Veteran New York broadcaster Dick Shepard is gone.
Better known to his legion of listeners on WNEW at different times in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s as Shepard Richard A, Dick passed away Monday after being hospitalized in south Florida for a week. His wife of nearly 65 years, Judy, told me he was taken to the hospital in Boynton Beach on Tuesday, October 9th after complaining of not feeling well.
Dick. who also worked at WABC Radio in the late 50s and during part of 1960. also appeared as a commercial, on-camera announcer on some ABC Television game shows in the 50s, and was a busy voice-over talent during parts of five decades in New York.
Sadly Dick and I just got together to celebrate his 90th birthday early last month and Ed Brown was in the process of posting a picture and a story about that when he was alerted to Dick’s passing.
A photo arrived the other day from Glenn Crespo, at one time a WNEW News desk assistant. His caption:
“I found a picture of Bruce Charles, myself, another Desk Assistant Mary Ellen Kowalski and, if you look close on the left side, fill -in reporter Randy Place. This was taken after we moved to 3rd Avenue and must have been in the early 1980’s.”
In response, we asked Glenn to send a few lines about his time at WNEW and where it led, which turned out to be an impressive string of call letters including the new, all news WNEW in Washington, D.C.
“I was (at WNEW, New York) from January 1977 through September of 1991, starting as a desk assistant, hired by Jim Gordon. From 1978 through 1980, I was a weekend anchor at WFAS in White Plains. I continued as a desk assistant at WNEW and then, under Mike Prelee, began doing sports reports in 1986 and weekend anchor shifts in addition to anchoring news on the NY Giants football network. I free-lanced for AM and FM until AM went off the air. . . My time at WNEW was a great learning experience, working with Bob Hagen, Bruce Charles, Charles Scott King, Andy Fisher, Mike Eisgrau and Peggy Stockton. There were many major news stories covered during my time there, “Son of Sam,” The Northeast Blackout, the helicopter crash on the Pan Am Building, hijackings, presidential elections, the First Gulf War, the Battle for the Falkland Islands, the blizzard of 1977, transit strikes, the murder of John Lennon, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the Challenger disaster, to name a few.
After the news department was “downsized” in 1991, I worked two years for WXPS in Hawthorne New York as the morning anchor, co-host and News Director.I also free-lanced for WHUD, WFAS, WBLS, WFAN during this time. Went to WJUX in Dumont New Jersey in 1993, where I worked as the afternoon anchor and moved to WVNJ in Teaneck as the News Director and anchor in 1995. In 1997 I joined Shadow Traffic and remained there for 10-years doing traffic on WINS and news on WQCD.
In 1997 I began freelancing for the Wall Street Journal Radio Network and continued to do so off and on there until I was hired full-time in 2012 doing overnight reports for Dow Jones Radio on the Wall Street Journal Network, WCBS and WNEW (in Washington D.C.).
The WNEW (New York) News Department was a very interesting, volatile, action-packed place to work. A lot of different personalities thrown together. But at the end of the day, getting the news on the air was what mattered and getting it right was what mattered. The business has changed so much since then with sensationalism, character assassinations and speculations now being the norm. I will always treasure my years working in the WNEW News Department.”
“Martin Block, host of WNEW’s ‘Make Believe Ballroom’ demonstrates his secret remedy for all-night partying.” That’s the caption that accompanied this photo in the book “Airwaves of New York,” from McFarland Books in 1998.
The Airwaves of New York Illustrated Histories of 156 AM Stations in the Metropolitan Area, 1921-1996. Bill Jaker , Frank Sulek and Peter Kanze Foreword by Joe Franklin
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-3872-3. 68 photos, bibliography, index 215pp. softcover (8.5 x 11) 2008 [1998]
We noted here, about a month ago, the passing of R. Peter Straus who, as president of WMCA 570 AM, New York, “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.”
An e-mail arrived recently from Chris Albertson who was WNEW’s Continuity Director in the early 1960’s. He was also producing jazz recordings and working nights as a volunteer at leftist, avant garde WBAI-FM. He left WNEW in 1964 to work at WBAI full time, eventually becoming General Manager. (See Posts: “Civil Rights Jazz,” and “Civil Rights Jazz P.S.”) Chris’s most recent e-mail tells how his activist ire, provoked by a WMCA contest, found an ally in R. Peter Straus.
“I am sorry to hear of R. Peter Strauss’ passing. I met him in April of 1965 when he handed me a check for $1,000 for WBAI. I was doing the morning show and I used to take a cab to work each morning. One day the cab driver had his radio tuned in to WMCA and I heard them pitch an unusual contest. To enter, one had to send in a photo that showed the WMCA call letters on one’s body, by way of a sun tan, and the clearest call letters won a car.”
