The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Cary Weston is a Bangor business owner and former city councilor.
There is something quietly inspiring about a person who spends their life in a passion. Not just someone who is talented, but someone who shows up for decades because the work itself calls them. Those people are rare. When you find one, you pay attention.
George Hale is one of those people.
For more than 75 years, George has been a fixture of Maine media. Generations of listeners built their mornings around his voice.
My grandmother was one of them. She would sit at her kitchen table with an AM radio and listen to George tell her what she needed to know about the day that was and the day coming up. It was as regular as the sunrise.
That kind of presence does not happen by accident. It is earned.
I have never worked in radio, but I have been surrounded by radio people my whole life. And to a person, every one of them holds George Hale in the highest regard, not just as a professional, but as a human being. That is peer respect. It is a harder thing to earn than fan admiration, and George has had both in full measure.
And that is what makes this farewell so important to get right.
I was 12 years old when I sat in Fenway Park for Carl Yastrzemski’s final Red Sox game in October 1983. At the end, Yaz ran around the warning track and the crowd met him every step of the way.
I didn’t fully understand what I was witnessing at the time. But the older I get, the more I appreciate what that moment held — for the fans who had given him decades of loyalty, and for a man who got to feel all of it come back to him at once. That is what closure looks like.
That is what a career of that magnitude deserves.
George Hale has earned it, too.
There are voices that fill a room and voices that fill an era. George filled an era.
George, I truly hope you get to take your lap around the cathedral, my friend.
You have more than earned it.
