They were star columnists for rival Chicago papers — stylish writers who were both independent, divorced and laugh-out-loud funny, with a fizzy chemistry that only seemed to benefit from their differences in upbringing.
Judy Markey was Jewish and from Beverly Hills.
Kathy O’Malley was Catholic and raised on a farm.
And on Super Bowl Sunday in 1989, when their bosses at WGN Radio decided that no one would be listening anyway, they got a shot at hosting their own daytime talk show. It was the beginning of a 20-year run that upended Chicago radio, showing that women, not just men, could succeed in a format best known for macho arguments about politics and sports.
“They were lightning in a bottle,” said Robert Feder, a former Sun-Times columnist known as the dean of Chicago media writers. “It’s a cliché, but in their case it’s true.”
Airing five days a week on WGN, the “Kathy and Judy Show” was a coffee klatch of the AM airwaves, a freewheeling forum for conversations about feuds, friendship, parenting, home appliances and anything else on the minds of “the Girlfriends,” as the hosts were known.
“We aimed to connect with people,” O’Malley recalled, “and to talk about real life.”
One of the program’s most sidesplitting segments began when Ms. Markey announced that she had bought a new dishwasher, only to discover it was “butt ugly,” with an inexplicable strip of turquoise on the top. After perplexed listeners started to call in, she realized her mistake: She had forgotten to peel off the protective covering, a turquoise film that sat atop the buttons.
“You don’t think I picked the one dishwasher in America that’s turquoise?” Ms. Markey asked, still a little uncertain.
It was classic Judy, O’Malley said: unfiltered and unafraid, with a willingness to make herself the butt of the joke even if she came across a little ditzy.
“Judy had no secrets,” she said. “She was just right out there.”
Ms. Markey, who was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disorder in 2024, died Sept. 11 in Switzerland, where she elected to go “out on her terms with a voluntary assisted death,” her family said in an obituary. She was 82.
By coincidence, Ms. Markey died the day before a new Illinois law went into effect authorizing medically assisted dying in the state. The option, which has sparked objections from religious leaders and others, is now available in 13 states and D.C., and was championed by Ms. Markey long before her diagnosis. Her husband, Tom Collinger, said that while her condition was debilitating, she would not have been eligible for assisted dying in the United States because she did not have a terminal illness and a prognosis of less than six months to live.
“She gave us a gift while she was alive with her humor and her insight, and she gave us a gift in the way she died,” said Steve Bertrand, a former WGN news anchor who became a fixture of the show as its resident “gender defender,” arguing on behalf of men in debates over sex and dating.
“She stepped toward normalization of it,” he said of assisted dying, “and helped make it more acceptable.”
Ms. Markey and her co-host earned national recognition, winning prizes from the Alliance for Women in Media and drawing praise in Talkers magazine, which covers the talk-radio industry. In Chicago, they sold out tickets to an annual fan convention that brought more than 1,000 listeners to a downtown ballroom.
“Those were in the flashbulb days,” Bertrand said. “We would walk through the ballroom blinded by these women taking pictures of us. Security had to take us through the kitchen to get us around people. It was like the Beatles.”
Celebrities stopped by their studio, including actress Brooke Shields, singer Robert Goulet and first lady Hillary Clinton. But the show’s real celebrities were the listeners, a cohort that included women and men, who collectively called themselves the Girlfriends in honor of their favorite broadcasters.
“If it wasn’t for this show, I wouldn’t be in touch with my feminine side,” one man told the Chicago Tribune in 2009, when the show was dropped amid a shake-up at WGN. (The program returned in 2013 for a four-year encore, this time on the weekends.) “Every time these girls talk about an issue, you absorb it and take it with you. It’s like part of your family.”
Drawing on a listener suggestion, the Girlfriends launched “Take Your Parents to Work Day,” which became an annual Chicago tradition after it was backed in a proclamation by Mayor Richard M. Daley. Another recurring segment, “Merry Medical Christmas Letters,” invited fans to share what Ms. Markey described as “a horrific juxtaposition” of yuletide greetings and accounts of medical maladies, including “a pimple problem in the groin area that may have been an ingrown hair.”
Ms. Markey and O’Malley built on the success of another Chicago broadcaster, Oprah Winfrey, whose talk show demonstrated a hunger for programs that appealed directly to women, Feder said. But the hosts also anticipated programs like “The View,” which bounced between topics in a similar format and was deemed a “copycat” by the Girlfriends.
Although it was usually lighthearted, their show delved into serious issues. O’Malley recalled that after a conservative group claimed “that everyone who ever had an abortion wound up with mental health problems,” she and a frustrated Ms. Markey opened up the show to listeners, asking to hear from anyone who had terminated a pregnancy.
“Without being asked, Judy was the first person to say, ‘I had an abortion, and I’m fine,’” O’Malley said. “And that opened the way for a lot of women to call in and say the same thing.”
A ‘strange and acquired taste’
The older of two children, Judy Kay Lindheim was born in Cleveland on Feb. 18, 1944. Her parents owned a dance hall and record store and were friends of Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, who later helped them become part owners of the Chicago White Sox. (Ms. Markey’s mother was credited, or blamed, for introducing the White Sox to a designer who created a polarizing new uniform item — short pants — for the team.)
Ms. Markey went to high school in California and studied journalism at Northwestern University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1965. She worked for an ad agency and book publisher in New York before putting her career on hold to live in Europe and raise two young children with her first husband, Thomas Markey, an Abbott Laboratories employee whose job took the family to Rome, Paris and Amsterdam.
Within a few years of their return to the United States, their marriage ended in divorce. Ms. Markey worked to reinvent herself as a writer, freelancing for magazines including Cosmopolitan and McCall’s. By the early 1980s, she was working at the Sun-Times, where she published a syndicated column for 16 years that told slice-of-life stories in the mold of humorist Erma Bombeck.
At one point, she enlisted her readers’ help in coming up with a name for her generation, which she described as “post-Yuppie and pre-geriatric.” She settled on PRAGGIES, for Pretty Realistic Amused Grown-Ups, after discarding suggestions such as GUPPIES: Genuine Upfront Persons Interested in Extramarital Sex.
“Zany greeting card manufacturers will rip off the name and turn my generation into yet another thoroughly disgusting trend,” she predicted, tongue firmly in cheek.
Ms. Markey published several books, including the column collection “You Only Get Married for the First Time Once” and the 1998 novel “The Daddy Clock,” about a middle-aged sportswriter dreaming of fatherhood. She quit her newspaper job after the success of the “Kathy and Judy Show,” which came together after WGN programmer Lorna Gladstone learned the co-hosts were friends.
Gladstone “figured that we could learn radio better than two other people could learn friendship,” Ms. Markey told the Tribune.
The columnists had met by chance in 1986, when they were selected to guest star as the wicked stepmother in a Chicago City Ballet production of “Cinderella.” Both did occasional guest spots on the radio before starting their show.
Ms. Markey married Collinger, now an associate professor emeritus at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school, in 2002. In addition to her husband, survivors include two children, Erin and Adam Markey; two stepchildren, Zach Collinger and Kate Collinger Buxton; a brother; and two grandchildren.
In interviews, Ms. Markey acknowledged that her show’s distinctive tone — comic in one segment, serious in the next — was not for everyone.
“It’s like cigarettes. It’s an acquired taste and then it’s an addiction,” she told the Tribune in 2006. “That’s true of a lot of people in radio. We were a particularly strange and acquired taste. It was ‘Are those their real voices? Is this a joke?’ Then, we wind up with, blessedly, this valuable commodity because no one else provided it.”
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