Remembering a Voice for the Region

Richard Drew/Associated Press Stan Brooks, shown here in 2005, was a senior correspondent at all-news radio station, 1010 WINS, and was a dean among radio reporters in New York City.

One day during Edward I. Koch’s third term, when allegations of corruption were swirling around mayoral allies like Donald R. Manes, the Queens borough president, the radio reporter Stan Brooks stopped Mr. Koch at City Hall. Mr. Brooks, as always, had his microphone in his hand and his tape recorder running.

“Stan said, ‘Can I ask a few questions?’” recalled George Arzt, a press secretary to Mr. Koch. “He quickly added, ‘Mr. Mayor, I understand you would rather be someplace else right now.’ Koch smiled, nodded in agreement and said, ‘You bet.’ But Stan got his interview.”

“Every mayor from Lindsay to Bloomberg loved the guy, not because he didn’t ask tough questions â€" he did â€"but because of his empathy,” Mr. Arzt said on Tuesday. Sure enough, Mr. Arzt said, after the pleasant opening, Mr. Brooks asked a series of serious questions, including how Mr. Koch felt about having a friend like Mr. Manes implicated in a widening saga of crookedness.

“Betrayed,” Mr. Koch told Mr. Brooks, according to Mr. Arzt.

Mr. Brooks, who died of lung cancer on Monday at age 86, was polite to the people he covered and collegial to colleagues and competitors alike. He did not mind filling in a new reporter from another station or a newspaper who arrived just before a news conference began.

He was heard on 1010 WINS from the days of open-reel tape to the days of digital recording, from 1962 until a month ago. “Before ‘You Give Us 22 Minutes, We’ll Give You The World’ became a household slogan, Stan was doing a two-minute newscast at the top of the hour,” Ben Mevorach, the station’s director of news and programming, wrote on its website.

WINS, 1010 on the AM dial, was then a Top 40 powerhouse with personalities like Murray Kaufman, known as Murray the K. But two years later, when he was told to prepare for a round-the-clock news operation, Mr. Brooks’s reaction was: “All news? What’s that?”

What it was was a format that made him a mainstay in New York news. Larry Seary, a former director of field operations for WNBC-TV who is president of the New York Press Club, remembered listening to WINS, and to Mr. Brooks, during the blackout of 1965.

“It was the only station I could hear on my little battery-operated transistor radio,” Mr. Seary said. “This was just a few years after the Cuban missile crisis. When you’re a kid and you’ve lived through that, you think something far worse could be happening, far more ominous. You didn’t know if the blackout was just in New York or the world. It was reassuring to listen to Stan and know that this is going to end, and it’s not as bad as I thought it was.”

The years went by, and Mr. Brooks stayed on the job long after other reporters his age had retired. But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday that after Mr. Brooks had a heart operation several years ago, he had his press secretary dial Mr. Brooks’s cellphone. They expected to reach Mr. Brooks’s wife or one of his sons at the hospital, but the voice that answered was the voice they knew: “Hello, Stan Brooks, 1010 WINS.”

Mr. Brooks did not always cover news. Station officials were concerned that Mr. Brooks might not recognize stars like Reggie Jackson or Thurman Munson when they sent him to Yankee Stadium for the World Series in the late 1970s. They assigned Scott Herman, a desk assistant at the station who was a baseball fan, to go with him.

“He covered everything, and obviously, he’d cover the World Series,” said Mr. Herman, now the executive vice president of operations for CBS Radio, which owns WINS. “Walking the field with Stan, going through the clubhouse with Stan, that was my first experience, and then he introduced me to somebody as his colleague. I was this 20-year-old kid who’d been in the business for less than six months, and he was introducing me as his colleague.”

Fifteen years later, Mr. Herman became general manager of WINS and thus Mr. Brooks’s boss. He gave Mr. Brooks a new title, senior correspondent, and tried to give him a raise.

“He said to me, ‘I don’t want to make to make more than anybody else,’” Mr. Herman recalled. “I said, ‘You’re not like anybody else, you have the history.’ He said, ‘I don’t want it.’ I said, ‘I’m going to put it in your paycheck.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to cash the check.’ That was Stan. As special as everyone thought he was, he didn’t want to be treated special.”

Mr. Herman said that he later told that story to Mr. Brooks’s wife, Lynn, who died earlier in the year. “His wife said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Stan about money. You call me. I have no problem with paying Stan more money,’” Mr. Herman said.