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Stan Brooks: Radio
Newsman On the Move By Eve Berliner |
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1010 WINS Senior Correspondent, Stan
Brooks, with then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York,
Rudolph Giuliani, on the steps of the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, New
York City, 1988. |
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By Eve Berliner He’s the voice of the city,
on the move, a part of its pulse, its passion, its tragedies great and small,
ace radio newsman Stan Brooks for over 40 years a part of the city’s very
insides. He was a child of the
Bronx, small and shy, 182nd Street and Walton Avenue home ground, played
in the streets, stickball, hockey (on roller skates), marbles, urban baseball
(against the walls) and for a 13th or 14th birthday,
was given a fortuitous little printing press out of which was born “The
Walton Avenue News,” the inception of his journalistic career. He listened to Uncle Don
and the old radio serial shows, his favorite, NBC’s stentorian-voiced Kenneth
Banghart. His real interest was in the
newspapers that his father would bring home with him each evening: The New York Post, The Journal American,
PM, Compass, Star. He wrote for his high
school newspaper, “The Clinton News”[DeWitt Clinton H.S.], a general news
column entitled, “Babbling Brooks,” which he presented in a Walter Winchell
staccato of dots, dashes and bulletins. His heroes were Lou
Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, the Brooklyn Dodgers and his brother, Alan Brooks,
sports editor of “The Heights Daily
News” at NYU, his inspiration, [now a doctor]. In later years, it would
be the great New York Times reporter Meyer Berger who commanded his high
respect. (“He would dance on tables.”) And then, there was the
trombone (add Tommy Dorsey to that list of idols) which now sits on a stand
in his bedroom, a gift from his three sons who had it repaired, repolished
and relacquered, sitting ready, in suspended animation, for his not imminent retirement when he plans to
seriously return to its study. Brooks had been drafted
out of City College into the Infantry in 1945 landing him overseas post-World War II as a trombonist in a
dance band entertaining the troops in Hawaii!
The aspiring trombonist returned to the states, graduated from Syracuse University and became a reporter and
editor at Newsday for the next 11 years.
His son George, a virtuoso jazz saxophonist, took up the mantle of
music. They were the rock ‘n
roll days of the sixties, 1010 WINS, home of the Top 40 and Murray the K, a
godlike figure known as the 5th Beatle; three big rock stations on the
airwaves: WINS, WABC and WMCA, The
Good Guys, Stan Brooks at the helm as director of news at WINS: “Westinghouse had a
serious commitment to news but disk jockeys like Murray the K didn’t want any news. The December 1962 newspaper strike that
lasted 114 days changed all that. We beefed
up news – ½ hour at 5:30 every evening, the usual 2½ minutes on the hour
raised to five, five minutes on the half hour expanded to ten.” It was the brainchild of
Joel Chaseman, vice president and general manager of WINS, subsidiary of Westinghouse Broadcasting. The
idea had been germinating in his mind for some time. Clandestinely, he came
down to Stan’s office late in 1964. “How about going
all-news?” he asked. “What’s all-news?”
responded Brooks. “I was sworn to secrecy,
a real cloak and dagger kind of situation.
