Pegeen Fitzgerald; Early Radio Personality

Pegeen Fitzgerald, believed to be 78 and part of the first husband-wife radio team whose New York City broadcasts for half a century turned her life into an ongoing soap opera. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s career began in 1937 with a radio station owned by a Portland, Ore., department store where she worked. To fill air time, she began to broadcast from the store. Her husband was a newspaper reporter who had gone into radio in 1933 as a master of ceremonies. After they married, they went to New York, where she landed a job on WOR-AM doing a half-hour talk show on her lunch hour while working as a department store advertising manager. When Mrs. Fitzgerald caught pneumonia, she was asked to broadcast from her hospital bed and later from her home while she was convalescing. Because she did not want her announcer, Henry Morgan, to see her in a bathrobe, she asked if her husband, Edward, could take his place. The husband-wife combination became a radio first and was at one time heard by 2 million people in the New York area. He died in 1982. In New York of cancer on Monday.