Celebration of Life Service Set for Greg McAtee
July 3, 2026
Greg McAtee at work at WPLW, 1980s
A Celebration of Life Service has been scheduled for one of Pittsburgh’s best-loved radio and TV personalities.
Greg McAtee, best known for his tenure as a traffic reporter with Audacy Pittsburgh and Metro Traffic, died Friday, June 19th following a five-year battle with cancer. McAtee was 69.
McAtee began his career at the now-defunct Christian station WPLW (Sonshine 16) in Carnegie back in the late 70’s. From there, he moved on to WPIT AM/FM (the latter now WORD-FM 101.5) in Pittsburgh, where he remained until its sale in 1993. He began reporting traffic soon afterwards.
McAtee’s service will be held on Saturday, July 25th at Allison Park Church Hampton Campus, located at 2326 Duncan Avenue in Allison Park. The service will begin at 10am.
Photo credit: Cathy Hickling
I remember him. Cancer is so evil.
That is one clean, but spartan setup, not like the pile of trash it was when I was there in the 1990s.
I say pile of trash lovingly, because I dig small, shoe-string operations like this.
In the 90s, That mixer was still there, but shoved back on the table and the ‘new’ mixer was put right in front of it, a tall panel, maybe LPB brand, with 2 main rotary pots with switches for different sources. I heard it came out of the Columbia School Of Broadcasting in Dormont when they closed, as some of their grads got their start at WPLW.
There was no turntable or open reel any more, that was probably the old equipment I saw that had been shoved into the room behind the transmitter.
Playback was only cassette and a CD player, to the left of the mixer, where the carts would be.
The tape decks were from Radio Shack, and I was told when they broke from the heavy use, it was cheaper to buy another tape deck to replace it than to have the cart decks repaired.
Ah, I loved this place, so much potential for greatness again, but unfortunately the owner got into a legal jam and went to jail for a year, and so the station soon became a K-Love affiliate, which I think was K-Love’s first entry into the market.
I spent time helping K-Love’s engineer as he tuned the station up, he fixed a long time problem with the station’s processing and had it sounding good in one night. For a long time they had no limiter at all, and you had to watch the levels carefully.
K-Love replaced everyone with a Windows 95 computer to run the local spots and IDs and used K-Love’s feed most of the time. I think they only kept sports guy Mike Reilly to turn the station on and off.
Shouts to my on-air trainer there, Adrian Maslonic!
RIP to WZUM/WPLW. Does anyone have a website dedicated to this station? 13Q and WIXZ 1360 have sites, and at one time, 60s, 70s, WZUM brought new rock to town before anyone else, and their daily polkas were popular too.
I didn’t take photos when I was there, didn’t think of it in my short stint.
Bows to Greg McAtee. Peace brother.
Thanks to Ken Hawk for writing this up.
Boomer