On the air for half a century

PRINCETON — To Princeton residents, he’s Nick Yeazel, a member of the Princeton High School class of 1967, the older brother of John and Jim Yeazel, and the son of the late James and Elizabeth Yeazel.

To the rest of America, he’s Nick Young, a familiar voice on radio newscasts of the past (RKO and CBS for many years) and present (freelance anchor for WBBM Newsradio 780 in Chicago).

To the fraternity of radio news broadcasters, he’s one of the best — reaching the pinnacle as anchor of the medium’s longest-running news broadcast, the CBS World News Roundup, for four years until he retired from CBS in 2010.

And to the Federal Communications Commission, he’s nearing a milestone. Yeazel will mark his 50th anniversary in broadcasting on Sunday. It was on April 1, 1968, that he was granted a third-class broadcast license so he could spin the dials while working a part-time broadcasting job at WZOE-AM in Princeton while a junior college student.

Why go into radio broadcasting?

Because he liked it, that’s why.

“I just enjoyed the variety of it,” Yeazel said in an interview this week.

“I enjoyed the personal nature of being on the air, and because I was a young guy, in an era of Top 40 hit radio, when WLS and WCFL were the big powerhouse radio stations in this part of the country, it was just a gas for me to get on the air and do a radio show, a record show as a DJ, so that’s what hooked me initially.”

Earlier, while still in high school, Yeazel had thoughts of studying medicine. Then fate played its hand in the form of English teacher Donnabelle Fry, who one day praised Yeazel’s writing skills.

“She gave me an ‘A’ on the short story, and she wrote on there, ‘Someday I’m going to be reading your best-sellers,’ and I started to think about, well, if I’ve got some kind of skill for writing, maybe a career where I could put that to good use would be an alternative to the idea of going to medical school for a hundred years, which somehow wasn’t so thrilling to me.”

Fry was correct that millions would be exposed to Yeazel’s writing, but she got the medium wrong. It was as anchor of the CBS World News Roundup that Yeazel, who wrote his own script every weekday morning, used his writing skills to inform a vast audience that often included the nation’s top leadership.

‘The World News Roundup’

Yeazel said the 10-minute broadcast, which was launched 80 years ago this month, was monitored by top news reporters in the nation’s capital as well as certain occupants inside the White House.

“It had been told to us that presidents would listen as well in the morning to see, What does CBS have?” Yeazel said.

“It’s important because the feeling was, if it’s on the Roundup, it means something. It has some news value. It has some additional level of credibility.

“We were very proud of that, knowing that we were helping to, I think, inform people and maybe help set a bit of the tone, if that’s the right word to use,” he said.

The journey from part-time DJ at WZOE to a 20-year stint at CBS News in New York City went through Columbia, Mo., where Yeazel earned a journalism degree and got more on-air broadcast

experience; through Cincinnati, where he anchored a nighttime radio talk show; through Boston, where he got into the news side of the business; and to the RKO Radio Network in New York City for seven years until he moved to CBS in 1990, where he did five-minute newscasts, covered major news stories, filled in on the major news broadcasts in the evening (“The World Tonight”) and later in the morning, and finally succeeded Christopher Glenn as anchor of the Roundup.

“He was just a wonderful, committed journalist, and he had those amazing pipes, that amazing voice,” Yeazel said of Glenn, whom many will recall for his “What’s in the News” featurettes that aired during Saturday morning children’s programming on CBS Television.

Glenn had a long career, with his finest broadcast work taking place on a tragic day in 1986.

“He was on the air the day the Challenger exploded, and that is … perhaps his finest hour on radio,” Yeazel said.

When Glenn retired, he challenged Yeazel to “hold the torch high,” and Yeazel worked hard to live up to the broadcast’s reputation. To inspire Yeazel and other colleagues to do so, CBS had a large black-and-white photograph of the legendary Edward R. Murrow hanging on the newsroom wall.

Yeazel and his producer, Paul Farry, arrived early each morning at CBS on West 57th Street to plan the day’s broadcast.

“We would decide what stories we were going to use, and usually in what order, what the lead was going to be, and roughly how much time we were going to try to devote to all of those things, then Paul would go and begin to assemble the sound, he would do any editing that needed to be done, put that in the queue for me so that I could write the story with whatever sound we had,” Yeazel said.

After Yeazel wrote the script, it was printed aout and reviewed by an assistant, then as the broadcast began, Farry would play the various pre-recorded reports from correspondents and other sounds in the correct sequence as Yeazel read the news.

‘Time on the Roundup, eight past the hour’

For some listeners, the World News Roundup is a familiar part of their morning routine. That goes for former “Late Night” TV host David Letterman, who once made a light-hearted issue of a slight change to the format made by Yeazel’s successor, Steve Kathan.

“He (Letterman) listened every day, and I remember he made much of that after I left because when Steve Kathan took over, he changed the wording. He didn’t say, ‘Time on the Roundup, eight past the hour,’ and Letterman got on the air one night and said, ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t they saying it anymore?’ And it turned out to be a funny little bit, and eventually he interviewed Steve, and Steve went back to saying, ‘Time on the Roundup, eight past the hour.’ So now that wording remains.”

As retirement neared, Yeazel and his family (his wife, Deborah, is from LaSalle-Peru), who lived in Westchester County, New York, considered their options, and Princeton rose to the top of the list.

