I've been on the news staff at WTAM 1100 since January of 1995, when we were still known as WWWE or "3WE". Hard to believe I've been here so long!
The Cliff's Notes version of my story: I've been in radio over 30 years, and have lived in a number of places, but I've been a Clevelander the majority of my career.
Now, the slightly more detailed version:
Radio has been my passion since I was a kid. I fell asleep every night listening to the radio. My radio career started in 1974 at Central Michigan University, where nearly every year since 2000, I've been involved in the annual Alumni Takeover of our old student station. I also serve on the alumni advisory board for the School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts at CMU.
The first ten years of my radio career took me through Michigan, Delaware and Maryland. Then in the fall of 1987, I suddenly had the desire to look for work in Cleveland. Cleveland? The town they called the "mistake on the lake?" The town with a tower that's Terminal, a lake that's Erie and roads that are Marginal? At the time, I had my reasons for coming here, but I'm glad I stayed.
My first job in Greater Cleveland was a year spent as news director of the former WBKC in Painesville. From 1988 to 1993 I was an anchor and reporter at WERE until the one-time home of "People Power" abandoned local news and broke up its award-winning news department. In between WERE and WWWE/WTAM, I spent a couple of years as public information director for the non-profit Substance Abuse Initiative of Greater Cleveland, a drug abuse prevention agency (if the timeline doesn't match up, I joined 3WE part-time while still doing my PR duties).
I'm married to Karen, a native Clevelander. I'm an active member of St. Angela Merici church in Fairview Park as a lector and PSR teacher. My musical passion is 50s and 60s oldies, such as the ones played on iHeartRadio.com's Real Oldies channel. The music file on my Android phone is filled with oldies from that era, including a lot of "one hit wonders" like "Michael (The Lover)" by The C.O.D's, "May I" by Bill Deal and the Rhondels, and "The Cheater" by Bob Kuban and the In-Men. Songs that truly fit the definition of "moldy oldie."
My favorite food is steamed Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, best served "all you can eat" at my favorite crab houses near Salisbury, Maryland, the Old Mill in Delmar, Delaware, and the Red Roost in Whitehaven, Maryland. If your travels take you to the Delmarva Peninsula, here's a lesson in how to properly pick crabs, so that you can look and act like a local. Sounding like a local out there is a different story. My wife says that when we visit Delmarva, my accent changes, but it goes away when we get back to Cleveland.
I love baseball. My philosphy about the game is best summed up in the speech by James Earl Jones near the end of "Field of Dreams":
You can't say that about football or basketball, but when it comes to football, I am very passionate about my Central Michigan University Chippewas.
Since I was a kid, I have loved reading newspapers, and I mean the real kind made from paper and ink. At this link, you can see PDF files of today's newspaper front pages from all across the nation and around the world, courtesy of the Newseum in Washington, DC. It's a fascinating way to look at how local news coverage is done in other cities.
I have enjoyed meeting and interviewing celebrities, including Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, James Brown and Chuck Berry, and even Lorain native Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci. The funniest interview I ever did was with perennial presidential candidate, comedian Pat Paulsen. If there was one interviewee over whom I gushed, it was Bob Keeshan, who I grew up watching as "Captain Kangaroo."
Other highlights of my career: I broadcast emergency information about Hurricane Gloria in 1985 to the Delmarva Peninsula, and information about the Blizzard of '78 to listeners in Southern Michigan. I described the beauty of dozens of tall ships as they passed up the Delaware River to Philadelphia, and I broadcast live from the "Ground Zero" of a locked down, downtown Cleveland, as the KKK ralled on the same day as the first game at the new Browns Stadium. Making "lemonade out of lemons", I once did an award-winning series about car theft prevention, after my own car was stolen.
I have been honored by the Ohio Associated Press Broadcasters and the Society of Professional Journalists as the state's best large market radio news anchor. I have also won the Achievement In Radio (A.I.R.) Award as Cleveland's best radio news anchor. In addition, I have won the Press Club of Cleveland's award for doing Ohio's best radio newscast.
Here are answers to a couple questions about me. I'm not really "five-foot-four" as WTAM 1100's Mike Trivisonno nicknamed me years ago ("Five-foot-four Tommy Moore"). I'm really closer to five-foot-seven, but that doesn't rhyme. As for the deliberate "I'm Tom Moore," in newscasts, it started when our newscasts ended with the anchor saying "I'm (anchor name) on Cleveland's only Newsradio..." I decided to deliberately separate "Moore" from "on," as my mother didn't raise a moron.
