Category Archives: History
Another of the Games Gone By
This site, from time to time, publishes a missive from the Nat Asch Softball Tome, “Ghosts of Field #1.” This is one of those times.
“I Love Rudy Ruderman”
Variety Headline – Wednesday, July 14, 1963
“I Love Rudy Ruderman, ” a song composed by WNEW listener Addy Feiger was performed by her on July 14, 1963 at Madison Square Garden before a crowd of 18,000 attending WNEW’s 30th anniversary party. Click on link below.
http://wnew1130com.web.siteprotect.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/i_love_rudy_ruderman.mp3
We asked Rudy Ruderman, a News Editor at the time and Nat Asch, who was then Director of Special Projects, to add a few details of that long, glamorous evening and we’ve strung together their separate e-mail comments into a long-distance conversation.
RUDY I remember Addy. She was a neighbor in Westchester of Giants coach, Allie Sherman.
NAT Addy had written to the station saying she was “addicted” to the sound of WNEW and so, she wrote the song.
RUDY And when she sang it, everybody cheered, especially me.
NAT Varner Paulsen, was the PD at the time . . . I used to say of him, “Behold, the pale Norse”. . . anyway, he reluctantly accepted the suggestion that we open the show with Addy at the Garden . .
RUDY . . .the old Garden at 50th and 8th. . . .
NAT. . .that we open with Addy on a dark stage under a single spotlight. . .
RUDY . . . dressed as a maid and holding a feather duster. She suddenly sees the piano on center stage, looks around furtively, then dusts the keys and sits down and starts the song. . .
NAT . . .followed by the Cy Zentner orchestra on the main stage. . .there were three revolving stages . . .playing the WNEW theme as the Garden lit up to the delight of eighteen thousand People.
RUDY . . .Jack Jones and Count Basie were on the program,Vic Damone. . .Bobby Darin . .
NAT . . .Helen Forest, Tommy Dorsey. . .
RUDY . . .Billy Taylor, Della Reese. . .
NAT . . .Dave Brubeck. . .the show went on for five hours . . .we had very little experience putting on a show of such magnitude…every ticket sold included the opportunity to win a new house. . . .
RUDY . . . artiste issues?
NAT . . .only one. Nina Simone and her trio.
RUDY . . .right. . .
NAT . . .she had a rep for being difficult and was most unhappy about being put on one of the smaller stages. She wanted bigger. But her manager, her husband, Ernie, a former detective, calmed her down and she was brilliant. . .sang “I loves You, Porgy,” “My baby Just Cares For Me “. . .as scheduled . . .on the smaller stage. Up until the last moment we expected to get Frank Sinatra to close the show. We didn’t get him. We got Frank Sinatra Junior instead. The night was a complete success . . .except for the fact that Buddy Hackett punched out Freddie Robbins at the post show party at the Americana Hotel.
Editor’s Note: WNEW staged an encore show at the Garden on June 10, 1964, starring all the station’s personalities with (among others) Tony Bennett, Steve Lawrence, Eyde Gorme, Trini Lopez, Buddy Greco, Jerry Vale, and the Smothers Brothers. Proceeds benefited the Greater New York Fund.
He Was A Gift
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (1978-1989) died Friday, Feb. 1 at age 88. An appraisal by Andy Fisher, posted on the New York Broadcasting History Board, appears below.
Ed Koch never worked for WNEW, but in the 1970s and 1980s, he might as well have.
Ed Koch certainly had a face for radio, and from sound-bite to talk show, he was always entertaining on the air. He presided over New York City’s financial and psychological comeback from chaos in the late 1970s, so he was a pretty good mayor by anyone’s standards, although for a long time, as someone pointed out this morning, he did seem to have a “tin ear” when it came to the subject of race relations.
My first interview with Ed Koch was on primary night in 1974. Howard Samuels, the choice of the Democratic organization, was supposed to win an easy gubernatorial nomination, so WNEW assigned first-string reporter Mike Eisgrau to Samuels headquarters. I was sent to the headquarters of underdog Brooklyn congressman Hugh Carey. Carey headquarters was a pretty quiet place, and I was getting set for a long wait until his concession speech, but shortly after the polls closed, Ed Koch showed up. He was the congressman from the “silk stocking” district, and he clearly knew that something extraordinary was happening. Sure enough, Carey upset Samuels, and Ed Koch was almost a play-by-play announcer for us!
