John Bohannon, longtime Hofstra radio host, is dead

John Bohannon, whose radio career spanned more than a half-century and included such iconic events as the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the near-disastrous flight of Apollo 13 in 1970 and the 1980 murder of John Lennon, is dead at 82.
Bohannon spent the last 15 years of his career as the host of “The Jazz Café” for Hofstra University’s radio station, WHRU/88.7 FM.
Bohannon began his career in his native Florida in 1955 with a five-minute newscast that ran between Sunday religious broadcasts, along with a country music program, “Hillbilly Hit Parade.” He moved to the CBS’s Tampa affiliate, WDAE, the following year, where he did news and weather reports.
Bohannon arrived on Long Island in 1959 and began working as a disc jockey at WBAB in Babylon. He spent the next eight years in Babylon, Freeport, where he worked for WGBB/1240 AM, and Huntington, where he worked for WGSM/740 AM.
It was after is return to hard news in 1967 as an anchor at ABC Radio that he covered the disastrous flight of Apollo 13. While in lunar orbit, the spacecraft suffered a near-fatal explosion that almost cost the lives of its three astronauts.