"Good Just Barely Morning ... "

How WNEW in New York Remade Radio and Became The Place Where Rock Lived: Chapter 13

May 31, 2025

Chapter 13

“We have witnessed this morning ... the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. ... It is no joke. It is a real war.”

— Harry B. Soria Sr., broadcasting the only eye witness account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as it happened over the NBC Red Network, Dec. 7, 1941.

As big a fan as she was of popular music and what it had done for her station, Bernice Judis never lost sight of the fact it was a news event, the Lindbergh baby murder trial, that first opened the door to WNEW's ascent to the top independent radio station in the country.

In her mind, informing the public of important events was a public service, but it took some time before she settled on precisely how she would do it.

To be sure, programming aimed at serving the city's multitude of communities featured prominently in the station's weekly schedule from the very beginning, but even in the mid-1930s, there was a difference between a straight news broadcast and a show that could comfortably fall under the rubric of public affairs.

The latter could feature newsmakers, of course, and could make news depending on what transpired on them; however, they were far from the impartial recitation of the day's events that was coming to define the news at the time.

Helping Judis navigate the nuances early on was John Jaeger, who was officially WNEW's chief announcer, but who's duties and status in the general managers eyes far exceeded his title.

Calm and, in contrast to many of his colleagues, unflappable, Jaeger had no regularly scheduled on-air turf to protect and proved to be a dependable and shrewd sounding board for his volatile boss.

Always dressed in a jacket and tie when he was behind the microphone, his short hair swept to the side with aid of some pomade, he considered so conservative that it came as something of a shock when colleagues he was romantically involved with a young staffer, Evelyn Hassemer, whom he later married.

Together, Judis and Jaeger, whom she affectionately called “squarehead,” due to his level-headed, sage nature, fashioned a schedule of morning, afternoon and early evening newscasts consisting of headlines ripped from the Associated Press wire, sports, weather, and transportation news in the form of reports on ship and zeppelin arrivals.

If the format itself wasn't world-beating — and given that the daily news was being done on a shoe-string — it had little chance of being more at the time — Jaeger quickly distinguished himself, as the voice of big unfolding events.

The first of these was the mysterious Morro Castle disaster. The ocean liner, considered a romantic getaway by some and a festive escape from the depression by all, began its final voyage leaving port in Havana, Cuba bound for New York on Wednesday, September 5, 1934. From the start, the journey was fraught with difficulties.

The first manifested itself on the trip's second day, when the Morro Castle encountered wind and rain of a gathering nor'easter as the vessel hugged the Georgia and Carolina coast.

As the winds increased and rain grew more persistent, many of the 562 people on board, including 318 passengers and a crew of 244, either retired early to their berths or were otherwise below deck.

On the 7th of September, events aboard the Morro Castle took an ominous turn.

Early that evening, 52-year-old Captain Robert Willmott had his dinner delivered to his quarters, and a short time later, called for the ship's doctor complaining of stomach pain. By the time the doctor arrived at the captain's quarters, Willmott was dead, the victim of an apparent heart attack.

A vintage Associated Press wire machine. (Photo by Dan McCue)

Command of the ship passed to Chief Officer William Warms. Meanwhile, Robert Smith, the cruise director, immediately made his way to the ship's Grand Ballroom where he cut the orchestra off in mid-song and informed the passengers there of what had happened.

He also assured them that while the cruise's farewell party and dance content would be canceled out of respect for Willmott, the orchestra would continue to play and the bars remain open for passengers who wished to remain in the ballroom.

As Smith spoke, the gale-force winds buffeting the ship grew in intensity.

It was only hours later, at around 2:50 a.m. on September 8, that a fire was detected in a storage locker below deck in the ship's writing room.

At the time, the Morro Castle was about eight nautical miles off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, not far from the scene of the ocean crash of the U.S.S. Akron, a dirigible, which had caused the death of 73 people a year earlier.

Within minutes, the entire ship was engulfed in flames.

Despite the unfolding calamity, acting Captain Warms initially kept the Morro Castle on its course, pressing on into headwinds at as near as full speed as the ship could reach.

By the time the first distress signal was sent, at 4:30 a.m., George White Rogers, the radio operator initially praised for his heroism in alerting would-be rescuers, most of the 137 passengers and crew members who were ultimately killed in the conflagration were already dead.

In Manhattan, Jaeger was awakened by a phone call shortly before dawn and told to make his way to WNEW’s studios as quickly as possible.

