This is great...Dan Ponce of WGN challenged reporter Mike Lowe to do a traffic report in several languages. Mike delivered with flying colors!
During the station’s Jan. 14 morning broadcast, Ponce showed a clip of Washington D.C.-based Associated Press reporter Philip Crowther delivering news reports in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and, of course, Luxembourgish.
Ponce, who is a Glencoe resident, then dared veteran WGN reporter Lowe to top it.
“He challenged me to do it,” said Lowe, a North Shore native, Loyola Academy graduate, and winner of a near-record 27 Chicago/Midwest Emmy Awards. “He said, ‘The ball’s in your court. … You won all these Emmys, but can you do this?’”
That evening, Lowe and his team took 15 minutes to put together a 54-second traffic report, and it played on the Friday morning news show. Sorry, Ponce. Game, set, match.
Lowe first gave the report in English, Spanish, French, German and Latin. The Latin he knew because his father, Dr. William H. Lowe, is a longtime Latin teacher at Loyola. The German he learned while doing a postgraduate fellowship with the government broadcasting network in Berlin for more than a year. And, the French and Spanish he got from Google Translate.
Then came the sixth language, spelled out on screen as “Chicagoese.”
You just gotta watch: