Bob Levy begins his semi-retirement

The famous saying “old soldiers never die they just fade away” is not really perfect for today but it’s not all that far off when it comes to Bob Levy. While he is not retiring (something he’ll no doubt repeat about 20 times a week) he is fading away or slowing down quite a bit.

As all you “listener friends” know Friday was the final installment in an 18-year odyssey known as “Bob and Marianne In the Morning.” As one who listened to the first show I never imagined that would make it for a week never mind close to two decades.

Bob, of course, began working for sisters station WOBM-FM before the roof went on the building and was in that tiny office on March 1, 1968 when 92.7 began broadcasting as the first commercial radio station in Ocean County. The original Sales Manager for the radio station, Bob has held numerous positions and he was the one who interviewed me in the summer of 1979 when as a 23-year old.  I was recruited as the radio station’s first-ever fulltime Sports Director. He gave two-thumbs up for me being hired and the rest is almost history.

This is not the first time Bob actually stopped working full-time as in the 1990s he gave up his Sales Manager position and worked only on Sunday hosting the legendary Topic A, a program he had created in 1979 and will continue to do in this next phase which officially has to be called a semi-retirement. His famous line is he’ll be taking phone calls on Sunday from 7-11am for as long as he can or as long as someone lets him. It will likely be a while.

For me personally it will be different not seeing him every morning slurp his coffee (loudly) and consume a toasted bagel and muffin while reading the newspaper. I’m happy he’s slowing down and hope he comes to work every Sunday excited to talk about things he’s been holding in all week.

Of course the other part of this is Marianne and while leaving “Bob and Marianne In the Morning” will be difficult she’ll still have a daily opportunity to make you or herself laugh from 8 a.m. - 10 a.m. with her new work-husband Joel Markel. My guess is many listener friends will gravitate there and hopefully that’s after spending the early part of their morning with our new host Jeremy Grunin.

So what’s this all mean? Well I will officially become the longest tenured full-time employee at 36 years and six months. Move over Bob, there’s a new sheriff in town and he’s not fading away anytime soon. At least I don’t think so,