The Gowanus, the BQE, the LIE, the GW, the dreaded Cross Bronx \u2014 the arteries were hardening again at the start of another week, another Monday rush hour, and also, as it turned out, another era in the annals of commuting in the New York metropolitan area. Because on this morning, Dec. 3, 1979, someone was watching the bumper-car mayhem more closely than ever before, taking its measure in a radically new way for the first time.<\/p>\n
In a nondescript office building on Route 22 in North Jersey, a gang of kids barely out of college was busy assembling a portrait of the morning\u2019s traffic. The wait at the tunnels was how long? An accident had closed a lane on what expressway? What bridge was backed up the farthest?<\/p>\n
News flowed into the new Shadow Traffic headquarters in Union Township from all around the region. There were airplanes circling above the usual chaos, mobile units dodging along the same roads as commuters, producers calling police and transit officials, and some field reporters \u2014 known as \u201cKongs\u201d in honor of the heights they had scaled \u2014 standing atop the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center, hoping the clouds didn\u2019t drop too low.
\nSeven reporters were sealed away in the boxy little studios that ringed the headquarters\u2019 main operations desk, reading into their microphones minute-long traffic reports that were fed to dozens of radio stations. Four of them were from Seton Hall: Joe Nolan, Bernie Wagenblast, George W. Forman and Donna Fiducia.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t high-tech at all, but it was very high-tech looking \u2014 lots of flashing lights, guys with headsets talking in two-way radios, a lot of things that looked very cool,\u201d said Nolan, whose studio had its own low-tech tool: a window that meant he didn\u2019t have to rely on anyone else to tell him what was happening on Route 22. \u201cIt was earth-shattering back then to have one person be on multiple stations at the same time \u2014 it was unheard of.\u201d<\/p>\n
That day, Shadow Traffic \u2014 which had debuted earlier in Philadelphia and Chicago \u2014 changed the drive-time habits of millions of commuters in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Before Shadow, only a handful of radio stations broadcast anything more than the most rudimentary information about what was happening out on the highways each morning. After Shadow, even the smallest stations did. Traffic woes still plagued the metropolitan region each rush hour, and while the Shadow reporters couldn\u2019t cure the affliction, they were able to diagnose it more precisely.<\/p>\n
And in those first years of Shadow, the majority of its voices were trained at a single college station, WSOU. \u201cThe first time that I was talking on the radio and being paid for it was on WYNY, which was at that time NBC-owned and broadcasting from the ninth floor of 30 Rock,\u201d said Forman, who had graduated just a few months earlier, and whose Shadow handle was \u201cG.W.,\u201d so no bleary drivers would think the former heavyweight champion was giving traffic updates. WYNY was the biggest of the stations his reports were broadcast on each day.
\nWagenblast had graduated in 1978, and now he was bantering on WABC with legendary Top 40 DJ Dan Ingram. \u201cThis was the big time,\u201d he said, describing his nerves on that inaugural morning. \u201cWe were going to be on New York radio, and we were going to be on New York radio in drive time.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of them were old enough yet to truly understand the dispiriting implications of a jackknifed tractor-trailer on the Turnpike, but they quickly became the voices of authority to drivers trying to find the clearest passage between home and work.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we got to the last traffic report of that morning rush hour it was like, \u2018Oh my gosh, we did it. It came off and there were no major goofs and everything worked, and can you believe it, it was a success,\u2019\u201d said Wagenblast, whose previous commuting experience had consisted mainly of driving his Chevy Nova from his Cranford home to the campus whose radio station had beckoned him since he was a boy.<\/p>\n
WSOU was an early occupant of the FM band, staking out a wide listening area from the time it began broadcasting from the basement of the University\u2019s recreation center in 1948. It was a beacon, too, to many New Jersey kids who had dreams of spinning Beatles records on the air, or calling a basketball game, or reporting the latest news.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I wanted to be in radio from when I was in elementary school,\u201d Wagenblast said. WNEW-AM was his station. William B. Williams, Klavan and Finch, Ted Brown \u2014 they were who he wanted to be, and Seton Hall, he reasoned, was his best route there. \u201cWSOU was the unique combination in the tri-state area of both being run by the undergraduate students and having a wide coverage area.\u201d<\/p>\n
He signed up at the station as soon as he arrived on campus for freshman orientation. Within a few months he had his air clearance, granted by an upperclassman who would later become a colleague at Shadow, Pete Tauriello.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did my homework long before I got to Seton Hall,\u201d said Tauriello \u201976, who was first nudged toward the university by his fifth-grade teacher in Old Bridge, a Seton Hall man whose class ring seemed such a precious treasure. \u201cI knew all about WSOU. I could tell you what kind of transmitter they had by the time I was in eighth grade.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tauriello got his first microphone when he was 5, and his boyhood bathrobe was imprinted with a pattern of TV cameras and mics. In high school he broadcast a show each morning through the public-address system. He worked as program director for WERA in Plainfield before joining his former WSOU colleagues on Shadow Traffic in 1982. \u201cIt was the Seton Hall mafia,\u201d Tauriello said about Shadow.<\/p>\n
George Forman had his own epiphany in seventh grade, when he visited the Ocean County Fair with his grand\u00adparents and was enthralled by the two radio stations that had set up remote broadcasts there: WJLK and WOBM. He joined WSOU his first week on campus and by November he was hosting \u201cTake it Easy,\u201d a midday show that played music tagged with an adjective much employed in the 1970s: mellow. He still remembers his first set: The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cAs Tears Go By,\u201d the Beatles\u2019 \u201cShe\u2019s Leaving Home,\u201d and Emerson Lake and Palmer\u2019s \u201cStill You Turn Me On.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI even found a mellow Jerry Lee Lewis record,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Joe Nolan and Donna Fiducia came to Seton Hall with different career ambitions, each expecting it to be a prelude to law school. WSOU lured them down another path.<\/p>\n