The other time I interviewed him was July 4, 1986, during Liberty Weekend, when President Reagan came to town to re-dedicate the renovated Statue of Liberty. I was a radio correspondent for NBC News, and Mayor Koch came to the press compound on the landfill for Battery Park City. I needled him about Liberty Island really being in New Jersey, and about his own origins in Newark, and, of course, he gave as good as he got. I tend to judge people by their senses of humor, and on that basis, I regard Ed Koch as the greatest New York mayor I can remember.
I can’t conceive of Michael Bloomberg standing on the Brooklyn Bridge asking, “How’m I doing?” I can remember John Lindsay getting huffy when he was reminded about calling New York “Fun City.” You wouldn’t dare try to have fun with Rudy Giuliani.
Ed Koch was a gift to radio, to politics, and, most of all, to New York
A.F.
Photos added by WNEW1130
Red Raven Redux
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Alan Walden
If you do an Internet search for the Red Raven restaurant, you’ll find it without any difficulty; a steakhouse on fabled Route 66 in Williams, Arizona, billed as the gateway to the Grand Canyon. But the Red Raven I remember most fondly was embraced by the concrete and steel canyons of Manhattan; a little Italian joint on West 45th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues (No real Noo Yawkuh would ever call it “Avenue of the Americas).
It was to that Red Raven some of us would repair at the end of a day of toil in the WNEW newsroom to hoist a toddy for the body, often more than one, and have a cheap dinner while, most of the time, engaging in pure and unfettered silliness.
There were three of us who formed the hard core of the group: The puckish Andrew Fisher IV, the redoubtable S. G. Ruderman, and me. And, while we were joined by a few others from time to time, for the most part the silliness was ours alone.
One evening, having run through the events of the day and casting about for something worthy of nonsense, we decided it would be really neat if we could come up with a list of names for reporters and experts that precisely matched their assignments and/or areas of expertise. It was Andy (No surprise there) who got us started. Young Mr. Fisher had spent time in Germany during his tour with the United States Army, and suggested correspondent Helmut Leiner in Berlin. When we stopped laughing, and it took awhile considering the amount of spiritus fermenti we had by then consumed, Rudy said, “How about Norman Invasion in London.” More laughter as I sputtered, “Or Norman Conquest.” From then on, we were off to the races.
We came up with two automotive experts, Jack Handel and Axel Grease. Our sales manager was Bill Collector. We discovered an Irish anthropologist appropriately named Paley O’Lithic, and his cousin, the outdoor furniture magnate, Patty O’Furniture. Our horticultural expert was Forrest Primeval. There was police reporter Billy Club, Russian hotel owner Comrade Hilton, society reporter Crystal Chandelier, seafood critic Clem Chowder, and CDC reporter Sal Monella. For corporate attorney and legal expert we chose Ann Aconda. Barb Wire was our reporter in Eastern Europe.(The Iron Curtain was still in place). On and on we went (Let’s have another drink). And the names because even more goofy: Willy Nilly in Boon, Les Agna in Rome, Pierre Ahmid in Cairo. Eventually, we became boisterous enough to attract the attention of other diners who were, no doubt, wondering why we were allowed in public without our keepers.
Even as I write this I can think of a few to add: Reporting from China, Hu Wot Wen, and ornithologist Bob Whyte, airport security guard Pat U. Down, and film critic Harry Iball.
I suspect that Andy and Rudy could add those I’ve forgotten: the years have taken their toll on my gray matter. But the larger memory remains: The Red Raven, and the fun we had just being us, and knowing that, the following day, we’d be back at the World’s Greatest Radio Station. At that time it was “Quoth the raven, ‘Evermore.’” But, alas, it was not to be.
One final note: The title of this piece is, of course, taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the narrative poem first published in 1845. Poe is buried here, in Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery. And almost every year, on his birthday, someone, identity unknown, places a bottle of brandy at his grave site. I have, thus far, resisted temptation. 
