Remarks  of

 William O’Shaughnessy

prepared for

 The New York State Broadcasters

Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

 50th Anniversary Conference

The Sagamore Bolton’s Landing, N.Y.

June 26, 2005

To be thought worthy of the company of WILLIAM S. PALEY, DON IMUS, WALTER CRONKITE, the GAMBLING Family, SUE SIMMONS, THMAS S. MURPHY, CHUCK SCARBOROUGH, FRANKIE CROCKER … and the other distinguished inductees among the first 25 to win your favor is a great honor.

This fraternity is a place of memories and friendships that last for a lifetime: Tony Malara … Joe Reilly … Dick Novik … Marty BecOk … Jim Champlin … Ed McLaughlin … Bob Bruno … Gordon Hastings … Phil Beuth … Dick Foreman … Ambassador Peter Straus … and my oldest friend John Kelly.

I want to thank Ed Levine and Steve Baboulis, two great chairmen, not only for establishing a Hall of Fame … but also for commissioning the 50 Year History of the Association. It’s going to be a stunning and comprehensive retrospective of our first 50 years.

The Fordham Press people tell me they are dazzled by the sweep and scope of the early galleys turned in by Stephen Warley.

I’m hopeful you might just permit me to briefly thank a few of those who have befriended me as a broadcaster … generous souls who weighed my many inadequacies less diligently than they assess what they find commendable in my stewardship:

I’m grateful, first of all, to Ward Quaal, the gray eminence of our profession, with whom I have had a 30-year-plus correspondence on the great issues.

On First Amendment and free speech matters I have learned so much – and appropriated, with reckless abandon and little discretion or subtlety – from the genius of Don West … Harry Jessell … John Eggerton … and Larry Taishoff and his incomparable father Sol, who adopted me at an early age.

I should also thank my distinguished Westchester neighbor Ambassador Ogden Rogers Reid, the great congressman and publisher. And, in recent years … Patrick Maines of the Media Institute … and Erwin Krasnow, the Washington sage and lawyer. And David Hinckley of the Daily News, who all of us should be grateful for every day.

I also can’t stand before you without thanking Bob Oppedisano and Saverio Procario of Fordham University Press, the great Jesuit publishing house in the City of New York, who have indulged my enthusiasms and promulgated my ravings by making them into graceful books which have been received quite beyond their due.

And, as always, wonderful Cindy Hall Gallagher and devoted Don Stevens of Whitney Radio.

As I look around this room tonight my mind drifts back to the early lessons and encouragement I also received from three extraordinary mentors: John Van Buren Sullivan of the original, magnificent WNEW, of sainted memory … Martin Stone of WVIP and the Herald Tribune Network … and a distinguished former president of yours: C. GLOVER DELANEY of Rochester, a dear man.

Forgive them their encouragement of a young, untutored Bill O’Shaughnessy. They also brought a graceful, stylish music to what we do for a living. And we never once heard any one of them ever describe our profession as a business or an industry. And, I dare say, we’ll not hear those words from any of your inductees tonight.

I will mercifully yield, Tony, if you’ll but permit me to acknowledge only two more without whom I could never even be considered for the Hall:

I’m grateful, in all matters, to a friend of yours … and Joe’s: Mr. Cuomo, our 52 nd governor, who somehow, inexplicably - even after the Boston Globe called him “the great philosopher-statesman of our nation”! … still finds time … to reach down and lift me from confusion, bewilderment and error.

Of course there is only one more: every good thing in my life, everything I’ve ever done … has been informed by the wisdom and goodness of Nancy Curry O’Shaughnessy.

As I drove up the Northway to this idyllic spot on Lake George in our beloved New York State … I thought again of the haunting verse of Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne’s beautiful ballad “Time After Time.”

What good are words I say to you?

They can’t convey to you

What’s in my heart.

If you could hear instead

The things I’ve left unsaid …  

(Rod Stewart loves that verse too … he used it to open one of his recent albums.)

I think the only thing I’ve left unsaid … is to assure our newest and most junior members that you’ll never … regret anything you do for the New York State Broadcasters Association.

Or for our profession. And thus for our listeners and viewers …

Although I have already been fortunate in my professional and personal life beyond anything I deserve … this really means a lot.

WVOX
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Phone: 914-636-1460
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e-mail: don@wvox.com