A Happy and Sad Anniversary

As the longest tenured and clearly oldest person still directly associated with WOBM I feel a responsibility to comment on the significance of today’s date.

It was on March 1, 1968 that Ocean County’s first commercial radio station made its debut and legend has it that on air personalities were reading school closings and delays on the very first day because of a snow storm.  55 years later much has changed…it would take hours to talk about them.  About the only constant has been that 92.7FM has been a trusted friend to many over the years.  As one who has been here for almost 44 of them WOBM has been an integral part of my life in so many ways…one day I will indeed take a stroll down memory lane.

Actually I am doing that today.  While March 1^st will always be a nice reminder of the radio station’s anniversary it is also a very sad reminder that it was on this date five years ago that Bob Levy passed away.  If you have only listened in recent years you likely have no idea of who and what he was.  Bob was the original Sales Manager and Sports Director and began working before the roof was on our building in Bayville which was our home for more than four decades. It was later in life that he would become a broadcasting legend.  For many years he was Ocean County’s Sunday morning institution through his immensely popular “Topic A” program and he even co-hosted a weekday morning show on our AM station with his wife Marianne.  While many thought of him as being “gruff” on the air he had a heart of gold and helped a countless number of individuals and groups with charitable efforts.  No surprise he was among the first class of inductees into the New Jersey Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

I’m still confused as to whether Bob’s death on the 50^th anniversary of the radio station he helped build was a strange coincidence or a message of some kind. I choose to believe the later although I’m not sure what the message was.  I do know we lost an icon and I lost a close friend, mentor and confident.  He may be gone but Bob Levy is certainly not forgotten.