Glenn Beck rides radio bus to cable-television stardom

By JOHN TIMPANE

His show can be seen at Tinseltown in Boardman on June 11.

NEW YORK — Glenn Beck is dressed to kill.

His show on Fox News hits in about an hour, and he’s ready in black suit, pink shirt, maroon tie — and black Converse Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers, no laces. The Chucks, like Beck himself, are upmarket with a dash of irreverence.

Depending on who’s talking, Beck, 45, is a hero, maniac, lightning rod. He calls himself “a guy on the radio bus.” That bumpy ride took him through Philadelphia and WPHT-AM, where he honed his skills, built a national audience, and — gasp — made the transition to cable-TV stardom.

Now he sits near the top of the cable universe. No. 3, to be exact. “The Glenn Beck Program” (“The Fusion of Entertainment and Enlightenment”) started only in January and is now the third-leading cable news show in prime time, behind Fox stablemates Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity — and third among all cable shows at 5 p.m. weekdays.

A special one-time screening of a show from Beck’s Common Sense Tour can be seen at Tinseltown in Boardman on June 11. Tickets are available at the Tinseltown box office.

Beck’s career began in Mount Vernon, Wash. “My mom gave me one of the ‘Golden Age of Radio’ albums,” Beck says, relaxing alertly in his New York office. (He still has the album.) The little boy was enchanted, and he started appearing on local radio soon after.

It’s been a long, hard ride on the radio bus. When Beck was 13, his mother lost her battle with depression and committed suicide. A brother would do the same; Beck and his father would become estranged. The radio bus wound through Provo, Utah; Baltimore; Houston; Phoenix; Washington. By the mid-1990s, he was close to the bottom. “I came from an alcoholic background and became an alcoholic,” he says. “I burnt every bridge I had, including my first marriage.” The radio bus stopped at Alcoholics Anonymous.

When he remarried, his wife told him: “We need a church.” “So we did the American thing,” Beck says. “We shopped for a church.” In 1999, he and his family became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The radio bus then pulled up in Philadelphia. Beck was fresh from converting an 18th-place time slot down in Tampa, Fla., to a market-leader, fresh from syndicating “The Glenn Beck Program” nationally, when he came to WPHT in 2002. His first line on Philadelphia radio was not promising: “I’ve moved away from my two oldest children for a job. This may be the biggest mistake of my life.” In a little under four years, his show went from 47 stations to more than 200 (it’s now at 350) and XM satellite radio.

In 2006, when he began a TV gig on CNN, he relocated the show to New York, and he now lives in New Canaan, Conn. But he retains an avid following in Philadelphia: It remains among his top 10 syndicated affiliates.