Radio host lampoonedDemocrats

Published 12:00 am Sunday, January 5, 2014

Bob Grant, the right-wing talk radio host whose testy, confrontational manner made him a dominant voice during the drive-time hours in New York for decades, died Tuesday in Hillsborough, N.J. He was 84.

His death was announced by New York radio station WABC, where he attracted his biggest audiences.

Grant thrived on the radio, despite being boycotted for racist remarks and despite a trademark habit of hanging up on his own callers.

But his sharp tongue also proved his undoing. In 1996, WABC fired him over a remark he made after news reports said a plane carrying Ronald Brown, the commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, had crashed in Croatia. In a comment on the air after the news bulletin, Grant seemed to express the hope that Brown, an African-American and a perennial target of his scorn, had not survived. All 35 people aboard the plane were killed.

Grant had hosted radio and television talks shows in Los Angeles when he arrived in New York in 1970 to work at WMCA, a major radio station in the region. He left WMCA for another competitor, WOR, in a contract dispute shortly afterward and joined WABC in 1984.