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BLACK ROCK AND BRADLEY
EARLY DAYS WITH ED BRADLEY AND WCBS
by Don Swaim

William S. Paley, founder of CBS, was a broadcast legend, so one can imagine the thrill I felt when he actually spoke to me not long after I was hired as a news editor for the network’s first all-news radio operation. I was in the lobby of Black Rock just about to enter an express elevator that went to the twentieth floor (where the 51/20 Club, the company’s stylish cafeteria, was located), and then became a local to the thirty-ninth floor. As I reached the elevator, the easily recognizable Mr. Paley, holding briefcases in both hands, also entered. There were just the two of inside as the elevator doors closed.
      In words that I’ll never forget, Mr. Paley said to me, “Will you please press thirty-seven.”
      Astutely, I answered, “Yes, sir.”
      We rose in silence until I exited on the twentieth floor, sheepishly aware of how awkwardly I had conducted myself — too intimdated to press the elevator button for a man with both hands full.

Paley

Black Rock

      The building was thirty-eight stories, but Mr. Paley’s office was on thirty-seven. He was a collector of expensive art, and the legend goes that he was afraid the building’s roof might leak and damage his paintings, so he put the corporate lawyers on the top floor.
      The CBS Building, an elegant skyscraper designed by Eero Saarinen, was known as Black Rock for its beautiful dark granite facade — sometimes cynically mentioned in the same breath as the film noir Western Bad Day at Black Rock. It’s now a designated New York City landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

ADDENDUM from Tom Foty, CBS News, Radio: I got about 15 minutes with Paley at the opening of the Museum of Broadcasting, which he helped bankroll and which is now named for him. This was around 1975 and his surprising familiarity with my [then] employer, UPI Audio, leads me to suspect he was more than just a passive, but devoted, listener to WCBS.

I first met Ed Bradley, much later of CBS’s “60-Minutes” fame, in 1967, the year we both began at WCBS. He came up from Philly, I from Baltimore. Bradley was about five years younger and intimidating, some six-feet tall with an Afro and long sideburns.


a youthful Bradley
      While television had relegated radio primarily to a format of recorded music, AM radio managed to remain an important presence. FM hadn’t fully developed, and there was no internet, no live streaming, no YouTube, no social media. Mr. Paley’s decision to launch all-news radio in New York to compete with Westinghouse’s WINS was a major deal, requiring a commitment of millions of dollars. The chairman was quoted as saying of WCBS, “It’s the station I listen to.” (Eventually, most of the network’s owned-and-operated stations switched to all-news.) At the time, the station was a poorly-rated hodgepodge of music, talk, and an afternoon news broadcast with Kenneth Banghart called “Up to the Minute.” Sports-legend Pat Summerall anchored morning drive, Arthur Godfrey aired in the mornings (one of the last vestiges of network radio), and American Airlines’ “Music ’Til Dawn” was heard at night.


click to enlarge
      CBS went all out, hiring scores of new reporters, anchors, editors, and writers. I was part of that wave. Initially hired as a news editor, I had a number of assignments over the years, including writer, producer, reporter, and anchor.
      Originally, we had three news directors, one of them, Ed Joyce, later became President of CBS News. (The others were Marvin Friedman and Dick Reeves.) Joyce was the one who offered me my job.
      After driving up from Baltimore, dirty, sweaty, and late for my initial interview because I had to change a flat tire on the New Jersey Turnpike, I started work a few weeks before the actual all-news sign-on date on August 28, 1967. But the night before the debut, a small plane crashed into the station’s transmitter tower on High Island in Long Island Sound, killing the two people on board, and knocking the station off the air.

