NYC Radio: Longtime WCBS-AM Reporter Rich Lamb Plans To Retire

Rich Lamb

Legendary Newsradio WCBS 880 AM reporter Rich Lamb has announced that he will be retiring next month after 50 years in the broadcast radio news business.

"I can remember days when I was working nightside when I thought, 'Can I possibly do another 20, 30 years of this?' And then, you know, it's such an interesting job. That's the thing about it," Lamb said, speaking with WCBS 880's Lynda Lopez about his decision to call it a career. "I worked the stories large and small, terrible and beautiful. I covered popes and presidents, and ticker tape parades, and indictments, and the attacks on the World Trade Center, of course, the pandemic, which is still a big story. I think it might well be the strangest, and most widely impactful of them all. It's surely a time we shall never forget."

After graduating from the University of Detroit, the Connecticut native, who was born in Hartford, started his broadcasting career in Michigan in 1970, working as an anchor and reporter at WEXL in Royal Oak, WNIC in Dearborn, and at WOMC in Detroit.

In 1974, he landed at New York City's WXLO, known then as the rock station 99X, where he had been the “sidekick” of morning man Jay Thomas.

Three years later, at the urging of legendary WCBS 880 political reporter Steve Flanders, after whom the plaza in front of City Hall is still named, Lamb applied for the reporter's position being vacated by the renowned Jerry Nachman.

In December 1977, News and Program Director Lou Adler hired Lamb. He covered the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the destruction and aftermath of 9/11. The award-winning journalist has covered four major plane crashes, all of the mayoral, gubernatorial and presidential elections since 1978, murders, fires, blackouts, St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, West Indian Day and ticker tape parades.

Despite his heavily-stamped passport, Lamb has done most of his reporting in the city he loves – New York, mainly covering City Hall.

"It has been a most extraordinary honor of a professional lifetime to have been a member of the WCBS radio team," Lamb said. "Through all the news stories, great and small, beautiful and terrible, it has been my good fortune to have reaped the benefits of the skills, knowledge and camaraderie of my fellow professionals at this station."