Fred B. Cole, 92; mouthpiece of big-band era

Fred B. Cole, at the microphone at WRPS-FM in Rockland. He began his on-air career in 1935. (ap/file 1980)

As Fred B. Cole told the story, his radio career started with a stop - at a traffic light on Commonwealth Avenue.

The year was 1935, and Mr. Cole, who had studied broadcasting at Leland Powers School in Boston, had just left an audition at WHDH, which didn't offer him a job. Unperturbed, he drove along Commonwealth Avenue looking for a gas station before heading home to Hingham.

"The light turned red outside WNAC," Mr. Cole told the Boston Traveler in 1948. "I went in and got a job."

Little more than a decade later he was finally hired by WHDH, where for 21 years he was the disc jockey playing big-band tunes on "Carnival of Music," which later was renamed "The Fred B. Cole Show." Mr. Cole, who in May was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, died in his sleep Thursday in his Hingham home. He was 92.

"I think Fred is one of the grand pioneers in the business," Ed Perry, owner of WATD-FM in Marshfield, told the Globe in 1996.

Five years ago, Mr. Cole published a short tribute to the Ritz-Carlton dining room in the op-ed pages of the Globe and recalled the big-band performances he broadcast from the roof in the late 1930s on WBZ radio.

"What a thrill to meet and work with so many greats, including Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Charlie Barnett, and many others," he wrote. "I still scan both radio dials frequently trying to hear big-band music, but it is almost totally gone except at my home, where CDs by my favorites are played."

Mr. Cole lost neither his fondness for big bands nor his love of the microphone, even when the plum spot on WHDH slipped from his grasp in 1967 as the audience for the music he loved waned and the number of listeners hankering for rock 'n' roll grew.

"They could give me no reason except that 'maybe I've been on too long,"' he told the Globe in January 1967 when he was replaced on the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. show.

Nevertheless, listeners protested his departure, and in subsequent years, Mr. Cole found an eager audience during gigs at smaller stations.

In 1980, he worked with WRPS-FM, the station run by the Rockland public schools, playing big-band records culled from his personal collection five days a week beginning at 5 p.m.

"I'm nuts about radio," he told the Brockton Enterprise about the show, which came along when he was 64. "I love to listen. I drive my wife crazy because I have it on all the time."

And in 1993, Mr. Cole broadcast big-band music from WSSH-AM in Marlborough. By then in his late 70s, he stopped after about 10 weeks because the commute from Hingham was arduous.

"I cried for two days having to give it up," he told the Globe in 1996. "But it was just too much."

Mr. Cole was born in Fitchburg, which he always rued. His parents lived in Hingham, but his mother had accompanied his father on a work assignment when she went into labor.

"He always apologized for not being born in Hingham," said his daughter Daphne Cole Keeler, of Hingham. "He said, 'I am a townie, but I was born in Fitchburg.' "

Mr. Cole married Betsey Balch in 1940. She, too, was from Hingham.

The job at WNAC was his first after graduating from Thayer Academy and the Leland Powers School. Within a couple of years he was at WBZ and was the announcer for Glenn Miller's first broadcast. The orchestra's New Year's Eve performance was at the Raymor-Playmor Ballroom.

"It took six Boston patrolmen to carry me on their shoulders up to the bandstand, and we had the honor of being the first one to go on the air for NBC at one minute past midnight, Jan. 1, 1939," Mr. Cole told the Globe in 1977.

Miller became one of the many musicians with whom Mr. Cole rubbed shoulders - including Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra.

"When Miller arrived in Boston, we became friends," Mr. Cole said in 1988. "He'd go to South Shore Country Club for golf, and then to my house in Hingham for dinner."

From WBZ, Mr. Cole headed west and was the broadcaster for Dorsey's radio show in California. Then he worked for stations in New York City until an offer came from WHDH, the station where he first tried to land a job.

"I said, 'WHDH! No way!' " he told the Brockton Enterprise.

Twenty years later, when his time at WHDH ended, he worked at other stations and later with his wife on her interior design business. And he spent a few years in the 1980s as a police dispatcher in Hingham. Always known for his enthusiasm, he said in a 1984 interview with the Globe: "I told my wife this morning that I would pay the town to work there. That's how excited I am about it."

The thrill of being in front of a microphone - even in a police station - was a legacy he passed along. Perry said yesterday that a formative moment in his own career came when he was a boy and saw Mr. Cole in a mobile van, broadcasting from the parking lot of an A&P grocery in Falmouth.

"They had this big picture window, and there's Fred B. Cole doing his show," Perry said. "I bang on the door and say, 'Mr. Cole, can I come in?' The word was that DJs were unapproachable, but Fred said, 'Come on in.' I never forgot going into his mobile studio. He was one of the good guys in radio who treated kids well, and he inspired them."

Sam Kopper, an announcer at WATD, had a similar experience at one of Mr. Cole's remote broadcasts at a different A&P. The result was the same: Another youngster decided to spend his life in front of a microphone.

"He wanted to share the joy of radio," Kopper said.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Cole leaves another daughter, Cheryl Sherwin of Hingham; three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Services are private.