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Newsman takes layoff in stride
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Veteran local radio newsman John Nagy reflects on his 40-year career with WKBN radio. He was told Tuesday, April 28, that his position had been eliminated.
By Don Shilling
After 40 years of morning updates on the radio, John Nagy was furloughed in a cost-cutting move.
Many area radio listeners awoke to find something missing Wednesday: the deep and reassuring voice of John Nagy.
Instead of preparing the morning’s news on WKBN 570 as he had done for 40 years, Nagy was getting ready to baby-sit his grandchildren. The veteran newscaster was laid off the day before as part of a larger cost-cutting move by the station’s parent company, Clear Channel.
Nagy was hired at the station in 1969 and has been reporting the morning news ever since, except for a six-month stint in the sales department in 1981.
Nagy, 60, was in a bright mood Wednesday and said he doesn’t consider himself unemployed. Instead, he calls it “pre-retirement.”
“I was looking forward to the day when I could take my running shoes off. It just came at a different time,” he said.
His wife, Pauline, is a teacher at St. Charles School in Boardman, and they have four grown children, three grandchildren and one on the way.
Clear Channel, which also operates MIX 98.9, 1390 WNIO, BIG 106.1, 95.9 KISS-FM and 93.3 NCD, isn’t providing details on the layoffs. Nagy said other people also lost their jobs, but he didn’t know how many.
Besides handling newscasts on WKBN from 5:30 to 10 a.m., Nagy was news director and also prepared the news for some of the other stations.
He said he appreciated the opportunity to do something he loved for so long.
“I had the privilege of having a front-row seat to the goings-on in our community, state and national governments,” he said.
Topping the list of memorable news events in his mind was the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard in 1970. He recalls feeling stunned as he covered the funeral of one of the victims.
He also remembers the long hours he worked covering the destruction delivered by the 1985 tornadoes and the closing of the steel mills in the Mahoning Valley in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“People say the news media delivers nothing but bad news, but we were just grasping for any little bit of hope in those days,” he said.
Nagy was a high school student when he started as a weekend DJ and news reporter for WPIC. His first full-time job in news came at WHHH in 1968, and then he was hired at WKBN.
WKBN, which was owned by the Williamson family at the time, had both television and radio operations. In 1974, the news crews were split, and Nagy chose to work in radio.
“I always had a love of radio. Radio is the theater of the mind,” he said.
Nagy’s routine was to go to bed at 5:30 p.m. and get up at 1 a.m. He was at the station by 2:30 a.m. to begin preparing for his newscasts.
Now, he can get on a normal sleep schedule, spend more time with his grandchildren and avoid his least favorite part of his job — coordinating school-closing announcements.
“I’m looking forward to the first 15-inch snowfall,” he said. “I’m going to just pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep.”
shilling@vindy.com