As I woke up in the morning, I wondered why I couldn’t pick up the station in my spartan room at the shabby Earle Hotel in the Village. Charles Osgood and Lou Adler were scheduled to be morning-drive’s first anchors. When I reported to work later that day, as afternoon-drive news editor, I then learned about the calamity. Because of heroic work by the technical staff, the station was able to transmit on WCBS-FM, but as FM was not fully established, the debut audience was negligible. The FM side had been airing an automated format of canned popular music called “The Young Sound.”
      The afternoon producer was Jerry Levin (whose ordeal in Lebanon as a kidnap victim of Hezbollah gunmen was made into a TV film) and I as news editor; in the mornings it was Mike Ludlum (later news director) as producer and Al Wasser, editor. (Broadcast historians note: the distinguished Al Wasser at WNEW Radio and at network position elsewhere, was a college classmate of mine and was not the same Wasser at WCBS.)
      The station’s all-news format grew gradually from daytime, to evening, and finally to overnights, which had been programming “Music till Dawn.” By the time the operation went to news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the newsroom staff had swollen to about a hundred people, including freelancers, with more than forty technicians. Such a sizeable staff would eventually prove to be unsustainable. Plus, because of the AFTRA contract, the network’s staff announcers were required to deliver a live station break every half hour. That’s literally all they did, a demeaning downfall for the voices who once commanded the airwaves in radio’s heyday. In addition, each shift had a “director” who sat next to the technicians in the control room, and whose duties were vague. One of them, Howard Stringer, rose in the ranks to become President of CBS News.
      When the station first went all-news, the only major sponsors were Carvel ice cream, and, as I recall, a sleazy men’s wear firm that peddled cheap suits using a nasally-impaired announcer who was so bad the spots were likely to have been read by the sponsor himself. Tom Carvel’s gravelly voice touting his own "creamy-dreamy" ice cream wasn’t much better.


WCBS newsroom — no computers, miles of paper
      The newsroom initially utilized a horseshoe arrangement, with the editor in the middle and several writers circling it. I was one of the few new hires with a broadcast journalism background, which is why I got the editing job over my more experienced journalistic peers. Still in my twenties, I’d been Supervising News Editor at WMAR-TV, Channel 2, the CBS affiliate owned by the Baltimore Sun. There, we had a newsroom of, probably, fewer than twenty, including cameramen. By the same token, we only had two newscasts a day, at 6:00 and 11:00.
      In New York, the writers I found myself working with were primarily newspapermen, most of whom seemed to lack the fundamentals of broadcast writing. They would frequently hand me — often late — typewritten, verbose gibberish that even they didn’t understand. A good number were short on the ability to truncate their writing to its basic relevance, and seemed to have little concept of time as it related to broadcasting. That it was a nightmare to edit their copy can’t be overstated.
      Little doubt, many of those I first worked with in those days found me an irritating, editorial crank. Should any still survive, I hope there are no hard feelings. However, there was and is — even in broadcast writing — a requirement for proper punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax, which must be understandable enough for the poor on-air person to read intelligently. For example, no self-respecting newspaper writer would ever substitute standard punctuation, such as a period or comma, with a succession of dots, whatever they were supposed to mean. Plus, broadcast writers needed to possess at least some ability to watch the clock and frame his or her copy appropriately, not to mention handing it in on deadline.

At first, there was but one woman in the newsroom, Mary Pangalos, who was a street reporter. After she left to work in the PR department at JCPenney, whose headquarters building was across the street, it took years before women were recognized equally in all positions in the newsroom.
      Later, I moved from editor to producer, but more and more the station began to call on me as a reporter and anchor, usually weekends and fill-in, in which I was, to be candid, inferior compared to the majority of our brilliant air people. Almost everyone on the air had a news beat, and at one point I began covering books and authors, a major interest of mine, and, because of the then broad-minded news management (predominately Lou Adler and Mike Ludlum), it became a three-times-a-day news feature that aired both locally and in limited syndication by the CBS Radio Stations News Service.
      One impressive perk was the fact that CBS had a doctor and nurses on duty at Black Rock, where the AM, FM, and radio syndication facilities occupied the 16th and 17th floors. Having a doctor on duty was handy. One could take eye exams there for the Department of Motor Vehicles and get inoculations necessary for difficult overseas travel. It could also be abused. Staffers would often go to the doctor or a nurse complaining of illness and be given a note to take to the boss sending them home.
      One newswriter did just that one morning, and I had to scramble to find a last-minute replacement for her. I was working on the desk at the time and my shift ended at noon, after which I hopped the subway down to the DMV in lower Manhattan to renew my driver’s license. Who should I see waiting in line ahead of me? Yes, the same newswriter who had had a miraculous recovery.
      Still another perk was the CBS Store, which offered substantial discounts to CBS employees on all sorts of products generated by CBS-owned entities: Columbia Records, Steinway pianos, Fender guitars, Creative Playthings, Fawcett magazines, Holt, Rinehart and Winston books, etc. The store was a popular place during the holidays.

