By Rick Kaempfer
MADE OF STEELE ON WBMX
W
BMX midday host Diana Steele
may be a new voice on the
Chicago radio dial, but she isn’t
new to radio, and she isn’t new to Chicago.
It’s just that her two worlds had never col-
lided like this before, and she’s really
enjoying the ride.
“It is the coolest thing on the planet for
a couple of reasons,” she says. “I grew up
in Elk Grove, but my family has never real-
ly had the opportunity to hear me doing
what I do live on the air before. My parents
are still here. They may not love the music
(laughs), they are almost 80. But they get
to hear what I’m doing. My sister is a
school nurse, and she gets to listen. People
who only do this work in their hometown
to come to LA to start the hip-hop station
there, called The Beat.”
Some may think that hiring a white girl
from Elk Grove Village was an odd choice
for a hip-hop station in LA, but the music
is something that Diana has loved from a
very early age. “I got in trouble when I
was five years old,” she recalls with a
laugh. “I was living on Peach Tree Lane in
Elk Grove Village, and I was wearing my
hot pants, flipped my t-shirt up inappro-
priately for that age, and was doing the
moves on the coffee table while I was
watching Soul Train. My mom walked into
the room, and screamed ‘WHAT ARE
YOU DOING?’”
Diana Steele
take for granted how great this is. I’ve had
the blessing of doing this in LA and San
Francisco, but this has special meaning to
me.”
Not that this is her first go-round on
Chicago radio. It’s just that the previous
time was many years ago when her career
was just beginning. “When I was 17, I
wandered into the Hancock building. I
saw the Channel 5 traffic logo on the win-
dow of an office there and walked in and
said: ‘Do you do internships? I want to be
a news anchor.’ A guy was typing (remem-
ber typing?), and looked up and said,
‘Well, we do traffic, not news. We used to
be owned by Channel 5, but now it’s our
own company. His name was Gary Lee.
He hired me to be an intern, and before I
knew it, I was doing traffic reports on Steve
& Garry’s (WLS) show as a fill-in. I would
sit on hold and listen to these guys, talking
and having fun and BSing, and I thought,
these guys get paid for this? I met Larry
Lujack at Chicagofest, and he told me how
much he made and that he had all day to
play golf. I thought this is what I want to
do. They need more females doing this.”
Steele attended the University of
Illinois, and that’s where her radio journey
continued. “I got a job at a radio station
called K-104 in Champaign when I was in
college and then got married. My then-
husband said do you want to go to Texas,
California, or Des Plaines? I said
‘California here we come!’ I was out there
about a month and got a job at K101 San
Francisco. It was the thrill of my life at age
21. I was there a few years before the local
hip-hop station called, and that’s where I
became Diana Steele and started my hip-
hop career. I was hired by Jimmy de Castro
14 illinoisentertainer.com july 2018
“I got infected by soul first. From there,
my taste moved to '80s hip-hop, and I
loved it when we started mixing in rap
and R&B, g