Hal Jay marks 35th anniversary at WBAP

Radio is a notoriously volatile business, with air personalities coming and going, bouncing from station to station and market to market. Sticking around for 35 years is pretty tough; sticking around for 35 years in one city is unusual; sticking around at one station is downright rare.

And then there’s Hal Jay, who has been with WBAP/820 AM since 1981. You’d almost never know that by his modest bio on WBAP’s website, which mentions that the Fort Worth native started in radio as a teen-ager and worked at stations in Liberal, Kansas, as well as in Fort Worth and Memphis before finding his slot at WBAP.

For a period, it was two slots — Jay and Dick Siegel, the traffic reporter he’d met in 1980 when Jay was working at KPLX/99.5 FM, did morning and afternoon shifts together. Jay and Siegel even had a comic strip in the Star-Telegram called The Adventures of Hal ‘n Dick.

Siegel, who left WBAP in 2003, died in early 2013. “We had a ball,” Jay said, recalling Siegel in a Star-Telegram obituary. “Of course, we drove each other crazy. We were kind of opposites. Our lifestyles were opposite. He was always going and getting with it, and I was more of a homebody.”

The station turned morning show into a Jay tribute on Tuesday morning — much to the surprise of Jay, who wasn’t expecting a parade of former cast members and colleagues, This is Your Life-style flashbacks and even a proclamation making Tuesday “Hal Jay Day” in Fort Worth.

If you missed the show, or if you just want to hear it again, the station has posted a condensed version on its website. Or you can click on the clips below.

This story was originally published January 26, 2016 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Hal Jay marks 35th anniversary at WBAP."