Pegeen Fitzgerald

Pegeen Fitzgerald
Pegeen Fitzgerald in 1955
Born	Margaret Worall November 24, 1904 Norcatur, Kansas
Died	January 30, 1989 (1989-01-31) (aged 84) New York City, New York
Nationality	American
Alma mater	College of St. Theresa
Occupation	Radio talk show host
Spouse(s)	Ed Fitzgerald (1930-1982, his death)

Pegeen Fitzgerald (November 24, 1904 - January 30, 1989) was a radio personality perhaps best known for co-hosting (with her husband, Ed) The Fitzgeralds on radio in New York City.

Born Margaret Worrall in Norcatur, Kansas, Fitzgerald was the eldest of seven children. Her father, Fred Calvin Worrall, was a builder who would "bring folks over from all parts of Europe, sell them land and set up communities for them." Her mother was Jane Sweeney Worrall.

Shortly after Pegeen was born, the family's home burned down. The Worralls were again homeless in 1910; a local housing shortage found the family living in a curtained-off area of the Norcatur Dispatch city room. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, when she was a teenager.

Fitzgerald attended the College of St. Theresa in Winona, Minnesota, but she had to leave after two years to help support her family. Fitzgerald had won a scholarship to attend The Sorbonne, but was not able to do so; due to the illness of her father, she needed to go to work. She was a newspaperwoman and "a prominent department store executive in marketing and advertising" before she became a broadcaster. Fitzgerald worked first as a bookkeeper at a Portland department store; she worked her way up into the store's advertising department. She also taught English at night school as a source of more income. In 1929, a press agent introduced her to Ed Fitzgerald. Their first meeting was a failure as each disliked the other. A year later, the two met again and the relationship was amiable enough that the couple married in June 1930.

Fitzgerald kept her advertising job while her husband worked in the Orient as a foreign correspondent. When he returned in 1932, Ed began working in radio at KFRC in San Francisco on various radio programs. By 1935, the couple relocated to New York, where Ed hosted various radio shows at WOR. While Pegeen was interested in radio, she did not begin working in it until 1940, with a program from The New York World's Fair called "Here's Looking at You". The program was based on beauty and fashion information.

Fitzgerald's obituary in The New York Times said that she "pioneered the at-home radio format." For 42 years, she and her husband, Ed, broadcast from their apartment near New York City's Central Park or, less frequently, from their weekend home -- first in Hay Island, Connecticut, and later in Kent, Connecticut. At its peak, their program had an audience of 2 million people.John A. Gambling, a colleague of the couple at WOR, described listening to the Fitzgeralds' program as being "like you were eavesdropping on a conversation with a loving but not always an agreeing couple."