WCBS

News Radio in New York Loses a Frequency

WCBS AM radio in New York (880kHz) leaves the air by tomorrow (to become a sports station with different call letters), after nearly 57 years of broadcasting. My feeling about the station is that it started as a nightly beacon, as I’m told it did for many - miles and miles away from the city. I’d hear it in Ohio at night. On a long road trip with my parents, sailing down darkened Interstate 75 to Atlanta, through endless mountain curves, I was carefully tuning through the AM dial when I came upon “It’s 38 degrees in Central Park” in the middle of the dial.

Such a wonderful moment of connection and imagination from a city 700 miles away. I know my mother and I looked at one another. Central Park sounded wonderful, magical.

In brief tribute, here’s a recording I made of the station one night around what I think is 1980, from Dayton. That beacon call always set my imagination up to the giant contours of the great city - tones echoing through endless streets and walls of granite and glass in the city that never slept. Five years later, I moved there.

The format sounds verily like a Broadway chorus. The someone in the world sings of a great city while it gently crumbles. This is the TV city of Archie and Edith, Felix and Oscar, Oscar and Cookie Monster, Barbara Walters at TODAY, Johnny Carson at 30 Rock, telethon Tony Orlando at the Waldorf, Louis Rukeyser nightly discussing Wall Street, Walter Cronkite at 6:30, Captain Kangaroo and his ring of many keys, and the origins of all those Broadway cast albums in my parents’ stereo cabinet.

Nothing described all of that better than a radio beam coming from the city at night. May WCBS Newsradio 88 and the times it covered be long remembered.