WKSU Veteran Retires Friday

The nearly 20-year veteran morning host at Kent-based public radio outlet WKSU/89.7 will no longer be heard each morning during NPR's "Morning Edition". Leonard Will is retiring from WKSU after Friday's broadcast.

Will has been with WKSU since 1988, joining the NPR outlet fresh off of a unique challenge - restarting public radio in Cleveland, as the general manager and architect of WCPN/90.3 at its launch.

But his resume extends back much further, as WKSU's Bob Burford shares in the release on Will's retirement:

Will began his journalism career following a 1962 honorable discharge from the U. S. Army Security Agency, where he served in Germany as a Russian voice transcriber. His first radio job was as a newscaster at WLEC in Sandusky, Ohio in 1963.

Will returned to Germany in 1966 as a freelance correspondent, covering a number of major stories for the Mutual Broadcasting System and ABC News that included the kidnapping and murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

At the end of 1972, Will and his family returned to Ohio where he worked as a reporter/newscaster for WERE “People Power Talkradio” in Cleveland. He left the following year for Iowa to help build and format one of the nation’s first fully-automated music stations.

Will returned to WERE as the station switched formats from talk to all news in 1975. Initially, he was the editor/producer of the daily five-hour morning drive news block but soon was assigned greater responsibility – rising to news director, program director, and finally operations manager.

WKSU has put up a page to say goodbye to Leonard Will here.

Current WKSU "Your Way Home" host Renita Jablonski sets her alarm clock much earlier starting on Monday, as she takes over the local "Morning Edition" host duties...