A Tribute · Baltimore Radio
Tom Marr
AM 680 WCBM BaltimoreIn memoriam · 1942–2016

“Talk Radio at its Best” — the voice of weekday mornings on WCBM 680.

Biography

The life of Tom Marr

A Marine, a newsroom anchor, the Orioles’ voice, and three decades of morning talk radio — set out with its sources.

Thomas Aquinas Marr — Tom Marr on the air — was born on October 17, 1942, and spent the better part of fifty years behind a microphone. He died on July 7, 2016, at the age of 73, from a stroke that followed spine surgery. He had been married more than fifty years, and left five children and ten grandchildren.

Most broadcasting careers fit into one of two boxes: sport or news. Marr’s refused to. He called two World Series for the Baltimore Orioles and, in the same lifetime, spent three decades hosting a weekday political talk show on the same city’s AM dial. What follows is the published record — his Wikipedia biography, his own archived website, and the station listings that outlived him — set out in order, with sources at the foot of the page.

Full name
Thomas Aquinas Marr
Born
October 17, 1942
Died
July 7, 2016, age 73 — a stroke resulting from spine surgery
Known for
Baltimore Orioles play-by-play (1979–1986); host of The Tom Marr Show on WCBM 680, Baltimore
Family
Married more than 50 years; five children; ten grandchildren

Before the microphone: WWDC and the Marine Corps

Marr started early. In 1960, still a teenager, he was hosting a high-school sports show on WWDC in Washington, D.C. — the sort of low-stakes local slot where a broadcaster either finds a voice or doesn’t. He then served in the United States Marine Corps, and was discharged in 1963.

The four years that followed are the road years every broadcaster of his generation seems to have: radio in Rhode Island, then Salisbury, Maryland, then WTAR in Norfolk, Virginia. They are listed in the record as stations rather than stories, but they are the apprenticeship that put him in a Baltimore newsroom before he turned twenty-five.

WFBR: the Baltimore newsroom

In 1967 Marr arrived at WFBR (1300 AM) in Baltimore as a news anchor and reporter, and later became the station’s news director. In the same stretch — 1967 to 1975 — he worked as a CBS Radio News sports correspondent, covering the Orioles, the Colts and the Bullets. That is the whole of Baltimore’s professional sport in one beat, filed to a national network.

WFBR is also where the second half of his career quietly began. He was a panelist on the station’s award-winning political call-in show, Conference Call — talk radio, years before he made it his job. In 1971 he broadcast Orioles exhibition games from Japan, and from 1976 to 1979 he was weekend sports anchor at WMAR-TV (Channel 2) in Baltimore.

The voice of the Orioles, 1979–1986

From 1979 to 1986 Marr held the Orioles’ play-by-play chair on WFBR. Eight seasons is a long time in a job that turns over quickly, and his ran through the best of that era: he called the 1979 World Series and the 1983 World Series. In 1984 he again broadcast Orioles exhibition games from Japan — a second trip, thirteen years after the first.

Those two World Series are the credits that follow his name in every summary of his career, and they are the reason a talk-radio host was still being introduced as a baseball announcer thirty years later.

“Talk Radio at its Best”The tagline on his own website, 2003–2005

Talk radio: WWDB, WCBM and the WOR network

Marr moved into political talk in the late 1980s. From 1987 to 1995 he hosted a Saturday-night political talk show on WWDB-FM in Philadelphia. In 1988 he joined WCBM (680 AM) in Baltimore, after the station was revived by Nick Mangione, Sr. — the station he would be identified with for the rest of his life. In 1995 he moved full-time to WWDB-FM in Philadelphia.

The return came in 1997, when he came back to WCBM on a long-term contract. From there the record lists three things at once: he was the station’s lead-in to The Rush Limbaugh Show, he was a national fill-in host for Bob Grant and Mark Levin, and he hosted a nationally syndicated weeknight program on the WOR Radio Network out of New York City.

His own website advertised the day job plainly: The Tom Marr Show, weekdays from 9 a.m. to Noon on AM 680 WCBM Baltimore. We describe the show itself, and what the archived site looked like, on the on-the-air page.

Reporting from the field

Marr did not do the whole job from a studio. He broadcast from more than fifteen international locations, among them Israel, Iraq, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Scotland and Bosnia. In July 2006 he spent three weeks embedded with Coalition Forces in Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar.

For a local-market morning host, that is an unusual amount of travel, and it is the detail that best separates his show from the format it belonged to.

Recognition

What the record does not say

This is a tribute, not a reconstruction. Several things a fuller biography would include simply are not in the sources we can stand behind, and we would rather leave a gap than fill it:

Timeline

How we handle facts. Every date, station and credit on this page comes from one of the three sources below. Where they are silent, we say so rather than guess — and if you can document a correction, we want it: contact us.

Sources

→ The show itself: The Tom Marr Show on Talk Radio 680 WCBM