SIDEBAR - WABC

WABC in New York City was relatively late getting into the game of Top 40 radio. By the time of its entrance in 1960, Alan Freed had come and gone, and his station, WINS, had been joined in the rock radio wars by WMCA (home of B. Mitchel Reed and the Good Guys) and WMGM (whose star deejay was Peter Tripp, the curly-haired kid in the third row). WINS featured Murray the K (Murray Kaufman), who supplanted Freed as the main man on the rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll scene and who, while reporting on the Beatles' arrival in the United States in 1964, was dubbed the Fifth Beatle by George Harrison. As an affiliate of the ABC network, however, WABC had the strongest signal of all the city's pop stations and built a formidable team of disc jockeys, including Bruce (Cousin Brucie) Morrow, Big Dan Ingram, Scott Muni, and Chuck Leonard, one of the first African-American announcers to break into Top 40 radio. With its personalities and a set of jingles patterned on the song I'll Take Manhattan, WABC became one of the most influential and most imitated stations in the country. Ben Fong-Torres