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Date Posted: 12:06:50 05/18/08 Sun
Author: JM
Subject: RIP, Keeve Berman

One of the KQV voices from the Top 40 era has passed away. Bob Gibson reports:

It is with deep sadness that I tell you that Keeve passed away early this morning (Sunday, May 18th) as a result of a blood clot traveling to his brain.

Keeve died at a nursing home in Pembroke Pines, Florida, where he was undergoing therapy for weakness on one side of his body and depression. He was 71. For those who did not know, Keeve was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer just about a year ago.

He underwent extensive radiation and chemotherapy treatment, and just after Christmas, his doctor informed him that he had beaten the disease. But once into the New Year, he found himself on a cycle of ups and downs with some days feeling fine and many others in which he felt tired and depressed.

This all seems so foreign to me because I knew Keeve for thirty-five years and there was seldom a time when he was NOT a fun-loving, easy-going broadcaster and a terrific friend.

He was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania and he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. In his late teens started working in radio. By the very early 1960s, Keeve was hired as a fill-in air personality and news broadcaster at KQV, the ABC-owned station in Pittsburgh. But after six or seven years at that station and ultimately becoming a staff newsman, Keeve was named News Director at New York's WOR-FM. But his "hometown" was not completely out of his system. About two years later, he returned to Pittsburgh to become News Director at WTAE Radio, where he remained until 1974 when ABC Radio News in New York called, and Keeve began a ten-year stint as a correspondent on the American Contemporary Network.

Keeve had an outstanding sense of humor and that newsroom across from Lincoln Center learned it in rapid order. But he was sometimes the butt of 'jabs' such as when he'd ask questions about a particular detail on certain stories and sometimes, nearly in unison, the rest of us in the room would remind him "you must read beyond the first graph of the A wire!!!"

Perhaps one of the best Keeve stories was the evening he was told by a desk assistant that he had a phone call and when he asked who it was, he was told "Dr. Parker." Thinking it was his newsroom colleague and fellow golfer, Wally Parker, Keeve picked up the phone and asked, "Well, Wally, when do you want to tee it up?" There was just one problem. The caller was not Wally Parker, but Tom O'Brien, apparently calling to ask or to tell Keeve something about his last newscast. Most of us received such calls, but Keeve took it in stride and
many years later, he and I would still chuckle about it whenever one of us made reference "Dr. Parker..."

As I write this, funeral arrangements are incomplete. Keeve's last marriage to New York broadcaster Shelli Sonstein ended in divorce several years ago. That union produced three children, Aaron, Ryan and Dina, all of whom are now en route to south Florida, where Keeve retired about five years ago and absolutely loved his condominium and the nearby golf course. He also loved his companion, Elaine Kugelman, of Pembroke Pines.

Without a doubt, Keever, as he was affectionately known, will be sorely missed!

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