As he sat down to begin telling his early Saturday morning listeners what had occurred, the details coming across the AP wire were scant. It was clear that a heavy loss of life had likely occurred.

The magnitude of confusion and horror aboard the Morro Castle would only be known later, after the first vessels to respond to its distress call arrived on the scene. Even in the murky dawn, it was clear the railing and other parts of the liner had literally melted from the heat.

Already, the rough, gun metal gray seas were carrying debris and some of the dead to the Jersey shore.

In the WNEW studio, Jaeger calmly relayed every detail as it came in, a line of wire type at a time.

In time, his reporting of the disaster of unknown origin turned to the anxious relatives who had nervously begun to gather on the Ward Line pier at the foot of Wall Street on the East River, where the Morro Castle had been scheduled to dock later in the day.

Others, he told his riveted audience, were rushing to Jersey shore communities where they'd heard survivors and the dead had washed ashore.

By mid-morning, he'd reported that every available doctor and nurse was being called upon to aid the dazed survivors and those grieving the dead.

For much of his broadcast, Jaeger had to rely on his own steady judgment to untangle conflicting reports and try to fill the inevitable gaps. But he remained cool under pressure.

Listening in from her apartment, Judis was beyond thrilled.

For Jaeger, however, the day was just getting started.

Because Chief Officer Warms and the crew that had stayed with him on the bridge had died in the fire the Morro Castle was now a ghost ship, and feared headed directly toward the new Asbury Park convention hall, which sat on a pier extending out over the ocean.

If it did, there was no doubt sparks from the ship would ignite the hall and the tourist shops along the boardwalk.

After several anxious hours, the liner ran aground on the Asbury Park beach, where it would remain for several months before eventually being towed off and scrapped.

A shift in the wind, which was blowing offshore when the ship came to rest, saved the resort community from almost certain destruction.

For a few days, Jaeger's tour de force was the talk of the station. He had, through his extended reports and flash update, shattered the mold of the staid and polish "announcer" of the early 1930s and transformed himself into something akin to what would later be called a "newscaster."

For the next 10 years, whenever a big and important story broke, WNEW could depend on Jaeger to handle it.

In December 1936, it was Jaeger who broadcast special reports overnight on the events leading to the abdication of England's King Edward VIII.

The constitutional crisis had gripped the British Empire for months. It was all to do with the fact Edward, who had ascended to the throne 10 months earlier, had announced his intention to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was divorced from her first husband and was pursuing the divorce of her second.

The controversy pitted the unconventional Edward, who already broke with tradition a number of times during his short reign, against Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who flatly told him a marriage to Simpson would not be acceptable to the British people.

Further, as the British monarch, Edward was the nominal head of the Church of England, which did not then allow divorced people to remarry in church if their ex-spouses were still alive.

Then as now, the American public couldn't get enough of it.

Shorting through wire copy from the Associated Press and dispatches broadcast by the BBC, Jaeger coolly described the goings-on as Edward's rule came to an end.

A group of men had gathered in Fort Belvedere, the private get-away of the king, where Edward proceeded to sign the stake of fifteen documents before him. He then relinquished his chair to his brother, Albert, who did the same.

Two others, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and George, Duke of Kent, then signed the documents as witness. With that, the former king stepped outside into the cool morning air.

A few hours later, WNEW and radio stations around the world broadcast his farewell speech.

“At long last I am able to say a few words of my own," Edward, now the Duke of Windsor, said. I have never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has not been constitutionally possible for me to speak.

“A few hours ago I discharged my last duty as King and Emperor, and now that I have been succeeded by my brother, The Duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with all my heart. ...”

Afterward, Jaeger succinctly summed up the day's events.

“King Edward VIII renounced his throne today because the vast empire over which he had ruled for only ten months refused to let him take Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, of Baltimore, as his Queen,” he said.

“The King announced his ‘irrevocable decision’ to abdicate and named his eldest brother the Duke of York, as his successor in a dramatic message which was read to both Houses of Parliament this afternoon.”

Aside from all this, Jaeger was a sound judge of talent.

Among his first hires for the growing news department was Earl Harper, the station's first sportscaster.

Although he was hired to cover baseball and required to file timely reports on the Jersey City Giants of the International League, and later, the Newark Bears of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, Harper did not travel with the teams for road games.

Instead, he relied on telegraph reports of the games, reconstructing his play-by-play as the reports came in. For the sounds of the game, he relied on the most rudimentary effects. The most famous example is his practice of snapping a wooden matchstick in front of the microphone.

