But how did the Queen of Talk get started on her road to her lofty perch?
It all began, says the man who found her, in August of 1983.
Dennis Swanson, who's now president of station operations for Fox Television Stations, told "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis that on his first day as program director of WLS-TV in Chicago, "the fellow doing 'A.M. Chicago' came in and asked out of his contract. And so I let him out. We were not doing very well. We were up against Phil Donahue at the time in his home market. And getting clobbered.
"And so I said, 'Let's try and find an alternative. Rather than focus on males, let's focus on females."'
A woman who'd been in the WLS programming department only a week brought him a tape with Oprah on it. Winfrey was at that time co-host of WJZ's "People Are Talking."
But, Swanson told Jarvis, it was "hard to tell (about Oprah) from that tape, because it was a - she was a co-host of a show in Baltimore where the male was the dominant talent. So we set up to do an audition. We brought her in Labor Day weekend of '83, and I told the folks to make it a for-real 'A.M. Chicago' show, make it difficult.
"And I'm sitting in my office watching the audition unfold, and I'm thinking to myself, 'I've just solved the morning show problem. This woman is awesome!"'
Winfrey also provided an additional audition tape in which she said, "My name is Oprah Winfrey. Oprah spelled O-p-r-a-h, and if you noticed, it's Harpo spelled backwards.
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