Bishop First Made News on the Radio

The bold and booming voice of Bishop John J. O’Hara can be traced to his days on the radio airwaves.

Bishop O’Hara was a broadcast journalist for more than a decade before he hung up his microphone and put on a cassock and collar.

“I stumbled into communications, which became my passion,” he recently reminisced.

His foray into the communications field began when he was asked to give an extemporaneous speech in front of a voice indiction class his freshman year at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

He was a hit, which prompted his professor to encourage him to apply to the university’s renowned radio station, WSOU, which had a 90-mile radius from South Orange.

After getting up his nerve, he later went to the radio station, where he met the late Father James Pindar, then the station’s director, who gave him “a pile of copy to read” for an audition. Afterward, Father Pindar said, “Thank you very much,” Bishop O’Hara recalled. “He called me a few days later and said, ‘We’d like to have you.’”

And so it began. “There was a wonderful spirit engendered there by Father Pindar,” Bishop O’Hara said.

John O’Hara debuted on the air in December 1963, precisely 21 years to the month he would be ordained a priest. “All of a sudden, it’s like you experience something that’s hand to glove,” he said of radio.

“And I knew it. I loved it. The radio station became my second home. And oh, my,” he continued in enthusiastic fashion, “not only did we learn the craft of broadcasting, but we learned what it was to cooperate.”

Father Pindar placed the budding broadcasters in their areas of skill and interest. “My interest was news and public affairs,” which included election coverage. “For me, those years were among the happiest I can remember, the years at WSOU.”

Father Pindar encouraged him to work in the field commercially after graduation, which he did, first in the news department at WERA in Plainfield, N.J., and then, from 1971 to 1980, at WMTR in Morristown, N.J., where he rose to news director before exiting the station to enter St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie.

John O’Hara announced his decision to enter the priesthood to a wider audience than most of his classmates had, as he relayed his breaking news over his final broadcast.

“I had come full circle with what I had been doing,” he said. “I felt there needed to be a change.”