Charles Osgood, lyrical radio and TV newsreader, dies at the age of 91

He was born Charles Osgood Wood III in Manhattan on January 8, 1933. His father, Charles Osgood II, was a textile salesman who moved the family to Baltimore when young Charles was six and took a second job, as a freight forwarder for a copper factory. company, during World War II. His mother, Mary (Wilson) Wood, was known as Violet.

Mr. Osgood attended Fordham University, where, he later said, he spent more time at the campus radio station than in class. His first job after graduating in 1954 with a degree in economics was as a radio announcer at a classical music station, WGMS in Washington, DC (the call letters stood for “Washington's good music station”). Realizing he might be drafted, he applied to be an announcer for the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, and got the job, which he held from 1955 to 1958.

He also worked under assumed names at several radio stations in the Washington area. Top-40 listeners knew him as Chuck Forest and, with a nod to Henry David Thoreau, Carl Walden. The pseudonyms were plays on his real name, which he had used at WGMS.

He broadcast briefly to an audience of one. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, Mr. Osgood was recruited as the president's personal disc jockey. “I was put in a studio with a stack of records all picked as his favorites,” he said in 2016“and I spent most of the day recording for Eisenhower.”

When his military service ended, he returned to WGMS, where he became program director. RKO General, the network that owned WGMS at the time, later transferred him to a pay-TV station in Hartford, Conn. “We were losing money at an alarming rate,” he said, and RKO let him go in 1963.