ONE OF SOUTHLAND’S OWN RETURNS HOME
Ray Cortopassi, a native of Dolton, fills WGN anchor role
When Ray Cortopassi went on the air Monday as co-anchor of WGN’s Evening News, for many of those watching he may simply be a new face alongside co-anchor Micah Materre.
But for Cortopassi, who grew up in Dolton and spent more than decades trying to work his way back to Chicago, it’s the culmination of a lifelong ambition.
“It is a thrill beyond measure, honestly,” Cortopassi said. “It’s been my dream for half of my lifetime.”
Cortopassi, the son of a sheet metal worker and piano teacher, grew up watching WGN’s Ray Rayner and Bozo’s Circus.
“It’s the station I grew up watching,” Cortopassi said. “It’s the station my parents watched.
“I love their sensibility at WGN and always have. … There’s something that makes them likable and relatable.”
Now, at 53, he is hoping the team saw something similar in him when he was chosen to join the network’s 5, 6, 9 and 10 p.m. programs Monday-Friday. His only disappointment: that his parents are not still around to see him on WGN.
“They would have been so beyond themselves with joy,” he said.
The road back to Chicago, a major market in the world of broadcasting, was a long and winding one for Cortopassi.
Cortopassi attended Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights, where he said there was a strong emphasis on writing — every class, all the time, writing. Thatwas just fine by him.
“I always was interested in writing,” he said. “I enjoyed the craft of sorting through ideas on paper.”
He went on to study at what was then Thornton Community College, now South Suburban College in South Holland, which reinforced his interests in writing and the humanities. A subsequent visit to WBBM-TV in the mid‘80s sealed the deal on broadcast.
“I actually got to sit behind the producer and director,” Cortopassi said. “I was floored by the magic, the dynamic energy of whatwas happening. … I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do this.’”
He said what sold him on broadcast was the idea that news could be presented in a thoughtful, engaging and meaningful way to a large audience. He made production his focus at Columbia College Chicago and worked as a stringer for the Daily Southtown, then known as the Southtown Economist.
“It was an amazing experience for me,” he said. “They gave me a key to the office.”
He covered everything from government boards to features, making $25 a story in the early ’90s.
“I really learned the ropes of writing under a deadline,” he said. “You had to be a quick study.”
But like many broadcast hopefuls, he ran into a wall trying to find work in the major market he called home.
After six months, he was coming up dry. He found printwork in the City News Bureau of Chicago, working overnights, hanging out near police stations and getting sent to story locations by way of a beeper.
But broadcasting was his goal, so he moved to Traverse City and worked at a TV station there for a year and a half, then jumped to an ABC station in Las Vegas.
In 1999, he moved to Indianapolis, where he and his wife, Leslie, raised their four children and he worked in broadcasting as well as for a local chamber of commerce.
“We made a great life here in Indiana,” Cortopassi said. “Indianapolis was a really wonderful, supportive community.”
But he kept his ear to the ground, maintaining connections in Chicago in hopes of one day coming home. Eventually, that opportunity presented itself in WGN and Cortopassi did not hesitate. He said he could not allow himself the “safety net” Indianapolis provided, and his family supported him in pursuing the opportunity.
“Getting to work in my hometown is something I worked really hard for,” he said. “When this opportunity came up at WGN, it gave my whole outlook new life and new love. It’s not often an opportunity like this comes about.”
Southland represents
Cortopassi is far from the only Southlander working for WGN.
Entertainment reporter and critic Dean Richards is a native of the South Side. Reporter Patrick Elwood was just inducted into Brother Rice High School’s Hall of Fame. Afternoon anchor and WGN Investigates reporter Ben Bradley grew up in Olympia Fields. And morning anchor Robin Baumgarten was raised in Burbank and still calls the south suburbs home.
Baumgarten said her interest in the business was sparked at Queen of Peace High School, when she realized she enjoyed writing and did the announcements at school.
“I liked doing that kind of thing,” Baumgarten said, noting a tour of NBC really planted the seed. “It was always in the back of my mind, but you never think it’s something you could do.”
She got jobs reporting on traffic for both CLTV News and Shadow Broadcast Services. She also did news and sports for WLUP Radio’s Jonathan Brandmeier Show and a year of freelance work for ABC Sports before WGN hired her in 1996 as an airborne traffic and transportation reporter.
“It was the opportunity that presented itself,” she said. “I got
real lucky.”
In 2004, she became morning news anchor morning news at WGN, where the personalities are authentic and reporters mispronounce the same words as everyone else in the city, Baumgarten joked.
“Everyone embraces their own,” she said. “People from Chicago know a Chicagoan.”
People also inherently bond over their upbringing. She and Bradley both recalled a story about a retirement party. The bar was crowded and Bradley went to grab Baumgarten a glass of wine.
“She says, ‘Red, you know how I like it,’” Bradley recalled.
Baumgarten was surprised that he assumed, correctly, that meant she wanted ice in it.
“We tend to bond over little things like that,” Baumgarten said. “At heart, I’m a girl from the South Side that likes to drinkwine with some ice and eat pizza.”
Bradley said while Chicagoans love to debate their favorite pizza parlors, they also bond over their education, their diversity of experiences on the South Side and their goals in doing the news.
“I think there is an authenticity that comes with being from the South Side,” Bradley said. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but you better not mess with our city. I think that is an attitude.”
The South Side also enabled Bradley to pursue a profession about which he has been passionate as long as he can remember. He said he recalls reading the newspaper with his Fruity Pebbles.
“I was a news nerd,” he said. “I was a little kid who wanted tobe a news reporter.”
Homewood-Flossmoor High School had “the most incredible broadcasting system I’d ever seen,” Bradley said. He never looked back after that.
“Long story short: it was H-F that gave me not only my first real taste of journalism and broadcasting but also propelled my career,” he said.
After TV news stints in Columbia, Missouri, and Charleston, South Carolina, Bradley returned to Chicago to work for CLTV and then with ABC7 as a reporter and weekend morning anchor before seizing the opportunity to “be myself and do investigative reporting” with WGN in 2017.
So Bradley knows what it feels like to be away and make that trip back to Chicago to do the job. He said many people in smaller towns have a goal of moving on to the biggest markets, but his aim was always more specific.
“My goal was always to come back to Chicago,” Bradley said. “There is something special about being from the South Side, saying I get to do the job I love in the city I grewup in.
“I think it’s great that they hired Ray. He had the same dream that the rest of us did: to report on his hometown. I don’t think there’s one of us who walks into that building every day who doesn’t know how lucky they are.”
Feels like home
“There must be something in the water that leads to good journalists,” Cortopassi joked of the Southland. “I hope I’m drinking from the same water source.”
A winner of multiple Emmy and Associated Press awards for his time in Indianapolis, Cortopassi started behind the scenes with WGN on Sept. 28. And he has already been back in the Southland on assignments that have him rekindling connections from his childhood.
Before that, though, he had to visit the studio to shoot some promotional materials for WGN to air, heralding his return as one of “Chicago’s Very Own.” The situation was unique, he said, because many of the network’s reporters had “been sort of fractured over the past few months,” with some working from home during the pandemic.
It was like he had wandered into a WGN family reunion, he said, as everyone reconnected in person for the first time in a while. And even though he might be that family’s newest member, something clicked for him in the studio.
“I felt a comfort there, stepping into that newsroom,” he said.
It was like he was home again.