\u201cWSOU really taught you the basics,\u201d said Fiducia \u201979, who also hosted \u201cTake It Easy.\u201d \u201cThat station, no matter what happened, never went off the air. You stayed there until the next person came on the air. The show went on. Everybody had to know how to do everything else, no matter what their interest was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nolan was a big basketball fan, and he was soon broadcasting Pirates games. \u201cPeople hear you,\u201d said Joe Nolan, whose grandfather was police chief in Jersey City, and whose father was a St. Peter\u2019s grad not too thrilled that his son was headed to his alma mater\u2019s basketball archrival. \u201cIt\u2019s not like so many college radio stations around the country where you\u2019re heard in the cafeteria and the parking lot. You can hear WSOU all over New Jersey.\u201d<\/p>\n
He covered news, too, and managed to get onto the White House lawn when President Jimmy Carter presided over the famous handshake between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. When Pope John Paul II made his first trip to the United States in the fall of 1979, the loyal Polish listeners of Cousin Stan Kosakowski\u2019s Polka Party show on WSOU sent enough donations to pay for Nolan to follow the first Polish pope. A team of eight student reporters stationed themselves along the route of the pope\u2019s ticker-tape parade in Manhattan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe sat on top of the phone booths and the cops came along, and we said, \u2019We\u2019re from Seton Hall\u2019s radio station, we\u2019re doing a live report.\u2019 They\u2019re mostly Irish-Catholic cops and they hear Seton Hall \u2014 \u2018OK, fine, go ahead, do what you want,\u2019 \u201d Nolan said. \u201cI might have been imagining this, but I remember he\u2019s coming down Broadway and he looks over and sees me with the phone up to my ear sitting on top of the phone booth, and to this day, I am certain he looked me dead in the eye and he had this look on his face like, \u2018What is that kid doing?\u2019 \u201d
\nNolan traveled to Washington, D.C., too, for the pope\u2019s final stop. \u201cI remember walking back to the hotel and it was getting dark and I had lost my train ticket,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought I was dead, I had lost Cousin Stan\u2019s train ticket, and I remember just blessing myself and saying a little prayer and I remember saying, \u2018John Paul the Second, please pray for me,\u2019 and I walked back to the hotel and sure enough within 30 seconds I found that train ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon after he came home, he got the call to audition for Shadow while still a junior at Seton Hall. \u201cFred Feldman hired me,\u201d he said, referring to the veteran helicopter reporter who ran Shadow\u2019s traffic operations, \u201cand the rest is history, all because of the pope, and Cousin Stan.\u201d
\nWhen Shadow was hiring its first traffic reporters \u2014 a job category that had barely existed before \u2014 WSOU alumni were a natural target: young, plentiful and technically skilled beyond their years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the opportunity of a lifetime \u2014 none of us knew it at the time, but it really was,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cYou were out there working on big-time radio stations. We were all 21, 22, 23. The bosses were 24. It wasn\u2019t like you were walking into a corporate environment at all. You were walking into basically what you had been doing the whole time at Seton Hall.\u201d<\/p>\n
They worked a split shift: 6 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. for the morning rush hour, then back again from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. as the tide reversed. \u201cIt was almost like an extension of college,\u201d Fiducia said. \u201cAll our friends were there. We were young. It was a lot of fun to do, and we were getting paid for what we wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
And after the last report on Friday nights, they made their own brief commute, to a restaurant called Beggars Banquet in Union. \u201cFred Feldman used to say, \u2018You guys are like a fighter squadron after a mission,\u2019 \u201d Nolan said. \u201cWe were all single, we were all basically still college kids and we had our own money for the first time in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nolan is still getting up long before dawn, and driving into the WABC-TV studios in Manhattan to give traffic updates every seven minutes. Pete Tauriello is the traffic voice on 1010 WINS every weekday morning, broadcasting from the Rutherford studios of the company now known as Metro\/Shadow Traffic. George Forman is a weekend DJ on WOBM in Toms River, and works for a company that produces DVDs. Donna Fiducia has worked just about everywhere, on both TV and radio, from Howard Stern to WNEW to Fox News. She now raises horses on a farm in Georgia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could hold down the fort for two hours,\u201d she said about her stints hosting television broadcasts when news was breaking, like the death of Princess Diana. \u201cI attribute that to radio, because radio is so spontaneous \u2013 nothing is scripted. You\u2019re not just reading a teleprompter. You have to be able to ad lib and you have to be informative and you have to sound good, and I really think that does go back to WSOU, because that really was a great training ground.\u201d
\nBernie Wagenblast is back on WINS part-time after a long series of transportation-related jobs, and he edits several transportation newsletters. His is also the voice you hear in the airport trains at Newark and JFK. And the best commuting tip he has for anyone headed to his alma mater \u2014 where the biggest problem usually isn\u2019t getting there, but finding a place to park once you do \u2014 is to do what he always did: wake up early, and be there first.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a recurring theme,\u201d he said. \u201cGetting there early and beating the crowds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Coyne is a New Jersey writer who teaches at Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a team of Seton Hall alumni joined the launch of Shadow Traffic in 1979, they helped transform the dreaded morning commute.<\/p>\n