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Newsradio 880 will soon disappear, but not forgotten

VaselineAugust 26, 2024

0 2 minutes read

Newsradio 880 will soon disappear, but not forgotten

On Sunday a familiar voice is silent.

It is not the voice of one person, but of dozens of people who make up the collective host of WCBS-AM Newsradio 880.

For many of us who grew up in the New York area, it will be a small death.

Monday morning at 12:01, WCBS will become ESPN. Or rather, pending FCC approval, it will become WHSQ-AM — an ESPN station.

Mets games will continue there. But the familiar anchors, news items, sports stories, “traffic and back together” updates that have been part of our lives and our car radio presets since 1967 will go the way of the old Penn Station, the Automat and other vanished New York icons.

It is worth grieving.

A reassuring voice

WCBS was the station I listened to in my father’s car as he drove me to school in the Jersey suburbs. WCBS was the lullaby I listened to as I set the timer on my clock radio to “1 o’clock.” The reports of murders, political scandals, and horrible car accidents sent me happily to dreamland.

That may sound strange. But that was the power of those disembodied voices.

They told me that the world, however imperfect, would still be there the next morning. And in their slightly quirky, New York way, they told me that it was nothing they — or I — couldn’t handle. War? Blizzard? Subway stitches? We can do this.

And during 9/11, when it was not With all the clarity that the world would be there in the morning, WCBS was a small island of normalcy. Planes may have been grounded, roads blocked, but the station was still there. Not its usual impassive self, to be sure, but who was? Commercials were suspended for a while.

On Saturdays, the station broadcasts special programs throughout the day commemorating the station’s 57-year history.

New York will still have one all-news station in the future: 1010 WINS (both owned by Audacy; 1010 WINS has its studios one floor below WCBS). But for some of us, it just won’t be the same.

Not only in hard times, but also over long distances, WCBS was our companion. It had an eerily strong signal — 50,000 watts from City Island, the Bronx. You could travel to New England, or beyond Baltimore, and a little bit of New York went with you.

Sound of the city

The New York flavor of WCBS, which once featured Leonard Bernstein’s “New York, New York” as its musical “bumper” on the half hour, had nothing to do with attitude, with a pat-on-the-back attitude.

Rather, it was the sense, conveyed by such lighthearted, occasionally witty, on-air personalities as Wayne Cabot, Paul Murnane, Brigitte Quinn, Levon Putney, Jane Tillman Irving, Deborah Rodriguez, Craig Allen, Todd Glickman, Joe Connolly, Steve Scott, Michael Wallace, Marla Diamond, Tom Kaminski, Pete Haskell — and before them, people like Jim Donnelly, Lou Adler, Neal Busch, Charles Osgood — that they had seen it all. Nothing could harm them.

As New Yorkers, it’s part of our heritage, no matter which side of the microphone we’re on. We’ve seen planes land in the Hudson and rats drag pizza slices down the subway stairs. We take it all in stride.

We will take this too. We will continue, in this area, without WCBS. But like Penn Station, we will remember it. And be poorer for the loss.

VaselineAugust 26, 2024

0 2 minutes read

A reassuring voice

Sound of the city

Vaseline

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