Judy Markey, whose vivacious chemistry with Kathy O’Malley on their groundbreaking radio talk show on WGN in Chicago carried them through 20 years of giggly and serious conversations about daily life, sex and families, died on Sept. 11 in Roderis, Switzerland, near Basel. She was 82.
Her husband, Tom Collinger, said she was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease two years ago and chose a voluntary assisted death at a Pegasos Swiss Association facility.
Ms. Markey first became known in Chicago in the early 1980s as a nationally syndicated columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times. She was likened to Erma Bombeck, the newspaper columnist and author, for her similarly droll focus on mundane subjects like money, parenthood, sharing toothbrushes and shaving one’s legs.
Ms. Markey and Ms. O’Malley, who had been an entertainment columnist for The Chicago Tribune, met in the 1980s when they appeared as celebrity stepmothers in annual Chicago City Ballet productions of “Cinderella.” Soon after WGN paired them on “The Kathy and Judy Show” in 1989, they found a niche among female listeners and became known as “the Girlfriends.”
“Judy Markey was an extremely talented broadcaster, who, along with her on-air partner, proved that women can be extremely successful major market talk radio personalities at a time when the field was dominated by male performers,” Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, wrote in an email.
At first, they tried to plan what they would say on the air, but Ms. O’Malley said the approach fell flat because it didn’t feel casual enough for radio. They quickly changed to something closer to improvisation.
“She has a list of topics, I have a list of topics,” Ms. Markey said during an interview at the Chicago Live! arts and culture festival in 2014. “Your turn, my turn. She has no clue, I have no clue.”
They developed close ties with their audience — some of whom were men — with their freewheeling conversations. They had regular segments like “Sex Thursday,” where listeners discussed their intimate experiences; “Speak Your Piece,” a soapbox for listeners to vent for 15 to 20 seconds about minor annoyances, like people who peel back corn husks in supermarkets; and “Letting Go,” an annual feature in which parents talked about dropping off their children at college for the first time.
“Parents would call in bawling,” said Steve Bertrand, a news anchor at WGN who worked with Ms. Markey and Ms. O’Malley as what he called the show’s “gender defender.” In a phone interview, he added, “They talked about how their audience lived — and how they lived — and spoke to an audience that wasn’t being spoken to.”
For a segment called “Merry Medical Christmas Letters,” Ms. Markey and Ms. O’Malley invited listeners to send in their holiday newsletters, which produced humor in the juxtaposition between Yuletide greetings and details of their fans’ medical updates and surgeries.
Ms. Markey could poke fun at herself, as when she complained that her new white dishwasher had a “butt ugly” turquoise-colored control panel — only to learn from callers that she was seeing a protective plastic coating that she could peel off.
Unbelieving, she told Ms. O’Malley, “It has writing on it.”
“No,” Ms. O’Malley said, “it has writing under it.”
“No,” Ms. Markey insisted, “it has white writing on it. I’m gonna cry.”
In a more serious vein, the duo once reacted to a conservative group’s claim that women who had abortions subsequently had mental health issues.
Ms. Markey responded by saying that she had had an abortion and hadn’t fallen into a depression, Ms. O’Malley recalled on WGN after her partner’s death. Calls poured in from women who said, “I have had an abortion, and I’m OK.” Ms. O’Malley added, “We couldn’t take all the calls. It was really remarkable.”
In 2006 and 2008, the duo earned Gracie Awards for outstanding radio talk show from American Women in Radio & Television (now the Alliance for Women in Media).
Judy Kay Lindheim was born in Cleveland on Feb. 18, 1944, and she moved to Beverly Hills with her parents and a brother, Jim, when she was 13. Her father, Johnny, owned a record shop in Cleveland and a carwash in Los Angeles, and sold clothing in New York. Her mother was Lois (Reinitz) Lindheim.
Judy graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1965. Jobs followed in the advertising department of The Washington Post and in book publishing, before she spent seven years in Europe with her first husband, Tom Markey, whom she married in 1967; he worked for Abbott Laboratories. They divorced in 1989.
After returning to the United States, Ms. Markey began to write for women’s magazines like McCall’s and Cosmopolitan, and also for The Tribune and The Sun-Times.
One of her columns for The Sun-Times — tips on how to behave at one’s high school reunion — offered lessons for Mr. Collingerwhen he was planning to go to St. Louis for his 30th reunion. She refused to accompany him.
She handed him a copy of “How to Survive Your High School Reunion … and Other Mid-Life Crises” (1984), a collection of her columns, and told him to read aloud Rules No. 2 and No. 10.
“Number two, don’t bring your spouse,” he recalled during her memorial service on Sept. 17, “and number 10, no sex.”
In a second collection of columns, “You Only Get Married for the First Time Once” (1988), Ms. Markey opened with something of a mission statement.
“I’m just like you — slogging through the nutsiness out there and trying to stay afloat. Trying to pretend it’s perfectly OK to live in a world where folks think a really swell gift idea is a bar of soap in the shape of a bagel.”
She also wrote two novels, “The Daddy Clock” (1998) and “Just Trust Me” (2004).
Ms. Markey eventually ended her column to focus on “The Kathy and Judy Show.” Their first show, which aired against the Super Bowl in 1989, was a low-risk debut; they were part-timers for about a year but eventually broke out into two of the station’s stars.
In 2009, WGN canceled the show — Ms. Markey always insisted they were fired — in search of younger audiences. Dozens of fans stood outside the street-level studio on Michigan Avenue during the final show.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. They are my saviors. When I heard, I started crying,” Jan Karwoski, a listener, told The Sun-Times.
When Ms. O’Malley began to weep, Ms. Markey consoled her. “The Way Old Friends Do,” a song by Abba, began to play.
“We love you guys, thanks for 20 years,” Ms. O’Malley said.
Four years later, under different station management, Ms. Markey and Ms. O’Malley returned to WGN to host a Saturday-morning version of their show, where they remained until 2017.
In addition to Mr. Collinger, whom she married in 2002, she is survived by two children, Erin and Adam Markey; two stepchildren, Kate Collinger Buxton and Zach Collinger; two granddaughters; and her brother.
At the memorial service, Mr. Collinger described his wife as “one part Annie Oakley, another part Gracie Allen, a dash of Erma Bombeck, a little bit of Betty Boop and maybe a little Lesley Stahl.”
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