became the No. 1 station in New York City. The first "disco" ratings saw WKTU with 11 percent of the listening audience—a huge number anywhere, let alone in a market the size of New York City—and WABC dropping from 4.1 million listeners to 3 million, losing 25 percent of its audience practically overnight. After this initial ratings tumble, WABC panicked and began mixing in several extended disco mixes per hour and sometimes played two back-to-back. Some of the disco songs ran in excess of eight minutes. What regular listeners heard was a major change in sound. While the station continued playing non-disco and rock songs about a third of the time, the station's familiar format had seemed to disappear and as a result, WABC began to lose its identity. In late spring 1979, Billboard magazine reported that Rick Sklar had demoted program director Glenn Morgan to "moving carts" instead of making programming decisions. WABC's numbers dropped for four consecutive ratings periods. On August 2, 1979, the Donna Summer disco hit "MacArthur Park" was playing during Dan Ingram's afternoon drive program. During the song, DJ George Michael (who also was a sports reporter) interrupted to break the news that New York Yankees catcher and team captain Thurman Munson had died in a plane crash. In late summer, WABC moved, temporarily, back to its tight playlists. That fall, Al Brady took over as programming director of WABC. He had come from WHDH Boston, where he evolved that station from MOR to more of an adult contemporary music format. At WABC, he added a huge amount of music and went as far back as 1964. He added The Beatles, Motown 1960s hits, 1970s rock hits, a few album rock cuts, and basically deepened WABC's music. The same amount of current hits still got played but less often and about 40%. That November, he let Harry Harrison, George Michael, and Chuck Leonard go. He made a couple shifts longer, moved Dan Ingram to mornings, moved Bob Cruz from overnights to afternoons, and hired Howard Hoffman for evenings. For overnights he hired Sturgis Griffin and eliminated the late night shift merging that with evenings and overnights. In the first six months of 1980, ratings were slightly up and stable. Also, Brady made a deal for WABC to air New York Yankees baseball beginning the next year in 1981, though the station carried a few Yankee