R. Peter Straus
WMCA 1960’s
At WMCA 570 AM, New York, station president R. Peter Straus combined Top 40 music with socially conscious journalism and ground-breaking public service to animate broadcasting’s most successful and influential big-city mom and pop radio station. I joined WMCA in 1959, about a year after Peter succeeded his father, Nathan Straus, as station president. For nearly six years in the news room, I witnessed and participated in events WMCA both covered and created with its two-fisted documentaries, independent news service, precedent-setting editorials, and a historic crusade for voting justice. Credit for WMCA’s best years as a top-rated station is shared by many people, but the first-of-its-kind balancing of jukebox and soap box that made that prominence possible, was by the design and direction of R. Peter Straus. Edward Brown
New York Daily News and New York Times stories follow below
R. Peter Straus in WMCA studio, mid 1980’s. NY DAILY NEWS photo: Jack Smith
R. Peter Straus, populist WMCA radio host and NYC fixture, dead at 89
Liberal Democrat radio icon made rock n’ roll fun, too
By DAVID HINKLEY/ NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
R. Peter Straus, a blueblood who used his WMCA radio station to fight for populist causes, pioneer talk programming and make rock ‘n’ roll fun, died Monday at his Manhattan home. He was 89, and even people who disagreed with his liberal Democratic politics hailed him as a man who loved his radio station and the medium passionately.
“Peter Straus was one in a million,” said Tom Tradup, now with Salem Communications and Straus’s talk program director from 1980 to 1983. “WMCA was a petri dish of talk radio creativity, with legends like Barry Gray, Bob Grant, Bruce Williams and Barry Farber.” While he employed hosts across the political spectrum because he thought they were entertaining, he also used his 5,000-watt signal to broadcast his own beliefs. He was one of the first station owners to broadcast editorials, endorsing John F. Kennedy for President in 1960 and calling for the resignation of Richard Nixon early in the Watergate scandal. But his station was better known as one of the first and most endearing homes for rock ‘n’ roll.
Deejays like Scott Muni, Murray the K, Harry Harrison, B. Mitchell Reed and Dan Daniel passed through WMCA, and Straus was one of the first owners to hire a black jock for a “rock ‘n’ roll” station when he signed the late Frankie Crocker. WMCA jocks were collectively known as “The Good Guys” in that wholesome era, and they delighted in waging guerrilla war against the much larger WABC
The battle between the two stations over who “owned” the Beatles became city radio legend. “WABC was bigger, but I always thought we had more fun,” said Dan Daniel years later. “And I think the fact there were two competing stations made them both better and made it a lot more entertaining for the listeners.” Straus turned WMCA to talk in 1970 and sold it in 1986.
Born in Manhattan, Straus was the son of a Roosevelt administration official and state senator who bought his first radio station in 1943. Straus’s grandfather was Nathan Straus, owner of Macy’s and Abraham and Straus. His great-uncle Isidor was a congressman who went down on the Titanic.
A Yale graduate and World War II veteran, he joined WMCA as program director in 1948. During his years at the station he also worked in the Lyndon Johnson administration and directed the Voice of America from 1977 to 1979. He and WMCA filed a lawsuit in 1961 charging that the state legislature was violating the Constitution by giving rural areas disproportionate representation. That suit, folded in with others, led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 “one man, one vote” decision.
Straus even had brushes with history in his personal life. His first wife Ellen Sulzberger, a niece of Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, died in 1995 after they had been married 45 years. In 1998 he married Marcia Lewis, mother of White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
But active as he was in social, political and economic circles, Tradup says Straus never lost touch with WMCA. Tradup recalls the time when night host Long John Nebel, late in his legendary career, was reading spots for a Brooklyn funeral home on his show. “Peter would ask the WMCA business department about them,” Tradup says, “and they professed not to know anything. “So one night Peter and Ellen were riding to a party and he heard the spot again. He had his driver turn the car around and barge into the station to get the straight story.”
