R.I.P.: Paul Brian, WLS-AM Chicago Radio Host

Brian ('51-'24)

Paul Brian, host of the Saturday morning program “Drive Chicago” for more than 20 years on WLS 890 AM died on June 11 following a short illness, according to The Sun-Times.

Brian took listener calls and discussed everything from hubcaps to automotive nostalgia. He stayed away from trouble shooting car problems — he wasn’t good under the hood.

While at WLS, his colleagues Steve Dahl and Garry Meier occasionally imitated Mr. Brian’s famous voice on their show to great comedic effect; sometimes Mr. Brian joined them.

Brian drove a different car every week for years because manufacturers constantly delivered various models to his home to test out and hopefully talk about.

Paul Brian Warhanik (he dropped his last name for radio) was born Feb. 6, 1951, in Chicago. Both his parents owned hot rods. Mr. Brian realized the allure and effect cars could have at a young age.

“I think it was that cars offered me equal footing to the jocks when I was a kid, to be honest,” he told media journalist and former radio producer Rick Kaempfer in a 2008 interview.

Brian bounced around the media landscape. Before working at WLS, Mr. Brian worked at WGN-AM (720) in a variety of on-air positions. One was covering pre-game shows from Soldier Field during the Bear Super Bowl championship season.

For several years in the early 1980s, he left radio and traveled the United States as communications director for the Alfa Romeo IndyCar team. He had an office at the company’s headquarters in Milan and took cooking classes in Italy.

He put his skills to use while traveling with the team in the United States, where he served as team chef, regularly having wheels of cheese and pounds of meat sent to racetrack towns around the country that lacked decent Italian restaurants.

Brian also headed up communications for the Chicago Auto Show from 1994 to 2012 and loved serving as a guest announcer for races held at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.

For nearly the past 10 years, Mr. Brian served as regular co-host of “His Turn — Her Turn” a car-centric show on YouTube alongside automotive industry expert Lauren Fix.

“One of his favorite lines was: ‘Always entertaining and sometimes actually informative,’” said Fix, who test drove cars around the world with Mr. Brian, including in Iceland and Portugal. “He was a legend in the industry, and he helped a lot of other people along the way, including myself,” Fix said.

Another of Mr. Brian’s passions was helping veterans. He was a founding member of the Allen J. Lynch Medal of Honor Veterans Foundation.