He was born Charles Osgood Wood III in Manhattan on January 8, 1933. His father, Charles Osgood II, was a textile salesman who moved the family to Baltimore when young Charles was 6 years old and took a second job, as a shipper. for a copper company. company, during World War II. His mother, Mary (Wilson) Wood, was known as Violet.
Osgood went to Fordham University, where, he later said, he spent more time at the campus radio station than in class. His first job after graduating in 1954, with a degree in economics, was as a radio host at a classical music station, WGMS in Washington, DC (the call letters stood for “Washington Good Music Station”). Realizing that he might be drafted, he applied to be announcer for the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, and got the position, which he held from 1955 to 1958.
He also worked under assumed names at several radio stations in the Washington area. Top 40 listeners knew him as Chuck Forest and, with a nod to Henry David Thoreau, as Carl Walden. The pseudonyms were plays on his real name, which he had used at WGMS.
Broadcast briefly to an audience of one. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, Mr. Osgood was recruited to be the president's personal disc jockey. “They put me in a studio with a stack of records that had been chosen as his favorites,” he said in 2016, “and I spent most of the day playing records for Eisenhower.”
When his military service ended, he returned to WGMS, where he became program director. RKO General, the network that owned WGMS at the time, later transferred it to a pay television station operating in Hartford, Connecticut. “We lost money at an alarming rate,” he said, and RKO fired him in 1963.
