NPR broadcaster Kasell dies at 84

Carl Kasell, a radio personality who brought gravitas and goofiness to the airwaves, first as a staid newsreader on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and later as the comic foil and scorekeeper on the delightfully silly news quiz show “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!,” died April 17 at an assisted-living center in Potomac, Md. He was 84.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Mary Ann Foster.

Kasell’s voice, resonant and reassuring, with a lilting trace of his North Carolina tobacco country heritage, helped define NPR as an emerging force in news broadcasting. He joined the public radio network in 1975 and, four years later, helped inaugurate “Morning Edition,” writing and reading five-minute top-of-the-hour news updates from pre-dawn to the lunch hour.

For 30 years, he was an unflappable anchor of that digest, bringing a no-frills seriousness to unfolding history, from the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His skill was conveying the drama of the news while maintaining an unforced conversational delivery, what an NPR executive once described as the warm voice of an informed companion.

He parlayed that stolid reputation into unexpected laughs when he signed on for “Wait Wait” in 1998. He became the semi-straight man to host Peter Sagal, becoming public radio’s institutional voice in playful harmony with a Chicago-based actor, writer and all-around wiseacre who declared his intent to run a weekly show that boasted the motto “NPR without the dignity.”

Some NPR executives initially fretted that Kasell’s participation on a program that lampooned the news and public radio tropes would collide with the venerable anchor’s normally sedate on-air reputation.

But as Sagal once told The Washington Post, “Deep inside that serious newscaster persona was a huge piece of cured North Carolina ham.” (An amateur magician, Kasell once sawed NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg in half.)

“Wait Wait” executive producer Doug Berman, known to credit-attuned listeners by his moniker, “The Subway Fugitive,” had been trying to cast the show when he heard Kasell field questions at a public radio conference. A woman asked what time Kasell woke to do his job.

“1:05 a.m.” the newscaster replied.

Someone bit. “Why 1:05?”

“Because 1 is too damn early.”

The quip showcased the possibilities, in Berman’s view, of pairing Kasell as a dry-witted second banana to the first “Wait Wait” host, the short-lived Dan Coffey, and then to Sagal. “I like to say they brought me into the show to add dignity,” Kasell deadpanned to the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve brought dignity, stability and class.”

In a recent interview for this obituary, Sagal called Kasell pivotal to the show’s fortunes, saying his credibility as the “voice of NPR, the brand as a voice, made us sound like we were an actual NPR show.”

Sagal said that Kasell struggled earnestly to re-create celebrity voices on the show, including newsmakers such as Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky, but he was not any good at it. “He was in on the joke,” Sagal said. “You could laugh at him, and he’d love it.”

The show has become one of the network’s most popular and enduring staples, fetching millions of listeners on Saturday mornings. It features a panel of humorists and journalists vying on behalf of listeners for Kasell’s voice to be played on their outgoing voice-mail message — “a prize that’s invaluable and worthless at the same time,” Berman told the Wall Street Journal.

Carl Ray Kasell (pronounced “castle”) was born in Goldsboro, N.C., on April 2, 1934, and was one of four children. His father, he once told a reporter, “was a guy who kind of bounced from job to job,” with little money to show for it. Radio became his entertainment and escape.