could seem an odd presence on AM radio. He had a cultivated FM classical music station voice and accent. He used academic locutions—“as it weres” and “if you wills”—liberally. He hadn’t any hesitation in dropping in a quotation in French (“Wasn’t it Baudelaire who said, ‘Plus l’homme cultive les arts, moins il bande’?”) or popping a Latin tag (Bene caca et declina medicos). Mass audience though his show was, Milt never made the least attempt to dumb things down to set that audience at ease.

A list of Milt’s guests over the years would doubtless be the size of a substantial suburban telephone directory. The Tribune obituary mentions Henry Kissinger, Carl Sagan, Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer, Bob Feller, Jane Byrne, and Barack Obama. Julia Child and Charlton Heston, Gloria Steinem and Friedrich Hayek were also on the roster. Authors passing through the Midwest on tour flogging their new books were, as they say in the business, easy “gets.” More likely Milt was the “get” for them. I was on his show five times, three times flogging books of my own. Whether being on the show greatly stimulated sales, I have no notion. I never checked my royalties—or peasantries, as I tend to think them—after my appearance on it to find out.

Being on Milt’s show was rather like meeting an old friend for coffee. The interviews were like conversations. Being on Extension 720 was as far as possible from my appearance at 6 a.m. one rainy Cleveland morning flogging a book I had written called Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility. The host of the show was a man in flowered pants who announced, “We got Joe Epstein here to answer all your questions on divorce,” put a recording of “Two Against the World” on the turnable, and off-mike moaned, “Shit, am I hung over.” Milt did his homework. He knew his guest’s books, his predilections political and personal, and the right questions to ask. He gave you the feeling that your subject was interesting, serious, of significance and, by extension, so were you.

During the three-minute commercial breaks when I was on the show, Milt and I gossiped about people we both knew and exchanged jokes. After the second time I appeared on his show he invited my wife and me to join him and his wife for dinner at a restaurant called Les Nomades, notable for its good food and ban on table-hopping. Milt’s wife, Marjorie, a psychotherapist who later developed an idée fixe about homosexuality being purely a matter of personal choice, was attractive and lively. Milt had only one voice, his radio voice, and early in the dinner he turned to my wife and that voice said, “Barbara, tell us, what do you do with your days?” Unable to hold back, I said, “Milt, let’s take a commercial break here and get back to Barbara afterwards.” He took it well.

The second half of Extension 720, the audience-participation part, was never awkward or difficult. Milt’s audience was respectful. They tended to address him as “Dr. Rosenberg.” They listened to the show in the hope of widening, possibly deepening, their knowledge and culture. Something of the earnestness of adult education lay behind most of the questions. Toward the end of Milt’s run, when WGN moved his show, which had always been at 9 o’clock, to 10 p.m., they were still up listening to him at midnight.

Here I have to confess that I did not myself often listen to Milt’s show, or at least not to all of it. But then I would only stay up till midnight to listen to Aristotle or Spinoza. Sometimes, getting into what the English call my “sleep costume,” I would turn on Extension 720 to see whom Milt was interviewing. If it were someone I knew, or had a previous interest in, I would stay with it for 15 or 20 minutes.

We went to dinner a second time, and I would occasionally see him at some intellectual function—a lecture, a dinner party—around town. We were never in regular touch, and I wasn’t aware that in 2012 WGN retired—for which read unceremoniously bounced—him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives. He was wrong, of course, not least about his own second (if posthumous) act in which he went from a man whose books were all out of print to a place as one of the great American writers. But the toughest act, in America and everywhere else, is always the last act. This turned out to be the case with Milt Rosenberg. Without his show on WGN, he seemed lost.

One day in April 2015, I had a call from one of Milt’s endless string of bright young producers asking me to appear on a new afternoon show he was doing out of a modest station called WCGO-AM in Evanston, the suburb just outside Chicago where I live. I had sworn off doing interview shows, but for Milt Rosenberg I made an exception. Unlike the capacious WGN studio out of which he broadcast in the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue, the Evanston station was housed in a single-story building, and the interview itself took place in a modest-sized office. Milt, whom I remember previously always dressed in blazer and necktie, was in a baggy sweater. Time, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote, is a mighty sculptor, and it had done its work on Milt, who seemed thinner, gaunter, his nose and teeth more prominent. Before our interview began he told me that Marjorie had fallen ill and was living in a nursing home in Seattle near their only son and his family.

The interview itself was a typical Milt performance. He began by asking me how many essays I had written over my career, from which he descanted on what mathematics and astronomy had to say on the subjects of finity and infinity, and we were off. During the show he may have spoken more than in the past, but I didn’t mind, for much of what he said was of interest to me and I hoped to his listeners, though the number of those listeners, now that his show was broadcast in the late afternoons over a much less powerful station, figured to be many fewer than in his WGN days.

Along with liking Milt, I found myself admiring him. Conversation was what he did; it gave him joy. Along with his WCGO-AM show in Evanston, he was making and marketing podcasts. Clearly, he planned, even in these diminished circumstances, to go down talking. Milt Rosenberg died, in the University of Chicago hospital, owing to complications from pneumonia. None of the obituaries mentioned his last words. I like to think they were, “We’ll break briefly here for a commercial and be right back.”

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Wind Sprints: Essays.