Cary Simpson

Inducted 1996

Born:  January 25, 1927, Huntington, Pa.

Cary Simpson is the president of the Allegheny Mountain Network, a group of nine radio stations in central and northern Pennsylvania.  He has been a champion of small market radio throughout his career, an interest he discusses in an interview entitled Thinking Big in Small Market Radio in the January 31, 1994, issue of Radio Ink magazine.

Simpson fell in love with radio at the age of six with his nose pressed against the giant glass window of the Crystal Studio of a local department store's radio station.  For ten years, he played radio with imagined equipment and shows featuring neighborhood children.  He got a part-time job at a real radio station, WMRF-AM, while he was still in high school in Lewistown, Pa.  At age twenty, he helped build WHUN-AM in Huntington and also served as its program director. 

For a short time, he worked at stations in Ohio and Nebraska.  He returned to Pennsylvania in 1950, where he started WKBI-AM in St. Marys.  When a second station was added in 1953, the Allegheny Mountain Network was born. 

Broadcasting has always been a family affair for Simpson. His parents helped
him build and staff his first station. Until her death in 2000, Cary's wife Betty operated the stations with him. His children, Ted and Barbie, have worked in sales.

For more than four decades, Simpson has been involved in industry organizations.  He was on the Radio Advertising Bureau's Board of Directors for more than twenty years.  He has been chairman of RAB's Small Market Advisory Committee and secretary of RAB's Executive Committee for many years.  He served on the Futures Committee of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Simpson has been active in the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters, serving as historian of Pennsylvania broadcasting and broadcasters.  He was instrumental in organizing PAB's History Project which produced oral histories of PAB members and arranged for the histories to be housed in the Broadcast Pioneers Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.  

He was PAB Joint Board Chairman in 1965. He headed PAB's Emergency Broadcast System program, serving as chairman of the Pennsylvania State Emergency Communications Committee for fifteen years.   In 1993, Simpson was awarded the Radio Wayne Award by Radio Ink magazine.