WCBS/880 AM, with laughter and sadness, celebrates its storied history with 3-hour special

WCBS/880 AM held its own wake Thursday, with a three-hour special that spanned decades and included a couple dozen current and former reporters, anchors and newsroom icons.

The tone was celebratory — the undertone far less so — as morning and midday anchors Wayne Cabot, Paul Murnane and Brigitte Quinn led listeners on a sprint down memory lane that stretched back 57 years to 880's launch in 1967.

And for one day only, this very last commemorative special even adopted one (very last) commemorative jingle, lifted straight out of the Joni Mitchell classic "Big Yellow Taxi: " ... Don't it always seem to go/ that you don't know what you've got til it's gone.."

The station — a true New York institution — will be gone for good at 12:01 a.m. Monday, when ESPN New York takes over the signal, and those iconic call letters disappear forever. Under these circumstances, maybe all this wasn't so celebratory after all.

Rich Lamb — the legendary 880 reporter who retired in 2021 after a 43-year ride there — called in from Italy where he was on vacation, to say, "Here we are in Italy, prone to earthquakes, and as far as I'm concerned, WCBS's departure from the scene is a radio earthquake for New York. There will be an indescribable vacuum that will be left behind by [its] absence."

He's certainly right — everyone in the studio Thursday knew he was right too — but Cabot (36 years here) quickly course-corrected: "I want to keep things positive!"

And did. There were a lot of laughs, special guests (Mayor Eric Adams, former Gov. David Paterson), old sound checks, a funny spoof of the Murnane/Cabot team, also a hilarious voicemail from an aggrieved listener sent some years ago complaining about the repeated use of Cabot's name on the air.

It was all insidery, but also deeply felt and terribly familiar — largely because 880 listeners have been on the "inside" after all these decades too. Alex Silverman, a former reporter — reflecting on the countless crises this station has covered — said that "when people are hearing us, they are hearing themselves, and [know] they are not alone, and they are not alone. We were the companion that gave them hope and we believed we'd always be there" for them.

Former CBS News radio chief Harvey Nagler — who retired in 2016 after a 50-year run, including a dozen as 880's program director — responded: "A huge loss to the tristate area."

Just as those famous 880 chimes marked the 1 p.m. hour, Cabot closed the special by telling listeners that parent company Audacy had chosen him to offer a final 15-minute farewell on Sunday — "their mistake," he quipped.

He said he would "be the guy to wrap it up after one hundred years — one hundred years" (WCBS, the station, began in 1924) and that he would prerecord his thoughts "because I can't get through it" live on the air.

Then, one last Cabot-esque quip: "No one will hear it anyway because it'll be in the middle of the night."