WXRT host Lin Brehmer dies at 68

Brehmer died Sunday morning, more than six months after taking a leave of absence for chemotherapy to fight prostate cancer.

 Lin Brehmer, a longtime WXRT (93.1) host known for his witty radio essays, died Sunday morning at age 68 after taking time off for a cancer diagnosis.

It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you that we all lost our best friend. Lin Brehmer fought cancer as long as he could,” fellow host Terri Hemmert wrote in a post Sunday morning. “He passed early this morning, peacefully, with his wife and son by his side.”

Brehmer announced last July that he was taking a break from the station to undergo chemotherapy for prostate cancer. He said he had been undergoing various treatments, including radiation and drug therapies, for “several years.” He briefly returned to air in November, telling CBS2-Chicago that “Radio has been my life.”

Brehmer was with WXRT for more than three decades, most of them as morning DJ until he slid to middays in 2020. He’s perhaps beset known for his radio essays called “Lin’s Bin.”

The segment consisted of his response to a listener’s question, interweaving prose with his encyclopedic knowledge of music and popular culture. “Lin’s Bin” was often funny and sometimes serious.

Those essays satisfied a creative yearning for Brehmer, who developed a love for literature in high school. “It’s a creative outlet. There is nobody looking over my shoulder,” Brehmer told the Sun-Times in 2018.

In that interview, Brehmer described himself as an “anti-shock jock.”

“It’s just not who I am,” he said. “The closest I come to shock jock is standing up for civil rights or religious freedom. That’s very shocking these days.”

Born in Queens, New York, Brehmer began his radio career as a Sunday morning DJ in Albany. At that gig, he was nicknamed “the Reverend” because he would recite poetry over song introductions. “I would slip into Dylan Thomas or William Wordsworth,” he told Sun-Times.

Brehmer moved to Chicago in 1984 to be the music director at ‘XRT. He worked behind the scenes until 1990, then took a short-lived radio job in Minneapolis. “I was there for 12 months, had a great time ... then found out the owner of my radio station was bankrupt. So it made things very dicey,” Brehmer said.

He came back to ‘XRT and took Hemmert’s spot as the morning DJ.

WXRT will celebrate Brehmer’s life Monday at 10 a.m., Hemmert wrote.

“We’ll hold each other up through this heart-breaking time. Lin would want that. Take nothing for granted,” Hemmert wrote.