Radio man Blumberg dies at 64

As he had done a thousand times before, Joel Blumberg boarded a Long Island Rail Road train in Merrick on Friday afternoon, headed for Madison Square Garden. Blumberg, a longtime radio broadcaster, producer and engineer from East Meadow, was going to work for a Miami Heat radio broadcast of the Knicks game. But while on the train, he was stricken with what appears to be a heart attack, and he was pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital. He was 64.

Blumberg had engineered and produced radio broadcasts for virtually every local professional and college team. He worked for the Islanders, Rangers, Knicks, Jets and St. John's. He had been the play-by-play man for Manhattan College basketball games for many years and had done NFL and NCAA broadcasts around the country.

Blumberg is survived by his wife, Jill, and daughter Miranda, 14.

"All he ever wanted to do was help people," said Ed Ingles, a longtime radio broadcaster who worked many St. John's basketball games with Blumberg. "If you ever had a problem with anything, and I mean anything, you called Joel. The guy was the salt of the earth."

"Joel would give you the shirt off his back," said Barry Landers, who worked with him on Islanders broadcasts. "He was an opinionated guy and we got into it once in a while, but in the end, we were always friends. He was always there to help."

Blumberg met his wife in 1987 while returning from an Islanders broadcast in Detroit. Landers, commentator Jean Potvin and Blumberg had changed their flight to the first one in the morning because of an impending storm in New York.

"He was grumpy and growly and mad, I guess, that I had taken up all the space in the overhead bin," Jill Blumberg said. "When he sat down, he tried to talk with me, but I put my Walkman on so that I wouldn't hear him. Then they served breakfast and I took it off. Somewhere between breakfast and New York, I gave him my phone number. We were married in July the following year."

Blumberg was a dedicated movie historian and had hosted a show devoted to movies on WGBB, "Silver Screen Audio." He spoke at film festivals around the country and co-wrote a book with Sandra Grabman published this year, "Lloyd Nolan: An Actor's Life With Meaning."

A service will be held at Star of David Memorial Chapel in West Babylon at 2 p.m. Monday, with burial to follow at Wellwood Cemetery. Donations can be made to the Dr. Theodore A. Atlas Foundation for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.