Ellen Mitchell reflects on her years as WCBS/880 AM’s “voice of Long Island”

When WCBS/880 AM received final approval of its all-news radio format in August, among the disappointed fans was the station’s former “voice of Long Island.”

Ellen Mitchell, 86, was the station’s Long Island reporter from 1980 to 1995. She reported on some of the region’s most headline-grabbing stories, including the Amy Fisher “Long Island Lolita” case, the 1989 murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes and the Long Island case. Mass shooting on Island Rail Road in 1993. She had her own signature: “On Long Island, this is Ellen Mitchell.”

Mitchell, who now divides her time between Huntington and her home of 32 years in Orient, said she has nearly 1,000 6-by-9-inch steno pads that she filled with notes while traversing Long Island as a freelance reporter for 20 years. She was such a local staple that then-Gov. Mario Cuomo once called during family dinner to ask if she wanted to join his PR staff; she said she declined the offer.

“She was a pioneer for many of the other women who came after her because she broke into a field at a time when there weren’t many women doing what she did,” said her eldest child, Elisa McDonagh, 61, a retiree . general practitioner in Centrumpoort. “She ultimately followed a passion that she enjoyed and was a role model for other women and for her daughters to follow the path that brings you joy.”

CAREER PATH

Mitchell, whose maiden name is Mayer, even said she “desperately wanted to be an architect,” but her parents said that’s not what women do. When she graduated from Freeport High School in 1956, she compromised and went to college to become an art teacher. It didn’t go well.

“I hated teaching,” Mitchell said of her two years at her high school alma mater.

By then she was married to Paul Mitchell, a doctor. She said she was happy to give up teaching and settle into married life and raising their three children. But Mitchell, who now has eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way, said she was bored by the time her youngest was ready for elementary school in 1975.

That child was Gail Mitchell, now 53 and an art curator living in Brooklyn. She remembers her mother telling a story about being invited to play cards with other housewives in their Melville neighborhood. “She said they talked about a chandelier for an hour and she had to apologize. I think she just needed to be active in a different way than other local moms might need.”

Ellen Mitchell remembered the moment things changed for her. “This was a time when women were mainly in the kitchen and I heard a woman’s voice delivering the local news. And I said, ‘I can talk better than them.’ ”

So she went to radio station WGSM, which was then located in Huntington. “I told them, ‘I don’t know anything about reporting. I don’t really know anything about being a writer, but I have a big mouth, so I’d like to help out in your radio news department.’ She said she added the magic phrase that sealed her job: “And I do it for free.”

In her five years there, she said she covered the Nassau and Suffolk legislatures, local government meetings and homicides. She occasionally sent Long Island stories to WNEW in New York City. That’s when she heard WCBS/880 was looking for someone to cover the area. Mitchell started there in February 1980 as a freelance on-air reporter covering groundbreaking events, government, politics, crime, courts and human interest, primarily on Long Island and occasionally in New York City.

START WITH A QUIP

Mitchell said she never forgot the advice a male WGSM reporter told her: The most important part of any story was its introduction, known as the lede. ‘He said: Ellen, if you learn something here, take the lead with the one who listens to you; the rest is gravy.”

And so witty jokes became her signature opening lines. She learned how to be a journalist on the job, getting to know detectives and police chiefs so she could get quotes and clues on stories. She carried a tape recorder and a microphone, and via a pay phone or, occasionally, a random homeowner’s phone, she sent her reports to WCBS.

Every day was exciting, Mitchell said. She remembered filling in at the city desk and reporting on a hostage situation. She entered a telephone booth on the deserted street to report live from a short distance away from the action.

‘I’m in the middle of the report and the presenter suddenly comes in and says, ‘Ellen, get the hell out of the phone booth. You are in the line of fire. The police just called.’ She added with amusement, “That was good radio.”

She said she was one of the first on the scene when Fisher was brought to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office after shooting her boyfriend’s wife, Joey Buttafuoco, and she soon got to know Buttafuoco and his family. The LIRR killer, Colin Ferguson, called her from prison and offered her an exclusive interview, which she said the station would turn down. Mitchell said she was disappointed because she thought it would have brought in a lot of radio listeners.