      When I first began, the desk assistants were little more than chattel, required to run personal errands despite how petty or for whom. On one occasion, after the phones remained unanswered and the wire copy uncleared from the huge double banks of teletype machines, the absentee DA told me the anchorman had ordered him to run down to the first-floor newsstand to buy cigarettes. Annoyed, I declared that, on my watch, DAs would no longer run personal errands. Despite a backlash, the management backed me, for which all subsequent DAs should be eternally grateful as it carried forward to all the shifts. Sometimes, even in a pressure-filled newsroom brimming with egotism, self-importance, and turf preservation, the underdogs won. Incidentally, the squad of desk assistants WCBS employed over the years was indispensable, and it’s doubtful the station could have functioned without them.
      Money seemed to be no obstacle as the station expanded, especially as the ratings gradually improved, although I don’t think we ever beat our primary competitor, WINS, which had both a smaller staff and a lesser product, or WOR, an ungainly behemoth whose programing attracted a faithful older audience. On one holiday event, it was said, WCBS shelled out $50,000 to rent the entire Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center for a holiday party, which featured a big-name band for entertainment.

One Christmas Day I was on the desk and Ed Bradley was our sole early-shift reporter. Scrounging for stories to cover, I found one that I thought had some human interest. Small Christmas baskets of candy, cookies, and trinkets were being given away by a generous donor to all the inmates at Rikers Island. Bradley had already developed a reputation as being difficult to work with, so those of us who made assignments had to tread carefully. Assignment people were, on paper, in charge. But air people, like Bradley or Tony Brunton, regularly swung their weight. They certainly made more money.
      When I asked Bradley to go to Rikers to cover the story, he balked, as usual, but I painted an emotional picture of the grim prison walls and how they contrasted with the pathetic little cheer the baskets might provide. Bradley didn’t want to go, and bitched and moaned, but he finally went, and, my shift over, I, thankfully, went home. That evening, I turned on the station, and heard Bradley’s reports from Rikers. They were excellent. Exactly what I wanted — a charming holiday story, which showed Bradley had it in him to do the work if he wanted to.
      The station hadn’t planned to cover the Woodstock music festival in 1969, but when we got word of the hundreds of thousands of people jamming the area, we sent Bradley upstate by helicopter, which was the only way to get in. I don’t know when Bradley’s infatuation with music, notably jazz, began, but I suspect Woodstock may have had something to do with it.

ADDENDUM from Gary Maurer, retired WCBS reporter/anchor: They sent me up to Woodstock, too, with my tech George Selinger. but since I was lower in the pecking order, we DROVE up in the WCBS mobile unit and wound up in the middle of the crowds, finally temporarily abandoning the mobile unit and walking in carrying our equipment. Since we were out of range of WCBS, I eventually filed my reports using a phone at the first radio station I worked for as a dj, WVOS in Liberty, NY, just down the road from Grossinger's.

In 1970, a young man named Michael James Brody, Jr., surfaced in New York claiming to have inherited twenty-five million dollars as the result of a trust fund set up by John F. Jelke, a Chicago oleomargarine millionaire. Brody announced that he was giving away his fortune to anyone who needed it, and passed out his phone number and home address in Scarsdale, which turned out to be a small rental. He and his bride, a woman he’d met just three weeks before, went on a honeymoon in Jamaica, returning home on a Pan Am 707 on which he bought out all the seats for seven thousand dollars.


