Lou Adler, a Fixture of New York Radio News, Dies at 88
One of his former colleagues, Wayne Cabot, a news anchor on WCBS, recalled in a recent interview
that “Lou Adler came around in the time in the 1970s when on television warm fuzzy news came into play.”
“Everybody was buddies hanging out,” Mr. Cabot said.
Mr. Adler liked to work on ’s crossword puzzle, and one of the ways he evaluated job applicants was by asking if they knew the name
of The Times’s crossword editor, said Larry Kanter, a news anchor at WINS in New York who worked with Mr. Adler in Atlanta.
Lou Adler, a longtime New York City radio news anchor
and director whose exacting standards influenced a generation of broadcasters, died on Friday in Meriden, Conn.
His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his daughter, Valerie Adler, who said he had Alzheimer’s disease.
Rich Lamb, a WCBS-AM reporter who was hired by Mr. Adler in 1978, recalled Mr. Adler — whose glasses, he said, gave him the appearance of
someone who “could see right through you” — as a stickler for precision who homed in on the finer details of diction, grammar and syntax.
Mr. Adler left WCBS in 1981 for another New York radio station, WOR-AM (710), and later worked at the Atlanta all-news station WCNN-AM.
He worked for CBS as a reporter on radio and, briefly, on television before returning
to radio in 1967 as an anchor when the station switched to a news format.
“One of his pet peeves was if somebody died, the person ‘died,’ the person did not ‘pass away,’ ” Mr. Lamb said.