A station for the ages
WNED-FM is in the middle of another pledge drive, and it gets me thinking: Wow, this station has a low turnover rate!
I can name so many of their program hosts, right off the top of my head, who have been there something like a quarter of a century. I bet some have been with the station even longer. Stratton Rawson has been there forever. (Mark Goldman, who owns the Allen Street Hardware Company, once said to me, "He's Buffalo's Leonard Bernstein.") Steve Levinthal, I remember his name from way back when I was a teen-ager, I'm pretty sure. And John Landis! If John Landis ever leaves that afternoon slot, it would be traumatic for me, something like the way it was when the Pope John Paul II died and I had never known a different pope.
Recently the station got a new program director, Gabe DiMaio. He succeeds Peter Goldsmith -- who, like so many of his colleagues, had been there for years and years. This is the first switch of program director that I can ever remember, and I would know, because my parents had that station on the whole time I was growing up.
Luckily, Gabe DiMaio is also a familiar name on the local public radio airwaves. We're not used to change and it's good they are going easy on us. All I can think, considering that station's employment record, is that they must be doing something right by their employees. Good pay, good benefits, good employee lunchroom, free beer on Fridays ... something.
I wonder if things will change at all with DiMaio in charge. We will just have to stay tuned.
-- Mary Kunz Goldman
