BANGOR, Maine — George Hale said he must be a morning person.
He gets up at 4 AM each weekday, prepares for the day, then drives to work to be ready to talk on the radio at 6 AM.
Hale has been following basically the same routine for close to 70 years, ever since he came to Bangor to find a job.
“I heard about this TV station in Maine that was new and they were looking for help. So I got in my Chevy and drove up to Maine and they hired me on the spot.
That was WABI Radio and TV, where Hale would make his career even though it wasn’t planned that way.
“And I was going to be here one year,” Hale joked.
Instead, he stayed at WABI for close to 50 years, starting in TV at a time when nearly everything was done live, but soon moving primarily to radio where his George Hale Morning Show became a fixture in central and eastern Maine for decades.
Hale had trained in New York City to become a radio announcer after a tour in the Navy but said his interest in the microphone started very young, in his native Jacksonville, Florida, during visits to his aunt’s house.
“I would sit in the yard on Atlantic Boulevard, a busy highway going to the beach, and I would describe the cars going by,” he recalled.
“Because they chopped off the top of the broom, made me a microphone and I would sit there Sunday afternoons and make believe I was announcing. And I was 6 years old.”
Hale has done every sort of broadcasting during his long career, from live TV commercials in the early days to years of morning radio and sports play-by-play. He covered countless high school and college basketball, football, and baseball games, including University of Maine sports and the annual high school basketball tournaments.
Along the way, he helped to launch the careers of several young Mainers who became highly successful sports announcers, Those include Steve Martin and Gary Thorne, who went on to the national level, and Rich Kimball, who was a high school student when he started working at WABI radio. Live basketball games soon became part of the job.
“The first game I did was a Class D tournament game. At halftime, it was 40 to 4, and (George) said, 'This is a great time to make your play-by-play debut, why don’t you do the second half?' And I said I haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on. He said don’t worry nobody else is either.”
Kimball succeeded his mentor as the voice of the University of Maine Black Bear football games for the past 27 years.
Nearly 20 years ago, Hale made a major career change. He moved across the hall to WVOM radio, to be co-host of the morning talk show with Ric Tyler — the job he still does today.
“I wasn’t that sure I wanted to do it. I was never a fan of talk radio,” Hale said.
But he learned to do it. Tyler said Hale “reinvented himself” to be a talk radio host. Tyler had been brought in as a Republican-leaning voice, while Hale was to lean toward Democrats.
“I did not think it was going to work, we were at each others’ throats,” Tyler said. “But something happened two or three years in, and I started to understand him and he started to understand me.”
The pair have become morning talk show favorites over that time, heard by listeners from northern Maine to Augusta and south.
At 92, Hale is still working five days a week, doing interviews and sparring with callers.
Retirement doesn’t seem a concern.
“My late wife once said to me 'You keep promising you will retire, but you won’t do it,'” Hale said.
But Hale also said he still likes being “part of the show”, and doing what he loves.
“I don’t want to compare myself, but I guess I will. Would anybody ever walk up to Stephen Kling and ask when are you going to stop writing? Nobody ever said to me you ought to stop talking."
That seems unlikely. George Hale is preparing to take his annual winter vacation in his home state of Florida, then be back in Maine, back at work, as he has for so many years, in front of the microphone.