John Montone in Midtown Manhattan
Johnny on the Spot
“Happy faces? On a subway platform? At 4:30 in the morning?”
By Jerry Tallmer
John Montone was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Election Day, covering Mark Green, a candidate for mayor in the Democratic primaries – had been there for four and a half hours – when, just after 8:45 in the morning, his pager informed him he should call the newsroom. Which he did. Get downtown, he was told. A small plane has just hit the World Trade Center.
As he raced downtown in his Ford Explorer, he kept its radio tuned to his own station, 1010 WINS, all news all the time (“You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world”).
“I heard Lee Harris [the 1010 WINS anchor man that day at that hour] talking with one of our sales representatives, a woman who lived down near the Trade Center. When the second plane hit, she screamed.” At that moment, Montone knew the city was under attack.
“I followed a couple of ambulances down the FDR Drive, parked my trusty SUV, and started interviewing people who’d made it out of the North Tower. Then,” says Montone these four and a half years later, “I found my cell phone didn’t work.
“Ran into a record store where they knew me, and on a land line” – regular phone – “told Lee Harris I was going to the towers. At the foot of the South Tower, the doorman of the Century 21 department store said: ‘Take care, watch out, there’s a lot of shit falling.’ He meant human bodies. I saw a line of firemen going in, looked up at the burning tower, and suddenly felt very angry.
“Turned on my tape recorder, and was interviewing a woman who’d just come through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel when she screamed. I turned and saw the second tower cracking like a twig, and then we were all covered with dust like a blizzard, everywhere.
“There wasn’t a stampede, but everybody was getting away as fast as they could. I ducked into some building, came out on the other side, on Nassau Street, and the first thing I realized was that I had lost my tape recorder. All the work was gone, including the woman’s scream.
“A phrase came into my head: ‘Nuclear winter.’ I had difficulty breathing. I went into a Burger King and said: ‘I need a phone.’ A woman there said: ‘Honey, what you need is water.’ I still had my mike, and I was finally able to find a phone on the east side [of Lower Manhattan] near the river. Caked with dust, I told my story. I felt it wasn’t good. Too much about myself.”
Montone pauses for a bleak moment, then says: “I still haven’t listened to it.”
Nuclear winter. John Montone, 1010 WINS’s roving reporter, covers everything, every day, from a cat in a tree to World War III, with a murder, a fire, a flood, a Broadway opening, an Off-Broadway sleeper, a new fad, a new gadget, a new fashion, a new ballplayer, an old ballplayer, a controversial museum show, an election, a political scandal (particularly in New Jersey), a cop shot, a racial conflict, a financial conflict, a labor conflict, a traffic jam, a beauty contest, a hotdog-eating Coney Island contest, anything and everything else in the tri-state area – New York, New Jersey, Connecticut – thrown in for good measure.
Once upon a time The New York Times had a much-loved Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist named Meyer Berger who with pen and reporter’s notebook did what short, stocky, affable John Montone with mike and tape recorder does now. The big difference is that much of Montone’s reporting goes out, live, to listeners, on the instant – and at 1010 WINS, Montone confirms, “live means live.” As distinguished from other reporting and features he puts to tape for play or replay later.
Early one recent fair-weather morning – 7:30 a.m., to be precise – Montone, in jeans, polo shirt, and brown sneakers, checked in at 1010 WINS, 888 Seventh Avenue (entrance on 56th Street), to pick up any messages, after completing a hitch that had begun when, from his house in Glen Rock, New Jersey, he had called the station at 3:40 a.m. to learn that day’s starting assignment from news editor Jim Maloney.
“He tells me where I’m going, and I head in that direction. I ask him: Can we go live?’” On this particular morning the destination had been a stretch of Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx where a tanker crash the previous afternoon had caused a fire that was still making a mess of the area and closure of many streets on all sides.
On any given day if you flip on 1010 WINS you will hear John Montone reporting by automobile or foot power from here, there, anywhere along highways or obscure byways within a hundred miles of, let’s say, Pennsylvania Station. Quite a bit of it he does while driving to or from the target, the story. Does the man have a built-in road map in his brain?
