Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Famous People Who Returned Our Calls

Carl Ray Kasell was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina on April 2, 1934. During high school, he worked part time for a local radio station. He studied English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was drafted by the Army before he could graduate. While in college, he helped start a campus radio station. He served in the Army for two years.

From 1958 to 1965, he was an announcer and disc jockey for WGBR-AM in Goldsboro. He then became a morning anchor and later the news director of WAVA-FM, a pioneering all-news station in Arlington, Virginia. In 1975, he joined NPR as a part-time weekend news announcer for All Things Considered. After WAVA switched to rock music, he quit the station in 1977 and became a full-time announcer for All Things Considered. He joined NPR's Morning Edition in 1979. In 1998, he became an official judge and scorekeeper of the news-related, call-in comedy hour Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! He retired from Morning Edition in 2009 and from Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! in 2014. He shared a George Foster Peabody Award given to Morning Edition in 1999 and was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2010. His memoir, Wait Wait ... I'm Not Done Yet!, was published in 2014. He died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on April 17, 2018 at the age of 84.

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