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GIBSON RETIRING, LEEDER TO HEAD 'BOARD' MEETINGS
6/17/07

Bob Gibson

Bob Leeder

Former WCBS anchor Bob Gibson has announced his pending retirement to Florida after heading the informal invitation-only semi-annual CBS "Board" meetings since 1993. Replacing Gibson is long-time CBS Radio executive Bob Leeder. The next luncheon is planned for early December.

Gibson has spent forty-five years in the industry, having excelled in a variety of areas including news, sports, business, commercial and promotional voice-over and industrial narration.

He's currently the back-up voice in New York for the CBS Television Network, a position he's held for eleven years. He recently concluded a more than year-long stint hosting the nationally syndicated old-time radio program, Radio Theater and worked five years as a freelance anchor and writer at WOR Radio News. All of this followed nearly two decades at WCBS Newsradio88.

Among the major stories reported by Bob during his career, the first two NBC Radio News bulletins that Richard Nixon would resign the presidency, twice-an-hour Persian Gulf War updates for the CBS Radio owned & operated stations, hourly ABC Radio News updates on the U-S hostage crisis in Iran, on-scene coverage of the Pirates' 1971 world championship and the 1967 Silver Bridge disaster that sent 46 people to their deaths in the Ohio River.

Before returning to WCBS in 1981, Bob was a network hourlies news correspondent for ABC Radio and NBC Radio News in New York and for the Mutual Broadcasting System in Washington, during the Watergate era. He also worked as a freelance anchor/writer at WCBS & WNEW Radio. Prior to that, Bob was the morning anchor at KDKA, Pittsburgh and WGAR in Cleveland following a stint as an afternoon news broadcaster at WSLR in Akron. In the early 80s, Bob anchored morning business updates for The Wall Street Journal Radio Network.

While radio remains his first love, Bob has also done television as an on-camera sports broadcaster at KDKA-TV Pittsburgh and as a news and commercial announcer at WBNS-TV in Columbus and WATR-TV in Waterbury, Connecticut. In more recent years, Bob's done promotional voice-over work for CBS and NBC television, as well as WOR-TV and SportsChannel. He's also been the voice on many of the sequences in the syndicated series Super Bowl Winning Moments and Olympic Winning Moments.

A native New Yorker who now resides in northern New Jersey, Bob earned a Master of Arts degree from Ohio University after doing his undergraduate work at the New York Institute of Technology.

As for Bob Leeder, he's been in the broadcasting business since 1955 when he sold an hour-long program of high school news and sports to a radio station in Providence, his home town, for an organization known as Junior achievement.

Leeder also did weekend announcing and vacation relief announcing at WHMP Northampton, MA while he was a student at Amherst College.

At Amherst, he served the college radio station both on the air and as its Program Director. He also served as Program Director of New York's premier beautiful music stations, WPAT AM & FM, after stints at WPRO, Providence, WACE Chicopee, MA and WJRZ Newark where he co-anchored a morning all-news program called "NBN", "Nothing But News" with Mike Ludlum.

In 1976, Leeder was hired by CBS to get and maintain the programs of the CBS Radio Network on radio stations all across the United States. For 25 years at CBS he traveled to every single state in the United States, except Alaska and Hawaii.

Leeder has taught classes and has lectured to communications students at many institutions including New York University; St. John's University; Montclair State College; William Paterson State College; The College of St. Elizabeth; East Stroudsburg University; and his own Alma Mater, Amherst College.

He has also served as a consultant to several radio stations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, helping the owners of those stations to develop business plans that would insure their profitability. His sales seminar in Yerevan enabled several young people in Armenia to learn skills essential for successful careers in radio and television sales.

Leeder now operates his own audio business providing narrations and presentations for various companies, as well as commercials and image liners for radio stations.

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