WCBS/880 AM held its own wake Thursday, with a three-hour special that spanned decades and included a few dozen current and former reporters, anchors and newsroom icons.
The tone was celebratory – the undertone far less so – as morning and midday presenters Wayne Cabot, Paul Murnane and Brigitte Quinn took listeners on a journey down memory lane, stretching back 57 years to the launch of 880 in 1967.
And for one day only, this very last memorial special even featured a (very last) memorial jingle taken directly from the Joni Mitchell classic “Big Yellow Taxi”: “…Ain’t it always like you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone…”
The station – a true New York institution – will be gone for good at 12:01 a.m. Monday, when ESPN New York takes over the signal and the iconic call letters disappear forever. Under the circumstances, perhaps the whole thing wasn’t so celebratory after all.
Rich Lamb – the legendary 880 reporter who retired in 2021 after 43 years there – called from Italy, where he was vacationing, to say, “Here we are in Italy, a country prone to earthquakes, and as far as I’m concerned, WCBS’s departure from the scene is a radio earthquake for New York. Its absence will leave an indescribable vacuum.”
He’s certainly right about that – and everyone in the studio knew he was right on Thursday – but Cabot (here for 36 years) was quick to correct course: “I want to keep things positive!”
And that’s what it did. There were lots of laughs, special guests (Mayor Eric Adams, former Governor David Paterson), old sound checks, a funny parody of the Murnane/Cabot team, and also a hilarious voicemail from an angry listener who complained about the repeated use of Cabot’s name on the radio a few years ago.
It was all insider knowledge, but also deeply felt and terribly familiar – especially because 880 listeners were still “inside” after all these decades. Alex Silverman, a former reporter, said looking back on the countless crises that this station has covered: “When people hear us, they hear himself, and (know) that they are not alone, and they are not alone. We were the companion who gave them hope and we believed we would always be there for them.
Former CBS News radio chief Harvey Nagler, who retired in 2016 after 50 years in the job, including 12 years as program director of 880, reacted: “A huge loss for the tri-state region.”
As the famous 880 chimes marked the 1 p.m. hour, Cabot ended the special by telling listeners that parent company Audacy had chosen him to deliver a final 15-minute farewell on Sunday – “their mistake,” he joked.
He said he would be “the one who finishes the matter after a hundred years – one hundred years(WCBS, the station, launched in 1924) and that he pre-recorded his thoughts “because I can’t get through” live on the air.
Then one last Cabot-esque joke: “Nobody will hear it because it will be the middle of the night.”
