Man there was some good radio in Nawleans! Listening to this recording, you notice the JAM jingles which were in common use at so many CHR stations. You also hear Cammie McCormick doing sidekick/news duties (she went on to be a CBS radio news anchor), and a promo done by our site friend Alan Beebe!
All was well back in ’87 – and if you’re from the area, take a listen (if you’re not, listen anyway!). It’ll bring back some happy memories from before last year’s hurricane took it all away.
Just a note about the Ben Cooper WEZB New Orleans aircheck… I worked there at that time doing weekends and fill-in. The jock is Cajun Ken Cooper, not Ben Cooper and the promo was voiced by PD Shadow P. Steele of Z-100 fame. Alan Beebe is surrently doing afternoons at Clear Channel’s Magic 93.7 in Biloxi, MS. My last gig was there as production director.
Quick B-97 story… I was the first jock on the air from their new studios after the move across the hall at the Poydras Plaza next to the Superdome so I stayed with Cajun Ken that morning to make sure he got the board right. They had not labeled the restroom doors yet and Cammie accidentally went in the men’s room. She made the mistake of telling us so we made fun about it on the air saying she was complaining because the bidets on the wall didn’t have any pressure. As I remember she was less than pleased.
Thanks!
Don Banks
Oops… a correction to my correction.
Shadow P. Stevens, not Steele. Brain fade.
When I moved to Atlanta in 1988 there was a Ken Cooper on WQXI-790. “Cooper on Quxie.” Same guy? Sounds the same, going from memory. I believe he was doing afternoons. At that time, 790 was back to CHR and was mostly a simulcast with the FM “94Q” but would sometimes break off and do their own thing with both sides doing CHR. Didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t understand the thinking behind a lot of what that station was doing at that time or since then. But they sounded good when they stayed in format, the AM was CQUAM and sounded awesome.
Yep Same Guy.
Cami McCormick has distinguished herself as a journalist of the first order since joining CBS News in September, 1998 — and she literally has the battle scars to prove it. She has won numerous awards for her reporting on some of the biggest stories since that time. She was at Ground Zero in New York on September 11, 2001, in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck, and in Havana in August of 2015 when the U.S. flag was raised over the American Embassy for the first time in 54 years.
McCormick served nine tours in Iraq during the war, embedded with American troops as well as covering the trial of Saddam Hussein. She was embedded with U.S. forces throughout Afghanistan before being injured in an IED explosion in August, 2009 in Logar province. She suffered extensive injuries and spent a year in the hospital.
Since then she has traveled to over 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ and Ukraine.
McCormick spent much of 2014 in Ukraine, and was there when Crimea was annexed by Russia. She returned to eastern Ukraine when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in July of 2014.
She reported from the Middle East for many years. She was in Ramallah for the funeral for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the West Bank during the Israeli incursions of 2001.
Early in McCormick’s career, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990’s, she lived and worked as a reporter in Moscow and was one of the first English-language hosts on a commercial radio station in Russia. She traveled to Northern Ireland several times to report on that conflict and was there when the Good Friday Peace Accord was approved in 1998.
Thanks Joe! Cami McCormick certainly has one of the most recognizable voices on CBS News. I love her pronunciations, the voice inflections and tone. That she has literally been all over the map only adds to her legendary (in my opinion) stature among radio news people. Thank you for writing this about her. McCormick’s is a story that needed to be told.