Nebel, it turned out, had cut his own deal with the funeral parlor to run the spots in return for, when the time came, handling Nebel’s arrangements and burial. “Those were in the bygone days,” says Tradup, “when a station owner in New York actually listened to his property.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/authors?author=David Hinckley
WMCA 1960’s
NYTIMES photo
R. Peter Straus, WMCA Radio Pioneer, Dies at 89
By robert d. McFADDEN – NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 8, 2012
R. Peter Straus, who took over WMCA in New York in the late 1950s and turned it into one of the nation’s most innovative radio stations, broadcasting what are regarded as the first radio editorials and political endorsements and helping to popularize rock ’n’ roll, died on Monday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 89.
His daughter Diane Straus Tucker confirmed his death.
The son of a radio entrepreneur and the scion of a family steeped in public service, Mr. Straus counted diplomats, cabinet officials, legislators and philanthropists among his forebears, and became a United Nations official, director of the Voice of America and the administrator of American aid to Africa.
He also became a plaintiff in a historic reapportionment lawsuit that forced New York’s Legislature to give cities increased representation. It became an integral part of the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” ruling, which concluded that many state legislatures were unconstitutionally unbalanced in favor of sparsely populated rural areas.
But his most memorable contributions were in radio. Long before NPR created a network for high-quality news, music and discussion programs, WMCA pioneered public service radio in New York. It was the first station in the country to run editorials on political and civic issues, with Mr. Straus himself reading opinions on the air, and the first to endorse a presidential candidate, backing John F. Kennedy in 1960.
In December 1963, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” wailed out over WMCA, and Beatlemania, with a big boost from the station, soon engulfed the region. It was hardly a surprise. WMCA had been playing rock ’n’ roll since the 1950s, and WMCA’s Top 40 format, along with that of its fierce rival WABC, dominated the New York airwaves through the 1960s. WMCA’s disc jockeys, known as the Good Guys, became almost as well known as the stars whose records they played.
It is what the people want to hear, Mr. Straus said.
After Mr. Straus converted the station to an all-talk format in 1970, WMCA was known for years as a forum for liberal causes. It was the first station to call for the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal, and the first to ban cigarette advertising and to accept ads from abortion rights advocates and makers of contraceptives.
It broadcast “Call for Action” programs featuring an ombudsman to help listeners who had problems with government agencies, corporations and landlords, and “Crime Stoppers,” to help the police solve crimes. It also accepted ads from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and put public officials like Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Mayor Edward I. Koch on the air to answer questions from listeners.
“We like to think occasionally we give voice to the voiceless,” Mr. Straus said in 1983. “We want to be broadcasters, but we want to make a difference.”
WMCA, 570 on the AM dial, was founded in 1925, broadcasting from the McAlpin Hotel, from which the call letters were derived. It was bought by Nathan Straus Jr. in 1943. Its programming included popular music, dramas, New York Giants baseball games and, in the postwar years, a remarkable run of music and talk featuring Barry Gray, sometimes called “the father of talk radio,” and disc jockeys like Scott Muni and Murray Kaufman, a k a Murray the K.
By 1986, WMCA was the last privately held station in a leading urban market when Mr. Straus sold it to Federal Enterprises of Detroit for $10 million. In 1989 it was sold again, to Salem Communications, which adopted the Christian format that continues today.
Ronald Peter Straus, who almost never used his first name, was born in Manhattan on Feb. 15, 1923, the son of Nathan Straus Jr. and Helen Sachs Straus. His father, who became director of the United States Housing Authority under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a New York State senator, bought WMCA in 1943. The company, Straus Communications, later owned many radio stations and newspapers in the Hudson Valley and New Jersey.
Peter had other notable antecedents: his grandfather, Nathan Straus Sr., was a philanthropist who co-owned R. H. Macy and Abraham & Straus department stores. A great-uncle, Isidor, was a congressman who went down on the Titanic in 1912; another, Oscar Solomon, was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce and labor.
After attending the Lincoln, Riverdale Country Day and Loomis schools, Mr. Straus majored in international relations and American government at Yale and graduated in 1943, a year early, under a World War II program. He became a B-17 pilot and flew 35 bombing missions over Germany. After the war he worked in public relations for a time, then joined WMCA as program director in 1948.
In 1950 he married Ellen Louise Sulzberger, a niece of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times. She died in 1995.
