Carl's Leaving The Newscast, But The Only Thing He's Retiring Is His Alarm Clock

It's an exciting, sad, terrific, historic, bittersweet day here at NPR.

Yes, all those things at once.

As you've probably heard, our colleague Carl Kasell will be delivering his last newscast at 11 a.m. ET. After 30 years, he's no longer going to have to get up at 1:05 a.m. ET to be on the air at 5. Carl, 75, will continue as judge and scorekeeper at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, and he'll be an NPR ambassador of sorts, traveling to member stations to spread the good word about public radio.

The team at Morning Edition had Carl on the show this morning to talk about his career. "The only thing I'm retiring is my alarm clock," Carl told Renee Montagne. As you'll hear, he always wanted to be on the radio. Linda Wertheimer introduces the conversation:

That 1953 broadcast from WUNC in Chapel Hill that you get a taste of in ME's report is amazing — if only for the deep, resonate, radio-friendly voices that Carl and his college buddy Charles Kuralt already had. Here's the full 30-minute broadcast:

And you can see the "boys," in about 1954, in this photo. That's Kuralt on the left, Carl on the right.

Carl's on the air right now, doing the 8 a.m. ET newscast. He's still got the 9 a.m., 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. "top of the hour" newscasts to do, so there's time to catch him. Click here to find an NPR station near you.

We'll "live-blog" the 11 a.m. newscast and put the audio on the Two-Way afterward.

For now, here's the first newscast Carl did this morning:

Coming up on the 8:30 a.m. ET newscast, by the way, another venerable NPR voice plans to pay her own tribute to Carl.

Jean Cochran says that for 30 years Carl, "has been my colleague and friend ... and your friend ... letting you know what's going on in the world each morning with his trademark calm and authoritative delivery. ... He will be sorely missed."

Update at 8:50 a.m. ET. Here's how Jean sounded when she honored Carl: