The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Dick Orkin, the man behind the "Chickenman" radio serial and other shows, died Dec. 24 in California. “He had been struggling with health issues for a while and lately was on the mend, but Saturday night he had a stroke and Sunday evening he passed away,” Lisa Orkin, posted on Facebook. “He was an incredible father and we all feel blessed that we had him in our lives as long as we did.” Orkin, 84, created the "Chickenman” radio series as a production director at WCFL in Chicago. The show, usually about two minutes long, featured a deadpan superhero who lacked any special powers, It started in 1966 and lasted into the late 1970s, and was syndicated to more than 1,500 stations worldwide at one point. The character was the alter-ego of shoe salesman Benton Harbor, who fought crime in Midland City in a chicken costume. The show evolved the character to an environmental warrior in "Chickenman vs. the Earth Polluters" and finished up in 1977, as "Chickenman Returns for the Last Time Again." In 1996 Orkin explained about the show, "I was never clear about what 'camp' meant, except that I guess it had something to do with the sacredness of absolute values that, when extended to irrational limits, became just plain silly... Thank God I hadn't known 'camp' was later considered a literary technique, or that would have killed the doing of it for me."