Fred Woskoff

His Story

Read what Fred Woskoff said in an e-mail to us when he once found out about our website.

The following is an e-mail from Fred Woskoff to Jerry Klein (5/11/99)

Hi from Albuquerque! Thanks for your note. I did surf around on the WRTI pages and found myself. Also sent some e-mails to some old friends, so many thanks to you and the folks who have worked so hard to put together a wonderful bunch of memories!

Over the years I've kept in touch with a few folks. Steve Medoff is one who I get together with occasionally. Another fellow you might not remember is Dennis Fisher. Denny did "color" with Steve, Bob Sigovich, and I during the 1968 football season, and the 68-69 Basketball season, including the NIT Championship. Dennis is now the Sports Editor of the "Lancaster New Era", in Lancaster, PA. He lives in Mt. Joy. His address is 4087 Hill Top Drive, RD 1, Mt. Joy, PA. 17552. (717) 684-8351.

Another name from the past in sports is Dick Weiss. Dick did color for WRTI for the '67 football season, as well as other shows. Dick is now one of the premiere, if not the premiere basketball writer for the New York Daily News.

Since I was one of the last people to work at WRTI who had started in Thomas Hall, I thought you might be interested in a couple of stories. First, how WRTI managed to go "all Jazz". One day during late spring in 1969, Bob Kassi, the Station Manager (Grad Assistant guy), got a call from one of the local radio station (might have been WIBF) asking "what did you guys have on Saturday nights". Evidently we showed up with a nice rating on Saturday. Kassi immediatly told the guy we had "jazz", which was scheduled. Only trouble was, all during the rating book, we had basketball games on Saturday, usually double headers (we did over 60 games that year), including the final night of the February book, when we had the only coverage, radio or TV, of the Temple vs. St. Joseph's ECC Championship game. So, Kassi decides we ought to go all Jazz, not bothering to check on things....

The other one was a couple of years ago. I went to some advertising media event in Philadelphia, and WRTI had a booth display. They were celebrating the "whatever" anniversary of "all Jazz" on WRTI". Only trouble was at the celebration was the wrong year. I told the guy, I was there when the station went all Jazz, and it was during the summer of 1969, so it couldn't be the anniversary they said it was. Of course he sluffed me off, but having lived through it. Oh well.

Anyway, hope all is well with you. I'm having fun out here in the west. Get to travel quite a bit, as we have several stations in New Mexico, as well as up in Colorado and down in El Paso. Not as green as my stint in Alaska or Montana (where I owned KRBN-AM for some time, until I had finally managed to burn enough money), but beautiful never the less. I also spend at least a couple of weeks each year in the Caribbean. I'm trying to figure out a way to get a media job in "St. Somewhere", so I can "retire" down island!

Well, again thanks for a super job on the WRTI pages, and give my regards to the "old gang".

This is the WRTI Oldgang Website