Mr. Straus and his second wife, Marcia Lewis, mother of the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, were married in 1998. They were introduced by a mutual Washington friend in 1997, months before the scandal of Ms. Lewinsky’s relationship with President Bill Clinton became public in January 1998. Mr. Straus said later that he had met Ms. Lewinsky once or twice, but declined to comment on her or the president, whom he had known for years. Ms. Lewis was divorced from Ms. Lewinsky’s father, Bernard Lewinsky, a California doctor, in 1987.
In addition to his daughter Diane, his wife and his stepdaughter, Mr. Straus is survived by three other children from his first marriage, Katherine Straus Caple, Jeanne Straus and Eric Straus; two brothers, Irving and Nathan; a stepson, Michael Lewinsky; and nine grandchildren.
Mr. Straus left WMCA in 1950 to become an executive of the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency in Geneva. He returned to WMCA in 1958, succeeded his father as president in 1959 and became chief executive when his father died in 1961.
In 1961, he and WMCA filed a federal lawsuit that led to the reapportionment of the State Legislature and became incorporated into a block of cases that produced the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” decision in 1964. That ruling affected more than 30 legislatures whose seats had been unfairly apportioned, with more power going to rural areas than cities.
Long active in Democratic politics, Mr. Straus was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s assistant administrator for aid to Africa in the Agency for International Development from 1967 to 1969, and director of the Voice of America under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979.
He was also the author of “Is the State Department Color Blind?” (1971), “The Buddy System in Foreign Affairs” (1973) and “The Father of Anne Frank” (1975).
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/business/r-peter-straus-wmca-radio-pioneer-dies-at-89.html
VOA photo of R. Peter Straus added by WNEW1130 editors
Civil Rights Jazz P.S.
The photo above was inscribed by Gene Klavan and Dee Finch “To the great dane, Chris ” Albertson who worked in promotion and as continuity director while with WNEW between 1961 and 1964. Albertson was born in Reykyavik, Iceland and attended schools there and in England and Denmark. It was while in Denmark in 1947, Albertson says, that he heard a recording on radio by Bessie Smith that changed his life, for it led to a life-long devotion to jazz and blues music.
In case you missed it, “Civil Rights Jazz” was posted here on March 12, 2012.
Publicity photo by James J. Kreigsman
WBW VIS-A-VIS RNR
William B. Williams is pictured above in a late 50’s newspaper ad. His opinions about rock ‘n’ roll were evidently expressed in a more courtly manner during a TV appearance in 1963, according to listeners who wrote to him after the show. Those listener comments were included in one of WNEW’s column-like promotional ads, What’sNEW, (see below) placed in New York’s major dailies in 1963 /64. This is the 5th edition we’ve reconstructed from original clips collected by Bill Diehl.
Footnote: From the mid 1960’s to the early 80’s, WNEW tried to acknowledge top pop music to no one’s satisfaction. The station’s return in the early 80’s to the style of programming that had long sustained it, was undone by a succession of owners whose starvation budgets and programming bludegons rendered the WNEW of times past unrecognizable and without immediate value except for one more sale. E.B.
Bang! They’re Off!
“. . .news on the hour and half-hour, Nat Asch Sports Reports . . .part of Klavan In the Morning once upon a time. An e-mail and a photo from Stuart Zuckerman appear below.
I was Promotion Manager of WNEW-AM for less than a year (June 1974-March 1975) but have fond memories of the great on-air talent I worked with, particularly Gene Klavan and Julius La Rosa.
It was a stressful time in the station’s history. A new Program Manager had arrived from the Cleveland station where Don Imus was the morning man. The program manager, John Lund, had been brought in to make the music more contemporary, but not be rock’n’roll. (Think pop Top 40). The on-air talent was not happy. Imagine Willliam B. Williams being told to mix “Baby I’m-A Want You” by Bread in the same set as something by Sinatra.
I’m most proud of an ad campaign I created for the morning drive program with the somewhat risqué headline. “Klavan gets you off in the morning”. (The runners L-R: Sales reps. Ed Mohr, Dick Barry, Nick O’Neill, PD John Lund.) Hope this brings back some fond memories to some of the gang that was at Eleven-Three-Oh back then.
