Program Director
and
AM Drive News Anchor

NewsRadio 1620 Program Director Dave McBride (wife Anita, son Jonathan) has long been referred to as “Veteran,” and aspires to one day earning the titles “Seasoned” and “Venerable.” McBride was born on Christmas Eve in 1948, one month after the Chicago Tribune printed “Dewey Defeats Truman” and a week after Chicago lost the championship game to Philadelphia 7-0. 

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a direct result of the United States Navy having released his father from service aboard the U.S.S. Birmingham the previous year, for the purpose of commencing the baby boom. Following 23 years of life-shaping events lost to history in a series of diary fires in the early 70s, Dave McBride left home with a lunchbox and a dream: to become the best News Pronouncer in Northeastern OH/Northwestern PA.  His first professional stop was at WPIC in Sharon, Pennsylvania (The “Pic” of the Dial) at which his assignments included reading funeral home calling hours of listeners who had recently ceased being active members of his target demographic. Next stop--- the powerful “Voice of the Mahoning Valley,” WHOT (“Hot” Radio) in Youngstown, Ohio (motto: “There’s lots more time-spent-listening since the steel mills closed”). During this period Dave shared a house with air personality colleagues Mike Richards and Ed Richards in the hard years when the radio business was so lean many disk jockeys were compelled to share the same last name. During this time, he cultivated radio friendships that would last as long as five minutes past the time he was hired by another station across town: WKBN (Widely Known Broadcasting iNitials). 

In 1975, McBride was tapped by the 50 thousand watt AM powerhouse, WGAR (George A. Richards), in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was to start a two decades-long association with air personalities whose surnames were “In the morning”, in the epoch when disk jockeys felt compelled to remind listeners what day-part it was.  “I worked with Lanigan in the Morning”, says McBride, “He was very humorous, but the newsroom was in a cinderblock windowless annex; so, in four years, I spoke with him twice, and was photographed with him once---in the group shot at the Christmas party.” During McBride’s tenure there, WGAR was twice voted the Billboard Magazine Adult Contemporary Station of the year, for reasons, as far as one can tell, unrelated to the delivery of the news.

In 1980, McBride received the call to come to Chicago to join the NBC owned-and-operated FM adult contemporary WKQX (extremely high word-score if the Scrabble proper names rule is waived).  With subsequent scientific findings that attempts to pronounce the station’s call letters as a word were inflicting vocal cord injury, NBC changed the designation of WKQX to Q-101.  In his first year in The Windy City, which is never called that by anyone who lives in the Windy City, McBride was paired with legendary rock jocks Joel Sebastian, Art Roberts, and Bob DelGiorno before Robert Murphy was hired to become the franchise player: “Murphy in the Morning.” A dozen years later, Q-101 switched to an Alternative Rock format and fired all on-air personalities over 40, which, in any other industry, is a violation of Federal Law, but which, it being radio, was fine, because none of the departed were desirous of lingering long in proximity to Toad the Wet Sprocket. Actually, management kept McBride for six months following the switch and paired him with former MTV Veejay Mark Goodman, before concluding the match had less chemistry than the curriculum at Karate School.

McBride joined Classic Rock Queen Patti Haze on Cox Broadcasting’s WCKG, which, in a subsequent buyout, became Infinity Broadcasting’s WCKG, which, in a subsequent buyout, became Westinghouse Broadcasting’s WCKG, which became CBS radio’s WCKG, which soon reverted to Infinity Broadcasting’s WCKG, a fully-owned subsidiary of Viacom. In 1996, Dave joined the daily five-hour comedy talk-fest of the legendary Steve Dahl as news dude sidekick and radio essayist. After nearly six years of book-ending the highly-rated afternoon-drive talk show with meandering excursions down his stream of consciousness,  Dave migrated from a lifetime of Great Lakes frigid Februarys to the jasmine-scented tropics of Florida. Here, he is Program Director and AM Drive news anchor at Pensacola’s premiere source for news and talk, NewsRadio 1620.

Dave has received the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Writing for Radio/Large Market. He was awarded the New York Festivals World Gold Medal for Best Writing for Radio. In his first year in Florida he received the Florida Broadcasters Association Award for Best Long Light Feature in both first and second place. A CD anthology of his Chicago radio essays was once up for a Grammy in the Category of Spoken Word.