By the way, I LOVE to keep up old blog entries. They were once in chronological order, starting with the newest. That was until late January of 2011, when corporate decided that no copyrighted photos could be posted on any web site. As a result, photos were taken off my blog, unless they were ones that I took myself, and that changed the dates everything was posted, and mixed up the order.
Enough about me. I'd like to hear from you. E-mail me at tommoore@wtam.com.
So, When Am I On The Air?
These days, you'll hear me on WTAM 1100 mostly at 5:30 and 6 p.m. I spend the rest of my day anchoring newscasts for our sister stations, Newstalk 570 WKBN in Youngstown, and FM Newstalk 104.7 in Pittsburgh.
This is from The Sun, the respected daily newspaper in Baltimore. It includes a link to video from WJZ-TV in Baltimore, also respected media.
What I'm trying to say is that this is not made up. A boy was suspended from school near Annapolis, Maryland, for breaking pieces off a toaster pastry like a Pop-Tart, and when it looked like a gun, he pointed it and said, "bang."
I understand that we're trying to teach kids about right and wrong, especially since what happened in Chardon High School and at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School.
But to suspend a second-grader for two days? Is this political correctness gone amok?
Read the story by clicking here, and please decide for yourself.
For some time now, I have been wondering about the fad of putting stick figure families in the back window of a minivan or an SUV. Why does a family want to advertise how many kids they have? Is that the right thing to do in this day and age?
Someone whose vehicle was parked in the lot here at work apparently has the same thought as me.
Someone hacked Burger King's Twitter page and put golden arches on it. Twitter has suspended the page. Check out this from our sister station in Columbus.
If you've been scrolling through my blog pages, you've seen my story about how in early 2011, I was diagnosed with an Acoustic Neuroma, a benign tumor in the inner ear area near the brain. I have been writing about how it was surgically removed, and how my facial nerves had to be reconnected.
I am a member of the Acoustic Neuroma Association, devoted to helping people deal with their ANs. A few months ago, I was asked by ANA director Judy Vitucci to write about my experiences.
It was just published in the September 2012 edition of ANA Notes. You can read it by going to the link below (you'll find my story on page 7). Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions.
Time to add something to this blog, and this time, it’s good news. If you’ve been following what I’ve been writing – and yes, I know I haven’t been writing much in the past year thanks to Facebook – I’ve written a lot about the surgery I had in January of 2011 to remove a benign tumor known as an acoustic neuroma (AN).
Today I had an appointment to see Dr. Erika Woodson of Cleveland Clinic. She’s the surgeon who removed the AN, which if she hadn’t, could have possibly caused problems with brain function, as it’s not attached to the brain but is right next to it.
It’s the first time I’ve seen Dr. Woodson in over a year. Standard procedure after an AN is removed surgically is to have an MRI done within a few weeks to make sure the entire AN is gone. I did that, and there was nothing there. Then, another MRI is done about a year later.
I had that second MRI done in May (it was actually my third MRI, the first one being the one that confirmed the presence of the AN). The results came back a few days later, and in an email, Dr. Woodson said there was no recurrence.
Today, I saw her in person, so I could ask her questions, and she could see what progress I’ve made in the past year.
I’ve made progress, because an unfortunate side effect of the surgery in some cases is that nerves wrapped around the AN cannot be reconnected, which means a loss in some facial motor skills. Some get beyond this with physical therapy. I got past it with surgery by Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Daniel Alam, who implanted a facial sling so that my facial muscles wouldn’t lose tone, and he connected my facial muscles to new nerve pathways. Those nerves have to learn to communicate new information, and they are slowly doing it.
I still don’t have the smile I had before my surgery. I can’t whistle. I can eat just fine, though, and have no problem drinking (even with a straw). Nevertheless, I’m improving.
Dr. Doug Hicks, who is in charge of speech therapy at Cleveland Clinic, worked with me a while, but he said I was doing just fine, so we ended our sessions months ago.
Now back to Dr. Woodson.
She told me today that I’m doing so well, that I won’t need to see her for another four years, which will be five years after my original surgery. That’s the best news someone who has had AN surgery can get!
Thanks, Dr. Woodson, for what you did on a cold winter day in 2011! It was a little scary going through that surgery, but the outcome has been fantastic, as I came out of it with a slightly different face, but I’m healthy, and that’s the important part.
If you want to learn more about Acoustic Neuromas, go to the web site of the Acoustic Neuroma Association. They’re based in the Atlanta area, but there are support groups all over the nation, including one in northeast Ohio. I went to a support group meeting in Copley a few weeks back, and got a lot out of it.
It was great to meet people who were fellow AN patients. People who are just like me.
ANA Notes Sept. 2012