Pete Fornatale
Update — Saturday, April. 28, 2012 — Bill Diehl (WNEW/ABC) spoke with Pete Fornatale a couple of years ago on ABC radio, after Fornatale released his ode to the Woodstock era entitled “Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQSS1UNuJg
New York Times feature story by Douglas Martin, published: April 27, 2012, appears below the following item.
Pete Fornatale, pioneering NYC rock radio deejay and writer, dead at 66
Bronx native was one of first free-form deejays on early FM rock radio
By David Hinkley – NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 26, 2012, 4:07 PM
Pete Fornatelle, a New York deejay, historian and writer who for almost 50 years championed the spirit of musical freedom on the radio airwaves, died 
Thursday at Beth Israel Medical Center. He was 66.
He suffered a brain hemorrhage on April 15 and been in intensive care for the last week.
A native of the Bronx and a graduate of Fordham, Fornatale started his deejay career Nov. 21, 1964, hosting “Campus Caravan” on Fordham’s WFUV.
He continued “Campus Caravan” until 1970, by which time he was also working at WNEW-FM as one of the pioneer free-form deejays on early FM rock radio.
“For the first time, we could play music on the radio the way we played it in our lives,” he said last year. “It wasn’t just the top 40 played over and over. You could play longer tracks, you could play older tracks, you could make the music fit together.
“It was magical.”
“My fondest memory of Pete,” said his long-time radio colleague Pat St. John, “was listening to him one Sunday morning when he was doing a show on different songs about life.
“A particular favorite of mine is a very little-known song by Rick Nelson simply called ‘Life.’ After about an hour, I called Pete and suggested this tune, and he told me he’d just cued it up and it’d be the next song he was going to play.
“It goes, ‘Life, what are we here for? / I want to know more.’”
Fornatale worked at WNEW-FM until 1989, when he moved to WXRK. He briefly moved back to WNEW-FM a few years later.
But as commercial radio moved further away from the free-form spirit, he and other free-form advocates became increasingly disenchanted.
In 2001, he returned to non-commercial WFUV, where he hosted a free-form show he had started in 1982 called “Mixed Bag.” He also hosted a weekly in-depth interview show, and he frequently tied both shows to historic or contemporary themes.
His last “Mixed Bag” show on April 14, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.
“This is just the right amount of radio to be doing,” he said last year. “I have this show every week where I can say what I want, but I don’t have to be scrambling to fill four hours every day. That gets harder as you get older.”
He developed close relationships with artists like Paul Simon over the years and was also active in several charity organizations.
That included World Hunger Year, which was co-founded by his friend Harry Chapin in 1975 and is now run by cofounder Bill Ayres as WhyHunger.
Fornatale raised money and hosted WHY events for many years.
He also wrote a number of books on music, including a history of Woodstock and a biography of Simon and Garfunkel. He often hosted shows on WNET and was a consultant on music projects for MTV and VH1.
He said last year he was always fascinated by “the real stories of what happened with music and songs. So much gets mythologized, but to me the real story is almost always better.”
Pete Fornatale attends the AFTRA Foundation’s 2012 AFTRA Media and Entertainment Excellence Awards in February. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
He won the Armstrong Excellence in Broadcasting Award in 1983 and received AFTRA’s Media and Entertainment Excellence Award in February at the Plaza.
Fornatale was born and raised in the Belmont section of the Bronx, known as Little Italy.
He was just a few years behind Dion and the Belmonts, who were one of his favorite artists, and he recalled growing up to the sound of vocal harmony groups, as well as Elvis and early rockers.
The first record he bought, he said, was Elvis’s “Hound Dog.”
He graduated from Fordham Prep before he attended Fordham, and after he graduated he spent two years as a teacher before going into radio full-time.
“Pete was always teaching us,” said folksinger and friend Christine Lavin, “even when we thought we were just being entertained.”
Fornatale is survived by his ex-wife Susan and their three sons, Peter, Mark and Steven.
Click on link for New York Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Pete%20Fornatale
Pete Fornatale thumbnail photo and WNEW-FM promotion publication added by WNEW1130.com
NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE STORY By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: April 27, 2012
Pete Fornatale, a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66. The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Mark said.