“There's the crack of the bat,” Harper would exclaim excitedly. “It's a single up the right field line.”

And he wasn’t above being a light-hearted pitchman, telling the listeners of Newark Bears games, whose broadcasts were co-sponsored by General Mills, that “WNEW” stood for “We Newarkers East Wheaties.”

In addition to his game day duties, Harper also served as host of WNEW's daily sports roundup at 6 p.m.

When the success of “Milkman's Matinee” proved not to be a fluke, Jaeger oversaw a further expansion of the newsroom. Among his first and best hires this time around was Richard Brooks, who was brought on board to handle the 5:45 p.m. newscast and an 8:45 p.m. commentator spot.

Born Reuben Sax, the son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Brooks was hired in part because his athletic good looks and lively intelligence intrigued Judis.

A former baseball player at Temple University, Brooks dropped out of college when he discovered his parents were going into debt to pay his tuition.

With little in the way prospects around his native Philadelphia, Brooks lived the vagabond's life for a time, riding freight trains around the East and Midwest.

At the time, whole families, displaced by the depression, were hopping freight trains, and Brooks, who had an inkling of an interest in writing, quickly recognized their stories could be his means of survival.

Hopping off a train in Pittsburgh, he made his way straight to the nearest newspaper office, where he found immediate interest in how the displaced lived on the rails and the conditions they were encountering.

Brooks also realized there was a disconnect between those who rode the rails and who didn't.

If you'd never tried to jump a freight train, you naturally assumed the challenge was getting on the train. “No,” Brooks explained. “The real problems begin as soon as you get off, and need to find a place to eat and sleep.”

“Every town, every city, wants you out,” he said.

The editor for the Pittsburgh paper paid Brooks a dollar and a half for the first newspaper story the young man before him had ever written.

The next stop was St. Louis, where Brooks promptly sold the same article to the city's Post-Dispatch for four dollars.

It was also while riding the rails that he had an encounter with a stranger that solidified his choice of career.

Winter was approaching and Brooks wanted to head to the warmer South. The problem was knowing which train was headed in that direction. Trains appeared to be heading South all the time, but oftentimes changed direction. Some only as far as the other side of the rail yard.

Spying an older, bedraggled man who was walking between trains and referring repeatedly to the pair of watches he alternately took from his pockets, Brooks approached.

After conferring about the possibility of catching a train to the Gulf Coast, the two settled into small talk.

Brooks, embroidering his experience, told the man he was a writer.

“A writer?” the man said, eyeing his new acquaintance.

“Well, have you ever read Dostoevski?” the man asked.

“I think I read part of one of his novels, yeah,” Brooks said.

“Ever read Tolstoy? Whitman?” the man asked.

“Well, kind of,” Brooks said.

“Well, you ain’t a writer yet. You gotta read 10,000 words for every one you write. Maybe then you’ll become a writer,” the man said before they parted forever.

When Brooks finally returned home, he found steady work as a full-time newspaper reporter, then jumped to WNEW when it offered him a higher salary.

His star rose quickly, so much so that when Columbia Pictures feted CBS's H.V. Kaltenborn, then the high priest of American radio commentators, in the fall of 1939 for his cameo, as himself, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” WNEW's commentator was among select few invited to attend the private luncheon and movie preview.

It was also while working for WNEW that Brooks began writing plays, a pursuit that eventually led him, along with Allen Courtney and David Lowe, respectively the station's theater and movie critics, to buy a summer theater in Roslyn, N.Y.

The partnership would be short-lived. After a falling out with his partners over Brooks' desire to direct the summer of 1940’s main offering, the newsman and commentator took off for Los Angeles on a whim.

Deciding to stay, he quickly landed a job with NBC radio in Los Angeles and began writing every play he could.

Eventually, he’d come to be known as screenwriter, film director, novelist and film producer.

Nominated for eight Oscars in his career, he's best remembered today for his work on the films “Blackboard Jungle,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ,” “Elmer Gantry,” “In Cold Blood,” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

In an interview late in his career he said he thought of himself as a writer first and foremost.

“Directing is only writing with a camera,” he said. “Editing is writing. Scoring is writing. it all has to do with a story. How to tell a story.”

It was Brooks' handling of one story in particular at WNEW that placed him at the center of an unspooling global drama.