He and I were the only people at the station who knew about this. Didn’t want the disk jockeys to know, the
outside world. One of the networks
might get the early jump on us. It was
a top secret operation.” Brooks surreptitiously
journeyed by train to Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis,
searching for talent, listening to “the morning rush,” amassing a staff of
broadcasters and engineers and formulating a plan for the station: its format, its conception, its
content. It would be a revolution in
news, the immediacy of breaking stories as it happened 24-hours-a day, man in
the street interviews, people who talk like New Yorkers talk, keep the
station sounding like New York. The station signed off
on April 18th as a music
station at 5:30 in the evening and reawakened the next morning as the first
major all-news radio station in the nation:
April 19, 1965. It was the Great
Northeast Blackout of ‘65 that put it on the map and secured its place in history``0.. WINS was the only radio station to stay on
the air. An engineer had managed to
hook up the phone line directly to a transmitter in New Jersey. The studio, on the 19th
floor of 90 Park Avenue, had no lights, no electricity; they worked by candlelight. “Everything had to be
live. You couldn’t record anything. There was no power. Reporters had to go
down 19 flights to get the story and then walk up 19 flights to go on the
air. They did it all night long. Then stations began calling up from all
over. ‘Give us feed on the
blackout. Ready 3…2…1…’ “New York City
was plunged into darkness …” adlibbed Brooks in a night of frenzy to
remember. Six weeks later Mike
Quill took the Transit Workers out on strike, bringing to a halt all subway
and bus service for the subsequent 12 days, the city paralyzed and weary, an
ominous beginning for the mayoralty of John V. Lindsay. WINS became for New
Yorkers the crucial voice in the crisis and even helped facilitate a
settlement by acting as a kind of mediator between Quill and his arch foe
“Lindsley,” both utilizing the air waves to send messages to one another. He has covered the most
significant stories of our time: The
civil rights crises, the Watts riots, the William Calley trial of My Lai
infamy, Chappaquiddick, the turbulent
Vietnam War demonstrations of the 60’s when he was tear-gassed outside the
Justice Department after a tumultuous rally on the Washington mall, the
Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, the bloodbath on the streets, Malcolm
X’s funeral, the Clay Shaw/JFK assassination trial, Hurricane Camille, the
Swiss America plane crash at Peggy’s Cove, Newfoundland, (he was there on
vacation, first reporter on the scene), the crash of TWA Flight 800, Cape
Canaveral, 1967, when Gus Grissom and two other astronauts were killed on the
launch pad in a raging fire – and his six day trip to Saudi Arabia in the
initial days of Desert Storm to cover the Harlem Hell Fighters, National
Guardsmen from the 142nd St. Armory in New York. But it was Attica that
was the most wrenching, the uprising, siege and slaughter inside Attica
Correctional Facility which began on September 9, 1971 and ended four days
later in a barrage of gunfire by New York State Police that left 29 inmates
and 18 hostages dead with 89 wounded, the final storming of the prison at the
behest Governor Nelson Rockefeller after days of tense and unrelenting, but
hopeful, negotiation. “Attica was the most
emotional for several reasons. I was
there for five days outside the prison wall, 4 hours sleep a night, 15/16
hour days. Flew up 12:30 on the first day.
Didn’t leave until 2:30 the next morning. Up again at 5 or 6. The families of both guards and prisoners
gathered at the gates. The prisoners all black and Hispanic from the area,
the guards all white country boys, farm boys from Attica and Batavia. Rumor had it that guards were being held at
knife point and that one had had his throat slashed but it turned out not to
be true. I could feel for
everybody. I wanted to cry for these
people.” “9/11, of course, was
emotional in a different way, stunning, startling, horrific.” Blockaded at Foley
Square by cops who prohibited him from moving closer to the catastrophic
scene, he would witness the exodus of thousands of people from Ground Zero,
the distraught evacuees covered with ash, the firetrucks racing up the
streets spewing the stuff, trucks with searchlights going in, finally finding
a working telephone in a Chinese laundry behind the courthouse, his wife Lynn
frantic as she fled the Municipal Building where she worked, headed uptown
toward home, running into an electronics store in the Village to purchase a
radio, her heart beating profusely until she heard her husband’s voice and
knew he was alive. Through it all, his love
for his work. Stan Brooks, 78 years
of age, a cub reporter at heart, full of energy and radiance, always
searching for the next great story as he oversees the procession of mayors
from Beame to Koch to Dinkins to Giuliani to Bloomberg, from his cat’s eye
vantage point in City Hall. “I have no idea what
each day brings,” Stan Brooks notes quietly, “My life is not my own. Wherever they send me, whatever they want
to do with my body,” he laughs. |
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