VARIETY’S   banner headline of July 24, 1963, WNEW TOASTS 30^TH WITH GALA! spanned five columns of stories about the big “W’ including the big show at Madison Square Garden as the start of six months of promotion leading up to WNEW’s 30^th anniversary, February 13, 1964.  In its issue of August 3^rd, a Billboard front page story reported that 15,000 people attended the event. On the bill were Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Vic Damone, Della Reese, The Si Zentner and Tommy Dorsey Bands, Jerry Vale, Frank Sinatra Jr., Peter Nero, Dave Brubeck Quartet, Jack Jones, Gene Klavan, Dee Finch, William B. Williams, Bob Landers, Ted Brown, Wally King, Fred Robbins, Billy Taylor, Marty O-Hara.

 Station promotions in the months that followed, included column-like promos What’sNEW, placed in New York’s major dailies. Below is the  3rd edition we’ve reconstructed from original clips collected by Bill Diehl.

“How I Got This Way”  by Regis Philbin

Chapter I  Bing Crosby

It all began with Bing Crosby during the Depression of the thirties. I must have been six or seven years old at the time. My family lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx, and every night at 9:30, I sat by my little radio in our kitchen and listened to a half hour of Bing’s records regularly spilling out over WNEW. His voice was so clear, so pure and so warm that after awhile I thought of him as my good friend. Even though he was out in faraway, glamorous Hollywood and I was in the humble old Bronx, in my mind we truly were friends and would always spend that special half hour together, just the two of us.

I listened to those songs of the Depression era and, even as a kid, I understood that the songwriters were trying to give hope to a struggling and downtrodden public. I grew to love those lyrics and what they said to me. I swear to you that those same songs have stayed with me for the rest of my life, and during various dark periods when I hit those inevitable bumps along the way, I would actually sing them to myself. Like “When skies are cloudy and gray, they’re only gray for a day. So wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream your troubles away.”

John Crosby, was a  columnist for The New York Herald Tribune from 1935 to 1941 and, after WWII military service, from 1946 to 1965.  

He continued newspaper and novel writing into  the mid-seventies, but is remembered best  as the Tribune’s chief radio/TV critic during the 1950’s.  This line of his about CBS-TV cancelling Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now,” helps explain why Crosby was so well regarded: “See it Now… is by every criterion television’s most brilliant, most decorated, most imaginative, most courageous and most important program. The fact that CBS cannot afford it but can afford “Beat The Clock,”is shocking.”  Another worthy observation of his concerned WNEW’s new, (1958) full-time news department and its “brash young news staff” whose news coverage was “busting out all over.”  Read on.  

The image above is a recreation of a 1959 John Crosby column as published in the New York Herald Tribune.  Thanks to Bill Diehl for finding a copy of the original column. E.B.

 Art Ford and the Night Visitor

The watercolor (above) by Tom Saunders is based on the  photo (below) published in Arnie Passman’s book, “The Deejays,”* But, the woman in the painting is not the woman in the photo.  Explanation, below.

 As WNEW’s first Station Manager, Bernice Judis often dropped in on shows at any time of the day or night. In the photo above, she is seen during an after-midnight visit to “The Milkman’s Matinee” when it was hosted by Art Ford. (1942-1954) In an e-mail to long-time friend, and ‘NEW alum, ABC’s Bill Diehl, Saunders explained: “I read that Bernice Judis was the manager who fired Art Ford for playing too much ‘jazz and international’ music, so I purposely eliminated her and put in a blond groupie instead.” Saunders identified correctly the cause of Ford’s firing, but not his executioner. Judis retired from WNEW in 1954 after 20 years with the station, and about four years before Ford got word while in Europe in April, 1958, that his services were no longer desired.

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