The historic “Time Zone Clock” in the lobby of the New York Daily News Building. (Photo by Dan McCue)

Bernice Judis had been of two minds about how to deal with what was, in 1937 and 1938, still known as the growing “European crisis.”

On the one hand, she was already claiming to employ the largest number of newscasters on any New York station, and she expected that team to report on everything of note from the continent.

On the other, she had a very real sense of WNEW's audience wrung out and weary from the depression. The last thing anybody needed was to be hit over the head with more bad news.

Now that things were getting somewhat better, wasn't it finally time to lighten up?

As a business woman, Judis’ first inclination was to place an emphasis on escapism. In full page newspaper ads, she emphasized WNEW's music over its other offerings.

Then the dark clouds that were extending over Europe reached her front door.

Though it's largely forgotten today, there was a point in the mid-to-late 1930s when certain German-American neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Long Island were hotbeds of Nazi activity and support.

In November, 1934, less than a year after WNEW had gone on the air, a “Friends of the New Germany” gathering drew thousands from all over the East Coast to the second largest of New York's five boroughs.

A year later, the New York World Telegram reported there were as many as 1,100 Nazis living in Ridgewood, Brooklyn, though the article stressed most saw their membership in the Friends of the New Germany and the breakaway American National Socialists League, as being in just another social club.

The same newspaper later reported that for those with no interest in spreading Nazi propaganda, there were other motivations to join; one was to protest the American boycott of German goods and services. The other was the extensive program of athletic and other activities the groups offered.

Camp Siegfried, for instance, in Yaphank, Long Island, offered card-carrying Fascist to take in the sea air and relax or compete in events. According to a report prepared for the Brookhaven Town Board, some 3,000 to 5,000 people visited the camp each summer weekend, many of them exchanging Nazi salutes as they disembarked at the Yaphank train station.

Though many were disturbed by these activities, few took a stand against them. One was Brooklyn's long-serving congressman, Rep. Emanuel Celler, who appeared on CBS radio in March 1938 to express his alarm over the spread of the Nazi ideology in the U.S.

Americans were being “duped” he said, being spoon-fed “a sugar-coated” form of the hateful political philosophy.

Also, fighting back was Charles Weiss, editor of an anti-Nazi magazine published in Brooklyn. In April 23, 1938, Weiss was found badly beaten in a back office at the Anti Communist Anti-Fascist and Anti-Nazi League on Flatbush Avenue.

Weiss told the police he was alone in the building near the Long Island Rail Road station when four men “of German appearance” broke in, pinning his arms behind his back, and demanded that he kiss a small Nazi flag.

When he refused, the intruders beat him nearly senseless and etched swastikas into his back. Before they left, they trashed his office thoroughly.

At WNEW, Richard Brooks, a Jew himself, was incensed. As he sat down to write the commentary he would deliver on Sunday night, April 25, 1937, he was determined to let Adolph Hitler and his followers know exactly what he thought of them.

As much as he would later want to, he couldn't say he was shocked with the results. By letter and telephone call, outraged listeners threatened him with beatings and boycotts. So bad and so insistent were the threats that the station was forced to arrange for a police escort to accompany the newsman to and from the station. The protection lasted for weeks.

About the same time that Brooks ran afoul with the Nazi's, Martin Block unwittingly plunged the “Make Believe Ballroom” into the armed conflict that had recently broken out between Japan and China.

The start of the second Sino-Japanese War had largely been overshadowed in the New York newspapers by the disappearance and search for the aviator Amelia Earhart near a tiny atoll in the far eastern Pacific.

As the war escalated, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union intervened, sending aid to China to keep up its side of the fight. As it had with Germany, the U.S. also imposed a boycott of Japanese goods.

Into this situation walked Martin Block.

Block himself never explained why he courted the controversy that followed. It began with his playing two records by a singer Midge Williams, renditions of two American popular songs — "Lazy Bones" and "Sugarfoot Stomp" — in Japanese.

By 1938, Williams was signing with Louis Armstrong's band, but the recordings Block featured in April of that year were more than four years old, having been recorded when Williams was on tour of the Far East with her first band, the Williams Quartette.

Before the records had ended, the telephones at WNEW were ringing off the hook, irate callers accusing Block of ignoring the boycott and other pro-Japanese activity.

Judis, who loved publicity, wasn't thrilled by the attention it was now receiving.

No doubt she longed for days when the publicity Block generated was of a far tamer variety.

