Dan Ingram, WCBS-FM 101.1 New York | September 8, 2002: 1 – 3 PM

A young Dan Ingram featured in a 77 WABC Promotions Photo, circa 1978
…”I guess in Hawaii they believe in sex. I know I do! (laughter)

Sent in by Contributor Ray Bozzanca (who gave us more Dan Ingram than probably anybody else), here’s one that’s been awaiting posting here on Airchexx for a couple of years.

Dan Ingram is synonymous with Top 40 Radio. In fact, he’s considered perhaps the best Top 40 deejay ever, a fact mentioned in Wikipedia (We didn’t have Wikipedia back in 2002 when this site launched.. how ironic!). Recorded only four months after Airchexx came into being, this was one of Ingram’s better shows of the period. Big Dan would retire from WCBS-FM and radio for good (with occasional apperances on WABC’s later Saturday Night Oldies Show with Mark Simone, and a couple of WABC Rewound programs before it was moved to internet-only in 2009), but not before doing what would turn out as the final years of Oldies on WCBS-FM.

We at Airchexx took this cassette tape, one of the last of that media sent by our Contributor (later material has come in the form of mp3 files), and turned an ordinary unscoped aircheck into a work of art for you listeners, scoped tightly down to 35 minutes out of 3 hours. The audio quality is quite good, although, because its a cassette, not quite CD quality.

Ingram here is in excellent form. There’s a one-liner for every intro, and as always, he always hits the post. Right up till his retirement, Dan Ingram showed us all how to do radio the right way. And we always got a laugh. Perhaps that is what endear us the most to Big Dan… No matter what was happening in the world, he always made us smile. We need Dan Ingram today. He’s still around, but maybe Dan knew when enough was enough. He got out while he was (and is) still regarded as the best there’s ever been.

WCBS-FM 101.1 - New York's OLDIES Station - pre-2005