Ed Walsh: Comfortable and Confident Behind the Microphone

   Sometimes the way something begins tells you everything.

  The WBZ-AM studios and offices were filled with the kind of mob and emotion usually reserved for the arrival of  maharajahs and heads of state. But on this particular  day, the fuss was caused by a departure.

    It was the last day at the station for longtime legendary WBZ-AM morning man Gary LaPierre.  Friends, family, photographers, and reporters were crammed into the place, the phone lines were lit up, and LaPierre had just made a touching, heartfelt final newscast.

    Just a few minutes later, without fanfare, Ed Walsh slipped into the same studio and somehow managed to begin a calm, reassuring, confident news update even though just a few feet away emotion levels were charging clear off the charts.

    He sounded then as he does now, as if he’s been on the station for years.

    “The show must go on,” Walsh later explained. “It’s my job now to reassure people that they may miss Gary but that they’re going to be getting the same dependable, authoritative, and congenial approach to things, and I’m very confident that I can do that.

     “I don’t feel I have to prove anything other than WBZ’s confidence in me  succeeding Gary was well founded,” he added.

     “This is going to be a good fit.”

     Wasn’t  it Larry Bird who once said something to the effect that it’s not brag when it’s fact?

    As a Bay State native and Holy Cross grad who was a  newsman at a competing Boston radio station from 1975-86, Walsh is well aware of both WBZ’s New England clout and LaPierre’s local legacy.

   “Gary has always been a most accomplished reporter and an easy-to-listen-to newscaster,” Walsh said. “It was not just a Boston phenomenon, either. Gary, without question, is one of the best in the business, and the challenge is to bring my own style to the broadcasts and not to mimic what Gary has done because that would be dishonest and ineffective.”

   But it’s also not as if Walsh is a newcomer trying to figure out how to do the job. He brings nearly three decades of radio and news experience with him, including stints at two of the country’s most powerful and respected stations- WCBS and WINS- that just happen to be located in the nation’s largest radio market, New York City.

   Asked what strengths he brings to the broadcast booth, Walsh spoke of his “inordinate amount of curiosity about current events” as well as nearly 30 years in radio.

   But he also understands the need to have someone in place who knows, for example, how to pronounce places like “Billerica” and the two real litmus-test towns for area broadcasters: Worcester and Gloucester.

   “I think it would be difficult for someone without local roots and the experience I have to take over the job and understand the connections New England, and especially Boston, has with the Red Sox, the weather, Cape Cod, and the overall feeling of cynicism about politics,” Walsh noted.

    “It would be difficult to fit in here because of all that, but I ‘get’ all of that because I am from here.”

     Walsh’s local roots were easily displayed when he was asked to cite his biggest radio influences. Only one was outside of Boston, legendary Big Apple personality Cousin Brucie. The local names included onetime WBZ deejay Bruce Bradley, the late and great talker Jerry Williams, and yes, Gary LaPierre.

    “I love the fact that radio is so personal,” Walsh said, eager to discuss his love of the medium. “With the best radio, the person on the air is talking to YOU, not the person next to you or whoever is in the backseat, but to YOU. And when you’re on the air doing that, you’re talking to that person in a way that can’t be duplicated in any other electronic medium.”

   His respect for morning radio and its unique audience has made Walsh fall into a very specific routine that he honed doing morning radio before he came to the Hub.

    He goes to bed on the weekdays at 9:30 p.m. and wakes up each morning at 3:20 a.m. He sets two alarm clocks each night, “But I don’t need them,” he revealed. “I can fall asleep instantly and wake up without an alarm.”

   Because he lives in a community near the station, Walsh likes to get to WBZ by 4 a.m. so he’ll have plenty of time to prep for his weekday 5 a.m.-9:45 a.m. shift.

   “You can’t not be sharp,” he stressed. “You can’t have a bad day. The listeners don’t care if you have a toothache or are in a bad mood. It doesn’t matter to them. So it’s important to discipline yourself. No staying out late, no night time ballgames at Fenway.”

   And he believes listeners have already sensed that commitment.

   “I’ve noticed people have been extraordinarily cordial to me here- not so much behind the wheel,” he laughed, “but in banks and restaurants and stores. But that doesn’t surprise me because I’m from here.

   “Everybody’s been wonderful.”

   And that includes the man who had the job before him. It wasn’t lost on Walsh that during those final hectic moments LaPierre was working at WBZ, he took the time to encourage the broadcaster who would be taking over his shift.

   “Gary could not have been nicer in welcoming me, complimenting me, and assuring me his audience will welcome me as well,” Walsh said. “He took time off to say, “You’re going to do great here.’”

   Walsh feels the same way. “I never expected I would be available to take this job, he said, “and I never expected this job would be available.

   “To be able to work at a news organization like this with the resources and reporters we have here is a dream come true.”

  If knowing the right thing to say is a measure of a person’s future success, then Walsh will do just fine here. Asked to compare the Hub with New York City, where he’d previously spent much of his career, Walsh was quick to observe, “Boston is a lot cleaner than New York City. A lot cleaner.”