Montone raises a forefinger. “Not quite,” he says. Not quite, he means, but almost. “Let’s have breakfast,” he says, and leads the way to a Pax coffee shop on 57th Street.
Apart from his daily assignment (or assignments, if in the course of it something breaks like a fire, or a 9/11), he tries a couple of days a week to pursue for his weekend spot, “John Montone’s New York,” a human-interest, Meyer Berger-type story – “some New Yorker doing something interesting, and they tend not to be celebrities.”
His working day is supposed to end around noon, but it frequently goes beyond that. When does he get to sleep?
“Generally after the 7:30 Seinfeld reruns. Except in baseball season, when I follow the Mets – until they go into their midseason swoon. So it’s 8:30 or 9 p.m. when I do get to sleep. Except for all the times I get up to pee. For that I’m over 50.”
Not much over, bald spot or no bald spot. He was born December 15, 1953, in West New York, N.J., the son of John Montone, Sr., who ran an auto-parts business in Englewood (he died 10 years ago) and Bruna Missaggia Montone, who still lives in Ridgefield, the town where son John grew up, went to high school, worked in a supermarket.
Coming out of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City in 1976 with a BA in Political Science and English, he knew he loved radio – “my AM six-transistor was constantly plugged into my ear” – but didn’t know how to get into it.
“So I drifted, did newspaper work as a part-timer on the Bergen Record, until my fiancée, Mary Tupaj” – fiancée then, wife ever since, mother of Michael, 20, Jacqueline and Joseph, 16 – “suggested I try to do what I wanted to do. So I went to NYU to figure out how to get a job in radio.”
The jobs in radio started in 1980 at WSUS, Sussex City, N.J., then hopped to WMCA as a standby fill-in for Barry Gray (at a studio around the corner from where WINS is now), and proceeded from there to two or three years as fulltime freelancer for the ABC network. He started with 1010 WINS as a New Jersey stringer in 1982, which makes 2006 his 24th year as WINSman.
“This is my office,” Montone says of the company car, the Trailblazer he is using today, his own car having had a battery give-out. We’re heading, after breakfast, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he wants to interview a prominent realtor – Diane Saatchi of the Corcoran Group, sister-in-law of controversial London art dealer Charles Saatchi – about whether the real-estate bubble has burst. As he drives, he talks:
“You know what? Everybody’s interested in real-estate prices. I don’t think it’s boring. The most boring assignments, for me, are news conferences, where you set up your mike and wait for someone to show up. Fortunately I don’t have to do them that much on this shift.”
What’s the most colorful thing you ever covered, John?
“Well, I don’t know if it was the most colorful, but early in my career I was sent to do a story on the city’s first topless diner, in Queens. There I am, with my tape recorder, sitting across the counter from a topless waitress. Pretty uncomfortable.”
He gives a laugh and remembers another.
“It was during the Clinton scandal, the time of the blue dress, remember? I’m in the Morning Star diner on 57th Street and Ninth Avenue, interviewing a bunch of gay guys. As I leave, one of them says: ‘Excuse me, but I have the same blue dress.’ ”
Did you get that on the air?
“Sure,” says John Montone.
We’ve reached Diane Saatchi’s address, and she’s out in front of it, waiting.
Montone gets out his microphone and miniature tape recorder, puts her at her ease standing beside a tree, and, mike in one hand, tape recorder in the other, asks a question or two that she answers with: “I’ve been telling people for 20 years that the time to buy is when you need a new home, and the time to sell is when you don’t need one.”
They discuss prices, which in some extraordinary instances can go as high as $75,000,000 for a super-luxury apartment in a Manhattan where the average today, she says, is $1,000,000. “I wake up every morning feeling I’m playing Monopoly,” she says – and those words are what come through over 1010 WINS radio when I tune in the next morning. The radio-loving kid from West New York, New Jersey, knows a good line when he hears one.