      True to his word, Brody, who was twenty-one, began handing out cash and writing checks, as well as IOUs if he was temporarily out of cash. For the purpose of dispensing funds he set up an office on Broadway which was flooded with money seekers.
      This was such a frenzy of a story that we dispatched Bradley to cover it, and for him it became a full-time assignment. When Brody and some of his friends flew off on a charter flight to Puerto Rico, Ed flew with them. However, cracks in the Brody story had already appeared. His bank revealed that Brody didn’t have enough money in his accounts to cover his checks, and he had been using a line of credit. Brody’s family revealed that he had nowhere near twenty-five million, that his inheritance was less than one million.
      But Bradley wasn’t reporting any of this. He had somehow gotten so involved with Brody, who not only appeared to have mental problems but, as it later turned out, was on drugs. When Brody disappeared, so did Bradley, who had become part of Brody’s entourage, and had even been driving him around.
      These were the days before cellphones so those of us on the desk had to wait for the reporters to call in. When Bradley finally phoned from San Juan, I told him about Brody’s bounced checks and exaggerations, and that the whole affair appeared to be fraudulent, and asked him to get Brody’s side of the story. Bradley was unresponsive, and to my knowledge, he never asked Brody directly about the situation.
      It was an example of a reporter getting too close to a story to be objective, and in Bradley’s case he was likely was fueled by the same drugs Brody was using. I urged management to take Bradley off the story, which, eventually, it did. If management penalized Bradley in any way for blowing the story, I never heard about it. Michael Brody had a number of psychiatric episodes after this, was arrested for threatening the life of President Nixon, and shot himself to death in 1973. There’s a book about Brody called Oleomargarine Heir, which is posted on the internet, and Bradley figures in it.

There were rumors that Bradley had some sort of an affair with an attractive young woman named Jessica Savitch, who was working in an administrative assistant position, such as filing scripts and answering phones. Jessica had taken a basic writers test on two or three occasions but failed each one. However, apparently based on her CBS resume, she landed a job as a TV anchor in Houston before being hired by NBC News. Jessica told me she’d also been offered a job at Channel 2, my old station in Baltimore, but opted to take the Houston gig instead. I was happy to hear of her success in both Houston and in New York, but was shocked to learn of her death by drowning when her car accidentally backed into the Delaware Canal in Bucks County. Gwenda Blair’s bio of Jessica, Almost Golden, suggests little was golden about her personal life, nor was her career at NBC.
      Ed quit WCBS in 1971, I’m not sure why, but I heard he’d gone to Paris, where he was working as a stringer for CBS News.
      In 1972, I went to Paris as a tourist, and decided to call Ed to see if we could get together for lunch or drinks. Because of Vietnam, the United States was highly unpopular at the time and CBS security warned its employees traveling overseas not to publicly display any items with the CBS logo for their own safety. Having the phone number of the CBS Bureau, I went into a Paris bistro to use the payphone in back. I had plenty of French coins, but no matter which coin I used it wouldn’t fit properly into the phone’s slot. Finally, I found one that almost did, and jammed it into the slot about half way when it got stuck. I tried to remove it but the sucker wouldn’t budge. I slunk out of the bar too embarrassed to tell the bartender I had wrecked his phone. How was I to know that with French payphones you had to use a token. At any rate, I ran out of time in Paris, so never did catch up with Ed.


      Several years later, when Ed was back in the States and working for CBS News, he dropped into the station to say hello. We had an amiable chat. It was the last time I saw him, and I was saddened to hear of his death at the age of sixty-five in 2006.

WCBS, billing itself as Newsradio 88 or News88, depending on who was in charge, endured ratings slides up and down, periodic management turnover, newsroom and studio relocations, staff cuts, and changes in corporate ownership. Some of the station’s newsroom leadershop were great, others questionale. For example, the time a new management team decided to broadcast live the Fourth of July fireworks display over New York Harbor. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve seen nothing until you’ve seen a fireworks display on the radio.
      After William Paley’s semi-retirement and eventual death, the company came under the control of Wall Street investor Laurence Tisch, who slashed the payroll and disposed of the company’s various divisions. A game of corporate musical chairs ensued, and the company was sold to Westinghouse, which pawned off the radio division to Infinity Broadcasting. Viacom bought the TV side from Westinghouse while Infinity unloaded the radio division to a conglomerate called Entercom, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Yet WCBS, as a station, has prevailed.
      Fortunately, by that time, I had left the business to write full time. Nevertheless, for me it had been a decent run with one of America’s great broadcast news entities and with some of the world’s best journalists, and for that I have no regrets — and a gold watch to show for it.
      While I never did have another conversation with Mr. Paley, he graciously inscribed to me a copy of his autobiography: