Unfortunately, there will be no more voicemail messages given out by him as prizes.
Every weekday for more than three decades, his baritone steadied our mornings. Even in moments of chaos and crisis, Carl Kasell brought unflappable authority to the news. But behind that hid a lively sense of humor, revealed to listeners late in his career, when he became the beloved judge and official scorekeeper for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! NPR's news quiz show.
Kasell died Tuesday from complications from Alzheimer's disease in Potomac, Md. He was 84.
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In 1975, Kasell joined NPR as a part-time employee. Four years later, he announced the news for the first broadcast of a new show called Morning Edition. Over three decades, he became one of the network's most recognized voices.
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Host Peter Sagal says no one could have guessed that Kasell would be so funny. "The greatest thing about Carl was anything we came up with, he was game," Sagal says. "When we were in Las Vegas, we had him come onstage in a showgirl's headdress. No matter what we asked him to do — silly voices, or weird stunts; we had him jump out of a cake once to make his entrance onstage — he did it [with] such joy and such dignity."
At the beginning, Wait Wait didn't have a budget for actual prizes, so the "prize" for listeners was to have Kasell record the outgoing message on their answering machines. He ended up recording more than 2,000 messages.
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"We laid her out on the table, got out that saw and grrrr ... ran it straight through her midsection," he recalled. "She said it tickled and she got up and walked away in one piece."
In all that he did, Carl Kasell was magic.
