Goodbye, WCBS Newsradio 88 - The Jewish Standard

“The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble.
They’re only made of clay.
“But WCBS Newsradio 88 is here to stay.”

Yeah, you’re right. Cole Porter just wrote the first two lines. The last one was me.

But WCBS, until Sunday night one of two all-news AM stations in the metropolitan area (tristate, yes, I know, but does anyone really care about Connecticut?), has gone away, the station’s call letters have changed to some alphabet soup mix, and at least in the summer it’s all Mets all the time.

And it’s a real blow. And I feel it very personally.

WCBS closed because the market has changed so profoundly. I grew up with a mother who was very interested in the news and a father who was obsessed by it. We got six daily newspapers, plus weeklies, plus magazines. My father always had a small radio with him, except when he was in the car, when he used the built-in one. (You could always tell that it was him in the shower because you could hear the radio through the door.) The television also always would be on, and if there was any news program anywhere, that’s what he’d be watching, at the same time that he was listening.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, his station was CBS.

He also introduced us to WNYC and through it to NPR, and of course that always was on too, and yes, we developed admittedly one-way relationships to the announcers and reporters there.

But then as now — until Sunday night, that is — when I was driving and got tired of the airless high-mindedness of NPR, when I wanted not to have to listen to the problems of some place that I should care about but don’t, when I wanted to hear people I knew could laugh, I turned — turned — to CBS.

I understand why it’s gone now. There are so many more media available. I am addicted to the one that is most radio-like, except it also offers more control. Podcasts. It’s in your ear, you can develop an again one-way relationship with the podcaster, and if you don’t like it there are hundreds more to choose from.

But WCBS Newsradio 88 was something else.

It was home.

The thing about it was that it was deeply, ineradicably part of this metropolitan area, of New York and New Jersey. It’s not as if the announcers had local accents. They didn’t. But still, somehow, they sounded like here. I have no idea what any of them look like, but their voices are a permanent part of my soundscape.

It was a place where we all could be together for real. There’s nothing Jewish about it — except of course for the large number of Jews who worked there — but we Jews are just as welcome as everyone else. There was something there for everyone. If what was on bored you — if the ads were too loud or too frenetic or too unappealing or just plain too stupid — you just had to wait a few minutes, and everybody would be on to something else.

And the traffic and weather together! My theory is that that’s where the real romance comes in.

I haven’t used radio traffic reports in years. Decades, maybe. Waze is just so much more accurate. It’s so much more precise. It changes often. It can route and reroute (I have no idea how many times I have gotten on the George Washington Bridge from the northbound Henry Hudson Parkway — probably thousands of times — but until Waze told me that I could bypass traffic going to the Cross Bronx by going north to the next exit and then back down a very short distance and getting on the ramp closer to the upper level, I never knew.)

But listening to the helicopter — excuse me, the chopper — pilot naming the roads, I imagine myself there. Like I assume many if not most of our readers, I have family and friends and have lived all over the metropolitan area, so I know those roads and bridges and tunnels and ramps and overpasses.

Of course, many of them have changed, because in reality change is constant.

The George Washington is as stately and stunning as ever; I’ve always imagined its two graceful arches as part of the art in the 1906 children’s book “The Amulet” by E. Nesbit. And the view from the bridge is jaw-dropping.

When we used to drive west on the old Tappan Zee Bridge, it would look like we were about to dive into the water, before we thrillingly skimmed over it. It was beautiful. Its replacement, the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, is elegant — but just last week we learned that there are problems with the anchor pipes that might cost billions of dollars to fix. (Whatever, right?)

The Verazzano Bridge never looks as impressive as the George Washington, but that’s a very high bar. The Goethals Bridge, which used to be a cut-rate industrial-era monstrosity, with narrow lanes, wide trucks, and only two lanes in each direction, became another elegant beauty. And the Outerbridge Crossing, which remains unchanged, still holds the award for silliest bridge name.

So this is what CBS Newsradio 88 did. It opened my imagination. It reminded me of my father. It was familiar, it was in the background, when emergencies happened — September 11, most terribly — or it was time to remember or to celebrate or to mourn, it always was there.

And now it’s gone. Its employees will have to find new jobs. That’s always true when a business closes, but we don’t have the voices of employees of other closed businesses in our ears. And a very particular, very local, truly beloved way of looking at our world is gone too.

I miss it already.

—JP

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