To several generations of New Yorkers, the name “John Gambling” meant a familiar voice in the morning delivering all the news of the world in a matter-of-fact style, starting with patriarch John B. Gambling on WOR in 1925. He handed the reins over to his son, John A. in 1959, who in turn entrusted the “family business” to his son John R. in 1990. Gambling moved around the dial a couple of times after 2000, but when he finally decided to hang up the microphone, “Rambling with Gambling” concluded a staggering 91-year run that will never be equaled or forgotten- raise your hand if you remember cheering when Gambling announced your school was closed on a snowy winter morning. John R. Gambling paid a visit to his old haunt, as he appeared on 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program to reminisce and talk current events.
Curtis asked Gambling why he decided to bow out when he still was at the top of his game in 2016: “Well, you certainly don’t want to go out on the bottom if you have a choice, but, you know, Curtis, I’d run the course. I was tired. I was tired of getting up at two in the morning; you know all about this, it’s a tough lifestyle, and I’d done it for forty-plus years, and I wanted a change. And I was tired of the weather in New York City. Back around that time, you remember, I was working for 970 The Answer, and I had to walk from Battery Park, where I parked my car across West Street, up Thames Street, onto Broadway to 111 Broadway in the middle of winter… and I’m saying, what the hell am I doing this for? So that was one of the motivations.”
Like a reference out of John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, Gambling says he doesn’t miss being on-air, though he still keeps tabs on what the world is doing: “People ask me all the time, don’t you miss being on the radio? And I say absolutely not, with the insanity within which we live today. It is something that I just shake my head at. I can’t get over it. And you’ve got this loony-tune up in New York (Mayor Mamdani)- you know, I hope somebody tells him that Sweden is now chucking socialism; they’re going to capitalism. Cuba is about to sink into the Caribbean Sea. It’s just a horror show.”
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