FM radio had been around for a while but did not come of age until the 1960s, when, amid the whirlwind of a growing counterculture, the federal government mandated that FM stations carry different programming from that of their sister AM bands. Enterprising D.J.’s grasped the chance to play longer, fresher, rarer music and give voice to the roiling political and social issues of the day.
Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts.
WNEW-FM may have been the most influential experimenter. When the station dropped rock music for talk radio in 1999, Billboard called it “a legend, affecting and inspiring people throughout the industry.”
Mr. Fornatale (pronounced forn-a-TELL) had actually beaten WNEW to the punch. As a sophomore at Fordham University in 1964, he persuaded the school’s Jesuit leaders to let him do a free-form rock show on what was officially an educational station. He continued that show for a few years after he graduated, and for a while could be heard on both WFUV and WNEW.
WOR-FM became the first commercial station in New York to adopt the format, in 1966, but abandoned it after about a year. WNEW, with the slogan “Where Rock Lives,” adopted it in 1967.
Mr. Fornatale came on board in 1969 and quickly moved to the center of New York’s music scene. He gave early exposure to country-rock bands like Buffalo Springfield and Poco. He did one of the first American interviews with Elton John, and got a rousing ovation when he brought a rented surfboard to Carnegie Hall for a Beach Boys show. He introduced Curtis Mayfield to Bob Dylan at a Muhammad Ali fight.
In 1982 he started “Mixed Bag,” a program that emphasized singer-songwriters, on Sunday mornings. His regular guests included Suzanne Vega, who introduced herself to him by sending a fan letter.
One of Mr. Fornatale’s signatures was playing songs that followed a theme. It might be colors, with a playlist including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” Or it might be great inventions, as when he celebrated the 214th anniversary of the United States Patent Office. Or the theme might simply be radio.
Peter Fornatale was born in the Bronx on Aug. 23, 1945, and graduated from Fordham Preparatory School, on the campus of Fordham University. His introduction to rock ’n’ roll came in 1956 when his father summoned him to the television to see “this crazy guy” — Elvis Presley. The first record he bought was Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Mr. Fornatale graduated from Fordham with a degree in communications in 1967 and taught English at a Roman Catholic high school before joining WNEW. His voice drew praise for its mellow, almost professorial tone, although some listeners may have chosen to describe it as nasal.
By the early 1980s, stations specializing in what had been known as free-form radio were bringing in business consultants who urged less variety in records and more control over the disc jockeys. Mr. Fornatale later complained that he and his colleagues had been demoted from chefs into waiters, “and fast-food waiters at that,” as he told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 1999.
He left WNEW in 1989 to follow the station’s program director to WXRK-FM (K-Rock), which followed a more conventional approach to pop music. Mr. Fornatale’s show came on after Howard Stern’s. Mr. Stern, whose shock-jock format was becoming radio’s new wave, called Mr. Fornatale the “anti-Stern.”
In 1997 Mr. Fornatale returned to WNEW-FM, which had decided to go back to album-oriented rock after a succession of owners and formats. But within a year the station had changed formats again, to talk. In 2001, Mr. Fornatale returned to where he had started: WFUV. “I love the idea I’ve come full circle,” he said.
Mr. Fornatale wrote several books, including one on the making of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album “Bookends,” and one on the Woodstock music festival. He was also the main writer for a series of 600 trading cards on the life of Elvis Presley.
He had lived for six years in Rockaway, Queens, and the previous four decades in Port Washington, N.Y.
Mr. Fornatale’s marriage to Susan Kay Flynn ended in divorce several years ago. He is survived by his sons, Peter, Mark and Steven, and his brother, Robert.
His WFUV show, which like his earlier WNEW singer-songwriter show was called “Mixed Bag,” ran from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturdays.
“If you give me the right idea for a program,” Mr. Fornatale said in 2004, “I can give back to you a three-hour journey where, if you tune in at any time, you’re likely to hear something that will entertain you. But if you take the ride with me, when we get to the end, you’ll say, ‘Wow, what a long, strange trip it’s been.’ ”