R.I.P..: NPR Newscaster Carl Kasell

Carl Kasell 1934 - 2018

NPR's Carl Kasell died Tuesday from complications from Alzheimer's disease in Potomac, Md. He was 84.

According to NPR, he started preparing for the role of newscaster as a child. "I sometimes would hide behind the radio and pretend I was on the air," he said in 2009, remembering his boyhood in Goldsboro, N.C.

He also used to play with his grandmother's windup Victrola and her collection of records. "I would sit there sometimes and play those records, and I'd put in commercials between them," he recalled. "And I would do a newscast just like the guy on the radio did."

At age 16, WGBR-AM

Kasell became a real guy on the radio at age 16, DJ-ing a late-night music show on his local station.

At the University of North Carolina, Kasell was, unsurprisingly, one of the very first students to work at its brand-new station, WUNC. After graduation he served in the military. But a job was waiting for him back home at his old station in Goldsboro. He moved to Northern Virginia to spin records but a friend persuaded him to take a job at an all-news station.

"I kind of left the records behind," Kasell said. "It came at a time when so much was happening; we had the Vietnam War, the demonstrations downtown in Washington, the [Martin Luther King] and Bobby Kennedy assassinations. And so it was a great learning period even though [there were] bad times in there."

In 1975, Kasell joined NPR as a part-time employee. Four years later, he announced the news for the first broadcast of a new show called Morning Edition. Over three decades, he became one of the network's most recognized voices.

Before moving to the Washington, D.C., area in 1965, Kasell was morning deejay and newscaster at WGBR 1150 AM in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

After leaving North Carolina, Kasell advanced to the position of news director at WAVA (AM) in Arlington, Virginia. As news director in Virginia, he hired Katie Couric, then a student at the University of Virginia, as an intern one summer, which was the start of her career in news broadcasting.