Jim West, the WBAL NewsRadio personality who became co-host of the popular morning show “Jones & West,” died Friday of heart failure at Oak Crest retirement community in Parkville. He was 95.
“Jim was the morning sports guy and I was the engineer producer,” said James M. “Jim” Bigwood. “Jim and Bob Jones were naturals on the air, very patient with each other, could ad-lib beautifully and both had a good set of pipes.”
Mark Miller, the station’s former news director who is now a spokesperson for Howard County, enjoyed working with the two men.
“Jones and West were just two guys who loved their jobs and never got mad at each other,” Mr. Miller said.
“Jim was kind of a character and a classy gentleman who loved telling stories and was just a funny nice guy to be around,” said Tom Davis, former WBAL-TV sports reporter.
James Griffith Wetzel, whose professional name was Jim West, was the son of Donald L. Wetzel, a Pennsylvania Power & Light accountant, and Gladys G. Wetzel, an educator and homemaker. Mr. West was born in Pittsburgh and moved to Hamilton in 1938.
A talented singer, Mr. West began singing with big bands and acting as an emcee at Skateland and proms.
He attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, and dropped out his senior year during World War II, and enlisted in the Army.
He was stationed in Tokyo at the Imperial Palace as one of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s guards.
After being discharged, he graduated from Poly and attended what is now Towson University.
His education was once again interrupted when he was recalled to active duty in 1950 during the Korean War and sent to Korea to entertain troops in a show called “Operation Kapers.”
“Ruth Hulla, who was a stenographer where our father worked, at his urging began writing to Jim,” said his sister, Judith Colaianni, of Parkville.
The couple fell in love and married in 1952.
“Initially I was angling towards a singing career,” Mr. West said in a 2020 interview with The Observer, the Oak Crest community newspaper. “But then rock and roll came along and knocked that idea out of play.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Towson and graduating from the National Academy of Broadcasting in Washington in the early 1950s, Mr. West began his career at WBAL-TV as a singer in 1952 on “The Brent Gunts Show.”
“They said my name needed to sound a little more show-bizzy, so we came up with the name ‘West.’ I was in my early 20s at the time, and it just stuck with me,” he said in the interview.
From 1956 to 1961, he was a disc jockey on WBAL NewsRadio.
Always interested in sports, Mr. West in 1961 was named news and sports director at WITH-AM-Radio.
He also covered box lacrosse and high school football for WJZ-TV.
When the American Hockey League Clippers came to Baltimore in 1962, Mr. West’s rich baritone became the voice of the team.
“When the Clippers came to town, Jim was assigned to cover them and had never seen a hockey game before,” Mr. Bigwood said, with a laugh. “He was reading the rule book in the back of a cab on the way over to the Civic Center.”
In 1971, Mr. West left Baltimore and headed for Chicago, where he worked for WGN-TV doing play-by-play for the Cubs and the Blackhawks hockey team.
Mr. West returned to Baltimore in 1979 as morning sports director and news anchor for WBAL NewsRadio.
“When I started the morning shift in 1979, I was still in college, and wet behind the ears,” Mr. Miller said. “But Jim never treated me that way and he took me under his wing. He was a generous guy who had been around for a lot of years but was never afraid to be kind to younger people.”
“Jim was the early morning sports guy and after he finished his broadcast, he and Bob Jones would sit around and start talking about things. Management saw that, and it became ‘Jones & West,’” said veteran WBAL broadcaster, John Patti. “Jim was very popular and brought a great work ethic to ‘Jones & West.’”
“We really didn’t talk about anything too heavy in those days,” Mr. West told The Observer. “We interviewed guests like Alex Trebek and Dinah Shore, broken up by news on the hour, weather, and sports.”
“He always had a joke. Most people who come to work are miserable, but that wasn’t Jim. He loved his job,” Mr. Miller said.
“Bob Jones, Jim West, Jay Grayson, Galen Fromme, they were WBAL powerhouses back then. They were legendary and Jim was a part of that,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Jones retired in 1990 and died in 2020.
Mr. West, who lived in the Sutton Place Apartments in downtown Baltimore, retired in 1995, and moved to Oak Crest that year.
His wife Ruth, died, in 2014.
Mr. West kept busy at the retirement community, where he wrote movie reviews and other feature articles for the resident newspaper. He also enjoyed swimming and exercising.
In 2007, he was inducted into the Maryland Senior Citizens Hall of Fame.
At Mr. West’s request, no services will be held.
In addition to his sister, he is survived by a brother, Jack Wetzel of Rochester, New York, and several nieces and nephews.