” The first thing that occurred to me was that this gave white or very light complexioned people a distinct advantage, which made the contest unfair. That morning, I urged my listeners to give WMCA a call and protest this inequity. The station was apparently flooded with calls, because I received a call from WMCA’s publicity dept. asking me to stop. Later that day, a call came to me from R. Peter Strauss, who was very embarrassed, thanked me for pointing this out, told me that he had killed the contest and that he wanted to donate a thousand dollars to WBAI. He did more than that, actually, because he placed a couple of ads in the NY Times urging people to subscribe to WBAI (we were a listener-sponsored station).The following day, Mr. Strauss told me to come and get it! I did, and here is the moment as captured by WMCA’s PR people.”
Thought you might find that interesting.
Chris
WMCA President, R. Peter Straus, presents a check for $1,000 to Chris Albertson of WBAI.
Typical of the legendary musical talent heard regularly and live on WNEW beginning in the 1930’s , was the “Bunny Berigan All Star Broadcasts.” The All Stars included Benny Goodman, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Count Basie, Red Allen, Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Krupa and other jazz greats. The photo below is the cover of a 1999 CD collection of broadcast sessions between 1936 and 1940, which includes recordings from “Jam Session,” a WNEW, broadcast of July 6, 1938 and a “WNEW Make Believe Ballroom” session on June 14, 1940. The collection also includes Berigan broadcasts on the “CBS Saturday Night Swing Club.”
All Star Broadcasts music CDs
Photographers: Edward Burke, Ken Whitten. All Star Broadcast songs.
Bunny Berigan’s trumpet solos during a 1935 tour with the Benny Goodman band, helped propel Goodman to “King of Swing” fame. By the summer of 1940, Berigan was bankrupt and had to dispand his own band. In failing health, due mostly to alcoholism, Berigan played for a time with the Tommy Dorsey band and toured with a small group of his own. Stricken by a hemorrhage on June 2nd, 1942, he was dead at the age of 33. E.B.
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.
In the summer of 1961, WNEW’s GM, Jack Sullivan, appointed me Director of Special Projects when Bill Persky and Sam Denoff left the station to write for Steve Allen’s new weekly TV Variety show. A few years into my “drektorship;” —that would be the summers of 1965 and ’66—I fielded a WNEW softball team to compete with other NY stations.
On the roster were:
Ed Dennehy–WNEW’s business manager.
Sales reps–Bob Goldsholl, Marty Ross, Bob Faselt and Bob Mounty. Faselt and Mounty became sales managers and Mounty became WNEW’S GM. Ross became my sales manager when I was sent to L.A. to run KMET.
Chip Cipolla–originally an overnight newscaster and subsequently the sports reporter/color broadcaster on Giants broadcasts.
Bill O’Shaughnessy–a Sullivan assistant without portfolio.
Jerry Graham–WNEW News Director.
Steve Nelson–engineer.
Allan Richman–systems analyst hired by Gerry Carrus, Metromedia’s comptroller. Carrus subsequently owned Trinity Broadcasting. Richman eventually owned stations run by Mel Karmizan, who was GM for both WNEW-AM and WNEW-FM before becoming top exec at Infinity, CBS Radio, Viacom (#2 there) and Sirius.
Me.
Some station-wide memos of results are all that remain of those epic contests on the diamonds of Central Park.
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.”
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).
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.
The New York City Hall news beat consisted of a close knit group of reporters. Peggy Stockton of WNEW News was proud to be a member of the Room #9 crew. For over 12 years Peggy covered four New York City mayors. She interviewed dozens of council members and a large list of political leaders. Election night was her specialty. Mayor Edward Koch is one of many who never passed up her questions. (photo below)
Peggy was a member of the New York Press Club, and the Inner Circle. She also was the recipient of many news awards for her on-the-scene coverage including the Associated Press Award for spot news reporting; The Press Club’s Byline Award; and the Olive Award for her program on “The Runaways of The City.” Peggy lived in Greenwich Village, a stone’s throw from City Hall.
Peggy Stockton and I co-anchored WNEW’S coverage of the fireworks display from beneath the famous Brooklyn Bridge on its 100th Anniversary celebration. We sat under the Bridge in the city she loved watching the historic event. We were like two kids, totally awestruck as we described the sight. Her first love, however, was the political and election coverage beat where she made a host of friends. Millions of listeners recall her signature radio closing to a story…Simply: “This is Peggy Stockton, WNEW News… New York City Hall” Peggy died of cancer September 12, 1988. Mike Prelee
Mike Prelee served as WNEW’s news director from 1981 to 1992.
Better known to his legion of listeners on WNEW at different times in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s as Shepard Richard A, Dick passed away Monday after being hospitalized in south Florida for a week. His wife of nearly 65 years, Judy, told me he was taken to the hospital in Boynton Beach on Tuesday, October 9th after complaining of not feeling well.
