As a senior at Notre Dame University, Tom Casey worked for WNDU, an NBC affiliate in South Bend, Ind.
He was a Sunday night sportscaster on TV who also had a disc-jockey shift on the radio side - at the same time.
"I would put an album on, go in and put a sports jacket on and read the news on the teleprompter," he said. "And I'd hope the album didn't stick."
After graduation, he had radio offers from KDKA in Pittsburgh and a station in Atlanta. Chuck Craig, a family friend who mentored him, advised Casey to accept an offer from WRTA in Altoona in 1967.
"He told me I'd be typecast in Pittsburgh and Atlanta - as just a news reporter or just a sportscaster," he said. "He wanted me to go to a little station where you can do everything - and I ended up being the morning guy and then the station manager, sales manager, did football and basketball play-by-play, and I learned that I liked that better than being typecast."
After nearly 20 years in radio, and sandwiched around an ownership deal in Ohio, Casey was back in Altoona in the mid-1980s when former WFBG General Manager Tom Connors asked him to ease the transition from Big John Riley, who had been stricken with an illness.
"He told me I could do the morning show and weather," Casey said. "[In 2005], I walked out of the place 25 years later."
Casey is now enjoying retirement. He spent some time talking with Mirror Managing Editor Neil Rudel about his career and the radio and TV industry.
Mirror: After spending your career in the public eye, what's retirement been like?
Casey: Good. I set out to spend a lifestyle of dynamic indolence. I still do commercial work, political campaign [advertising], but I don't miss sitting in a restaurant and everybody walks by and says, "Hey, what's the weather going to be?" I don't miss that at all.
Sometimes I think I should have been a sportscaster. Other times I think, "You had it pretty good."
Mirror: When you came to Altoona, did you envision spending most of your career here?
Casey: Not at all. I didn't intend to, but I had great people to work for and with. I learned a lot and fast. I had offers with the Cleveland Cavaliers and in D.C. But I didn't want to spend the rest of my life making big bucks and paying it out in housing and living in the big city. And every day there's somebody with an audition tape telling your boss he can do your job better than you can - and some of them can. By the time we got married, I wondered, "Do you want to raise kids in D.C. or Altoona?" I got real lucky here in the beginning. Some towns are hard to break into the inner circle, but people like Lou Murray, Rod Wolf, Bill Prosser, Bill Stauffer and some of the coaches were real good about taking me around. I met Ron Hoover. Mike Irwin and I hung out a good bit. I was lucky to meet people quickly.
Mirror: You were one of the few in local media history to have successfully made the transition from radio to television. How difficult was that?
Casey: It didn't seem like a big deal to me. Other people made it a big deal. When I was in college, one of our professors announced [famous sportswriter] Red Smith would be talking to our class on such and such a date. He spoke on communications. He said "write the way they read and speak the way they listen" - and he walked out of the damn room. He was out for 10 minutes or so, smoked a cigarette, and he came back and said, "Did I leave anything out?" That stuck with me.
Mirror: What other aspects of radio did you miss?
Casey: The freedom of it. It seemed even the time constraints you could control. I could take a commercial break when I needed to or when I wanted to. On television, you're on someone else's stop watch. It's more social on TV, but you could work more independently in radio. I prefer a press box with a microphone but only because there are no cosmetics involved; it didn't matter if your necktie was straight. If I wanted to do a remote at your store, I'd plug in a box and say, "We're on the air." It takes 11 people to do that in TV. You can control radio yourself better.
Mirror: Did you do a regular radio talk show?
Casey: Yes. "Open Mike," it was called. I hated it. It was kind of boring. I don't like listening to talk shows now, either.
Mirror: Weathermen often have no privacy at all. Was that a challenge?
Casey: Sometimes. It goes with the territory. There are times you get tired hearing about it [weather] 400 times a day. Where do you hide? I can only imagine what it would be like for Elton John to go to dinner. The upside was we went on ocean cruises [through TV promotions] and island trips one or two or three times a year. I like interacting with people one-on-one.
Mirror: You are still a commercial spokesman. Have you enjoyed staying connected to the industry?
Casey: Very much. It's nice to be able to pick and choose. If I want to do an industrial video, I can. Sometimes the money's real good, and sometimes it's not.
Mirror: What are your views of the changing media?
Casey: Technologically, everything has changed by orders of magnitude 15 years ago. It used to be you could have a newspaper or a radio station or a TV station in a town where the ownership and the management and the employees were part of that town. When they de-regulated radio, that changed and everybody found out to make money, you had to buy 10 radio stations. It means fewer people do more. You may have a guy making program decisions who's never even been in your town. And then there are so damn many places to get stuff - and then bloggers pass along information without any editing. There's no filter. Editors can make mistakes, but they can also catch them.
Mirror: Who were your early influences in the broadcasting field?
Casey: I was always more of a fan of the writers than the performers. My heroes were F. Scott Fitzgerald and Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Hemingway, Mark Twain.
Mirror: Was there a point where you came close to leaving Altoona?
Casey: I auditioned for the Ohio State [radio] football job. If I had gotten that, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. I came in second. And one of the guys there introduced me to a guy from Cleveland, and we talked about the Cavalier job. And I asked myself, "Do I want to spend the rest of my life in an airport?"
Mirror: How do you see the future of Altoona and Blair County?
Casey: I see it continuing to decline in population. They're going to have to do something to encourage industry. I don't know what that is - tax breaks or whatever - but there are too many places sitting open. It seems all we do is bring in restaurants and retail places. On a scale from skeptical to optimistic, I come down somewhere in the middle.
Mirror: Some people may not know that your real name is Tom Streb. How did you arrive at Tom Casey?
Casey: When I was a little kid, my maternal grandfather used to call me Casey Jones. There are some Caseys in our family. But in those days of radio, everybody used a phony name - one or two syllables, and nobody asked you how to spell it. Nobody calls me Tom anymore; it's just Casey. I think I was "Casey in the morning" before "Imus in the morning."
Mirror: What is your favorite retirement passion?
Casey: I had planned to do a lot of fishing, but I've got some knee problems. We go to Florida for three months a year - a month in the spring and two in the fall and make a long summer out of it. And both Patty and I are voracious readers. I'm enjoying life, and I've enjoyed my career and the part Altoona played in it. I had enough success here and in other markets, through freelancing, that makes me think, "Maybe I did OK."
Mirror Managing Editor Neil Rudel can be reached at 946-7527 or nrudel@altoona
mirror.com. Feel free to email him suggestions for Monday Spotlights