Like the time, two years earlier, when he and the Ballroom inadvertently came to the aid of a young man accused of being a pickpocket.

His alibi was that he was home at the time, listening to the show, describing how Guy Lombardo, who was to appear on Make Believe Ballroom, was unable to keep the engagement and sent a telegram, which was read on the air. His story was verified and all charges were dropped.

The world was becoming a much more complicated place.

Sunday, December 7, 1941, was slated to be a big day for WNEW-AM. The previous Monday the station had moved to 1130 on the AM dial, and in the process committed itself to broadcasting 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

It was partly cloudy and seasonably cold as WNEW-AM listeners began their Sunday morning with recorded music. The presentation was followed by a news broadcast at 9:45 a.m.

The rest of the day was to follow much the same pattern, long stretches of music interspersed with news and commentary until the caper of the evening, a live broadcast of the Jimmy Dorsey dance band from the Meadowbrook Ballroom in Cedar Grove, New Jersey.

Everything changed shortly after 2 p.m., when Harry Soria, Sr., of the NBC radio affiliate in Honolulu made an urgent phone call to New York and began to describe the unfolding attack on Pearl Harbor.

Within minutes, H. V. Kaltenborn, who had moved from CBS to NBC in 1940, was telling his shocked listeners “Japan has made war against the United States without declaring it ... airplanes, presumably from aircraft carriers, have attacked Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and Manila, the capital of the Philippines.”

In New York, WOR-AM broke into the Giants football game it was broadcasting. At WNEW an announcer interrupted the playing of Xavier Cugat's Latin orchestra. Everywhere, the initial reports were the same.

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin. ... Flash. Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned for further developments ... “

Though WNEW went back to music, playing everything from Dinah Shore to Gene Autry to Phil Spitnalny's All-Girl Orchestra, Jaeger and the WNEW team converged on the station and repeatedly cut into the day's program with updates and bulletins.

The Jimmy Dorsey broadcast saw 42 such interruptions during the one-hour program, six of them coming during his solo feature, “Finger Bustin.’” In frustration, he finally ceded to the inevitable, and led the band into an impromptu version of “The Star Spangled Banner” before leaving the stage.

The following Wednesday, under the headline “Japs Timed Well for WNEW,” Variety reported the station “enjoyed a break” in that the attack transpired on the very day it began full-time Sunday broadcasts.

For Christmas, Judis gave everyone on staff two weeks’ pay as a Christmas bonus. To a chosen few, she mentioned she'd have a major announcement to make after the first of the year.

WNEW was about to become the first radio station in the country to broadcast news every hour, 24 hours a day.

The decision apparently had been made while American ships still smoldered in their slips in Hawaii.

Listening to the urgency of the reporting her station was doing all that Sunday, she evidently paced the floor of her apartment.

“We've got to have more news,” she told her staff early that evening. “People are in this war now. America is in this war.”

On February 16, 1942, at 12:30 a.m., WNEW began broadcasting hourly news summaries prepared by the New York Daily News, the city's best-selling newspaper.

The five-minute long dispatches were prepared by a staff of 12 at the paper, transmitted to the radio station by teletype and read by staff announcers. In return, the newspaper would receive extraordinary free advertising.

“Under the schedule, the station will for the first time cut into its ‘Make Believe Ballroom’ with something other than music,” Variety noted.

Nobody alive 80-plus years later knows why Judis decided to broadcast the hourly news on the half-hour. Over the intervening years, different rationales were suggested. One was that she believed most people made business appointments on the hour and would be leaving in time to catch the news a half hour later.

Others believed she simply liked the symmetry with the station's new frequency: “News coming up at 2:30 on your clock, 1130 on the dial.”

In any case, she did have news and commentary on the hour in the evenings. The show, which was broadcast nightly at 7 p.m., was hosted by what some took to be a newcomer to the station — one George Brooks. In actuality, it was John Jaeger, once again in the midst of breaking news, only this time under a pseudonym.

Other stations inked similar deals. In fact, WMCA, one of WNEW's chief competitors at the time, beat it to the punch by launching three-minute newscasts on the hour in partnership with the New York Times.

But Judis was the only one to do news day, night and overnight, an important distinction when the events one covered were half a world and many time zones away.

The arrangement with the Daily News would last until 1958, when WNEW replaced the "offshore" newscasts with its own full-fledged news department.

Main photo: The famous globe in the lobby of The New York Daily News Building in New York. (Photo by Dan McCue)