“We just decided this would be a pretty good place to put our roots down, and our son, Chris, liked it. He’d spent many summers here with his grandmother, so it seemed to be a pretty natural fit for us,” Yeazel said.

In retirement, Yeazel found an interesting part-time job as a freelance anchor on WBBM radio in Chicago. Its all-news format fits Yeazel’s strengths, although there are some differences.

“When I’m doing my shift at WBBM, there it requires a different skill than what I was required to do at the network. There it was very structured. It was a five-minute newscast, or in the case of the Roundup, a 10-minute show, scripted down to the second.

“When you’re doing the show at WBBM, it’s more fluid. I still have the stories to read, but there’s more opportunity for ad-libbing around weather, traffic reports, getting into sports. Those sorts of things require a little bit more free-form,” he said.

Yeazel had praise for radio station and network colleagues who helped him over his 50-year career, as well as his mother, who always planned her daily schedule so she could listen to his broadcasts.

Through it all, Yeazel tried to keep in mind the wisdom of a former boss from early in his career.

“One of my early mentors in radio was a guy named Charlie Murdock, who was a station manager at WLW in Cincinnati. … He said, ‘Never give ‘em a reason to leave. Never give ‘em a reason to tune out.’ And that was his big deal. I guess that’s pretty good advice.”

Nick Yeazel file

(aka Nick Young)

Hometown: Princeton

Significant event: Sunday marks Yeazel’s 50th anniversary in radio broadcasting

Professional name: Nick Young

Education: Princeton High School class of 1967; Illinois Valley Community College; University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he earned a journalism degree.

Career: Began at WZOE while at student at IVCC; worked for major radio stations in the Midwest (WLW Radio, Cincinnati, where he hosted a nightly telephone talk show) and East (Boston); RKO Radio Networks; CBS News in New York, where he anchored the network’s flagship broadcast, the CBS World News Roundup, for four years.

Major events covered: As a field correspondent and radio anchor, Yeazel covered Pope John Paul II's visit to Boston in 1979, the Statue of Liberty centennial celebration in New York City, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson trials, the funeral of Mother Teresa, the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War.

In addition, he covered hurricanes, plane crashes, political conventions, campaigns and presidential inaugurations. He reported from the White House and the Supreme Court and while overseas covering former President Bill Clinton.

Retirement: Yeazel retired from CBS in 2010. He has been a part-time freelance anchor at WBBM Radio in Chicago for nearly eight years.

Family: Son of the late James and Elizabeth Yeazel; has two younger brothers, John and Jim Yeazel; lives in Princeton with his wife Deborah; their son, Christopher, also lives in Princeton.

Quotable quotes

On Clark Weber, the legendary WLS morning DJ:

“Clark was very good, and I tried to pattern myself after him because he had a style that was very personable, very friendly, just the kind of guy that you’d want to hear in the morning when you were getting up and getting your day started.”

On being prepared:

“I think the old saying is, the best ad-lib is a prepared ad-lib, and the better prepared you are, knowing your subject … the better you are able to bring that information to people.”

On the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’:

“People might remember the incident where the airplane landed on the Hudson River. That plane came to a halt right at the end of the street where I worked on West 57th Street, and the plane pretty much stopped right there where every day I made my right turn to go up the river to go back home.”

On working in the Big Apple:

“Working in New York, it’s everything and more that it’s cracked up to be. It’s a wonderful city. Most people have a love-hate relationship with it, but I am very thankful that I was there. There is no place quite like it.”

On working at CBS:

“When you look up and you see that CBS News on the wall in big letters … it was very intimidating to me when I first got there. I felt like I had much to prove. It was a steep learning curve, and I was working for a real tough boss, and it was intimidating.”

On the 9/11 attacks:

“The terrible tragedy of 9/11 was just four miles away from where I sat on that day. I would say that was the most challenging day I’ve ever had in 50 years of being on the air, journalistically, I think, for sure, because of the nature of the event, the scope of the event, and what we had to do as journalists to try to separate truth from fiction that day and stay on top of that story, as you can imagine. That was a remarkable period of time.”

On man landing on the moon:

“We (WZOE, when it was housed in the Hotel Clark) had an old clackety UPI machine down the hall from the studio, … and one of the things I remember that had a great impact was the day I was doing a record show on a Sunday afternoon the day that man landed on the moon. I remember running down the hall with a record on the air and ripping off that little strip of wire copy that said, ‘The Eagle has landed. Man has landed on the surface of the moon,’ and going back on the air and reading that, and being able to say that on the radio. That was in ’69. I still have that little strip somewhere, buried in my archives somewhere.”

On “fake news”:

"Journalists are human beings, Journalism is a human endeavor, that means it's imperfect. That means that from time to time, mistakes are made, but if a news organization is worth anything, it will try its damnedest to minimize those mistakes, and if it makes mistakes, to own up to the mistakes, because the only thing we have is our credibility. …
"The notion that we are out there, manipulating facts and peddling falsehoods, not only is it blatantly false, but it's also when you start to think about the institution and the role of a free press in our society, it is very, very dangerous to suggest that you have this institution that is somehow working to subvert the system of government we have. You know, we've been called the enemies of the people. I mean, that's an astonishing charge to hear, not from a foreign dictator, but from a voice coming from within our own country."