Published: May 04, 2008 11:53 pm            

Engineer for WVU broadcasts dies

MORGANTOWN — John McKinney, technical director of West Virginia University football and basketball radio broadcasts for 31 years, died unexpectedly on Sunday morning at Monongalia General Hospital.

He was about 59.

“We’re all saddened,” said Tony Caridi, play-by-play announcer the past several years. “John did a great job seeing that everything that needed to be done was done before we went on the air. He'll be sorely missed.”

The Morgantown native was an employee of the West Virginia Radio Corp., whose WAJR was the flagship of the statewide Mountaineer Sports Network and had the broadcast rights.

“John still worked all home basketball games and all home and away football games,” said Mike Parsons, WVU deputy director of athletics. “His son, John Jr., has worked with him the last three years or so.

“The job John Sr. did has been very important to the network because he was the guy who made it operate flawlessly. We’ve all admired and appreciated his work. He understood the operation and he was very efficient.

“He was the mainstay of our network — the consistency of it all. We’re certainly going to miss John McKinney Sr.”

In an interview five years ago, McKinney recalled that the late Jack (Voice of the Mountaineers) Fleming, then general manager of WAJR, hired him as an engineer for the local station on Aug. 8, 1967. But he did not start working full time for MSN until the 1976-77 school year.

“Up to that time, we’d pack the needed equipment and Jack would serve as his own technician for road game broadcasts,” McKinney explained. “The equipment included one microphone, a nine-volt battery and a headphone set.”

But the network has been even more sophisticated, with more equipment involved, in recent years.

McKinney acknowledged that a lot went into radio broadcasts of games, but that he always enjoyed every bit of his work. He enjoyed working all those years with Fleming as well as with Caridi, Woody O’Hara, Jay Jacobs, and more recently, Dwight Wallace.

Parsons said, “I’ve always said John McKinney is the most popular guy in West Virginia that no one knows what he looks like or what he sounds like. That’s just from people hearing his name on the radio broadcasts so frequently and for so many years.”

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

        

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