Radio industry veteran Ted Cramer has died

Ted Cramer, a radio programmer who spent decades inside country radio, died on Tuesday, Aug. 25 at the Center for Hospice Care in Elkhart, Indiana. He was 65. He also went by the name Cary Maurice Forester Tricarico.

Cramer served as program director of WIFE and WLPK in Indiana. He also sat on the MusicRow CountryBreakout Radio Chart panel, the reporting group that feeds one of the charts the Nashville industry watches, and MusicRow named him its Reporter of the Year in 2021.

He started in radio at 17 and worked at stations across the country before settling in Indiana. That is a long stretch in a business that has spent much of the same period consolidating, cutting local staff and centralising programming decisions away from the markets they serve.

The chart panel work is the part of a career like his that reaches furthest. A reporting station's programmer decides what gets counted, and in country radio that judgement helps determine which singles build momentum and which quietly stall.

Cramer is survived by his children Jensine Tricarico, Janyce Logan and Jaison Spink, seven grandchildren, one great-grandchild with another expected, and his brother Scott Tricarico. A celebration of life was set for Saturday, Sept. 5 at Ox Bow Park in Goshen, Indiana.

Local radio has lost several long serving figures this year, including Harvey Stone, who led the station KBLX for decades. The country format he worked in keeps producing the same chart stories he helped feed, among them Kenny Chesney returning to number one on the MusicRow radio chart.