Excerpted from "Radio entrepreneur called innovative, focused" Bob Goldsborough, Chicago Tribune, November 17, 2017.
Born in Chicago, Peters grew up on the North Side and graduated from Amundsen High School. He worked at Northwestern University’s radio station, WNUR-FM, graduating in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in speech.
Peters and a friend briefly ran an advertising agency called Pedott & Peters before he shifted into broadcasting, hosting several
programs at WAIT-AM in Chicago. With WEBH-FM — now WLIT-FM — signing on from studios at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1958, Peters saw a business opportunity. He leased all the broadcast time on the fledgling FM station and started producing all programming, selling all commercials and even serving as the station’s announcer. He also produced shows on WGN-AM and WMAQ-AM.
After WEBH lost its tower atop the hotel with its signal, Peters joined Century Broadcasting, which recently had bought WFMF-FM (now WSHE-FM). Peters started working as the station’s general manager and director of programming. Century changed the station’s call letters to WLOO-FM, and with the rise in the popularity of FM radio in general and of the “beautiful music format” in particular at WLOO, Peters had the idea to syndicate a version of its format to other stations.
Called the “FM 100 Plan,” the program was distributed to more than 260 radio stations around the U.S., and Peters — whose company owned the plan — produced all tapes on-site from offices in the John Hancock Center. Peters’ company operated 24 hours a day to keep up with demand for the plan, which cost stations $650 to $5,000 a month, depending on the size of the market.
“We never blaze any trails,” Peters told the Tribune’s Eric Zorn in 1982. “We follow the hits by doing our own very conservative versions, but we never try to make hits.
”WLOO changed its call letters to WPNT-FM in 1990. Peters’ firm in 1982 sold the FM 100 Plan to Bonneville International, a radio conglomerate that also had purchased WPNT.
Peters remained with Bonneville as a consultant. He also purchased several radio stations, including what then was known as WTCO-FM in Arlington Heights in 1982.