MINEOLA PRESS ROOM

Her headquarters was the Mineola newsroom in the Nassau County Courthouse, along with reporters from media outlets such as Newsday, Channel 11, News 12, the Daily News, The Associated Press, the New York Post and UPI.

“We were a very close group. “Everyone on Long Island: the police departments in Suffolk and Nassau, the executives, cops, politicians, detectives and corporate PR people called us all the time, came over and talked to us,” she said. “It was really an information center.”

It was the place to be, agreed Vicki Metz of Bayville, the assignment editor for Channel 7 “Eyewitness News” from 1987 to 2009. “You knew you had really made it when you worked in that room. There was real camaraderie. . . I loved working there.”

Also in the press room was Irving Long, 85, of Rockingham, North Carolina, a Newsday reporter who covers politics. “Ellen was the No. 1 radio reporter in my opinion. . . She was tough. She was competitive. She was hard to beat. She is a great person, not just a great reporter,” he said.

Another Newsday reporter and longtime friend, Shirley Perlman, 86, said Mitchell “was called the CBS voice of Long Island because the range of what she reported on was astonishing. Most reporters specialize in one area – for me it was courts in Mineola – but whatever happened on Long Island, Ellen covered it.

Perlman, who retired from Newsday in 2003 and now lives in Bondville, Vermont, said that even though they were competitors, they met every morning before work at 5:30 a.m. to run three miles. They still speak almost every day.

Mitchell’s husband, Paul — who died in 2022 — had a busy schedule with his medical practice in Plainview, so for much of her radio career she juggled her reporting with her children’s schedules. All three said they had pleasant memories of her career.

McDonagh, a mother of four, said it was always exciting to hear her mother’s name on the radio. “Whether it was in the eye of the hurricane or she was interviewing someone, I had an idea of ​​where she was based on where she said she was reporting.”

Her son, Jim Mitchell, 60, of Irvington, New York, recalled riding on the press car after one of the Islanders’ Stanley Cup victories. But what left a lasting impression was going to the courthouse with his mother, especially on the day in 1982 when five men were charged in a violent act at the Seacrest Diner in Old Westbury. “I enjoyed watching the lawyers in the courtroom,” he said.

Although he doesn’t remember it, Mitchell said the teen turned to her and said he was going to do that one day. He is now a high-profile criminal defense attorney at Ballard Spahr LLP, often answering reporters’ questions for his clients.

‘There weren’t that many mothers who did things like that back then. . . Now I deal with reporters all the time and it gives you a whole different perspective and appreciation for how difficult it is,” he said.

Gail Mitchell said that as the youngest, she spent most of her time at work with her mother, often going to the press room after school. She got to know what she called “the cast of characters” and remembers a message board where reporters posted alternate headlines that could never be published.

A favorite memory was when her mother took her to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at dawn to fly in the helicopter with WCBS traffic reporter Neal Busch. “I had my camera with me and got to sit next to him while he reported live,” she said. “I still have the photos I took that morning.”

PRIZES AND A BOOK

Mitchell won several awards for her on-air news reporting, including from the New York State Broadcasting Association for excellence in spot news covering the fatal Grucci fireworks explosion in 1983 and in 1990 for the crash of Avianca Flight 52 in Cove Neck. But her long term at WCBS ended due to a change in her employment status.

Mitchell said she was never employed by the station and was instead paid as a freelancer. She also wrote features for The New York Times and Newsday, and shared story information with other radio stations. In 1995, she said WCBS asked her to become a staff member, which meant giving up writing for someone else and having the freedom to write the stories she wanted. So she quit at the age of 57. (In a 1995 Daily News article, a WCBS official declined to comment on the matter.)

Mitchell went on to do publicity for the North Shore Health System for five years and was a regular contributor to Newsday, including writing a weekly column, “Connections,” for this section. She also wrote a book related to one of those articles, “Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child,” about women whose children had died. It was published in 2004 by St. Martin’s Griffin.

Mitchell officially retired from freelancing about 15 years ago. Of her time as a radio reporter, she said: “I could never do it today. The schedule was insane. I don’t have that much energy to be so busy and keep going.”

These days, she says she focuses on photography and was almost persuaded by her children to write a book about her years in the Mineola pressroom. Of the final days of WCBS/880, she said, “I was heartbroken when I heard it had closed. They really knew what they were doing with news, so I will miss that. I consider my time there as the glory days of radio news.”