Big Joe Henry is going to the Hall of Fame — and I was there when it happened
I have been doing this job for 48 years. I have had a lot of good days on the radio. Thursday at the New Jersey Hall of Fame at American Dream was one of the best.
It started with a smooth ride up the Turnpike and a parking strategy lesson — Court C, if you are going. American Dream is enormous and parking is very much part of your visit plan. The Hall of Fame is on level three, just past the food court. Once you find it, the entrance stops you immediately. This is a serious place. The exhibits are impressive, the Wall of Fame is stunning, and walking through before we went on air I kept thinking — New Jersey produced all of this. All of these people. This state never gets enough credit for what it has given the world.
We settled into the on-site studio, the New Jersey Hall of Fame logo on the desk in front of us, and then we started the show.
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The moment
Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) called in first. She opened by saying it was an honor to be talking to one of the newest inductees-to-be into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Big Joe heard that and paused. You could feel it through the radio.
Just to see his name on the ballot, he said, he had been thinking — did these guys have gummies, sitting around? To be inducted the first time around is an amazing, humbling experience.
I have known Big Joe for a long time. I have sat across from him in studios and watched him work red carpets and dazzle at charity events and in the hallways of this station for years. And I am a loyal weekend listener — I send him a text whenever a joke hits just right!
I have never seen him speechless. He was close to it Thursday morning.
He stayed with Judi and me until noon — taking calls from well-wishers, talking about what New Jersey means to him, being exactly who he has always been. The phones lit up the way they light up when something real is happening on the radio. People called from all over the state. People who grew up listening to him on Saturday mornings. People whose kids grew up listening to him. People who tracked Santa with him on Christmas Eve, made holiday recipes from his cookbook and considered it all as much a part of the holiday as the tree.
What Big Joe actually is
I said on the air that Big Joe was the voice of light during the darkest times. I meant 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy specifically — those moments when New Jersey needed something steady and familiar and he was there, playing the music and taking the calls and being the companion that radio is supposed to be when everything else goes silent.
But it is the other stuff too. The Holiday Express shows with Southside Johnny at Jenkinson's, raising millions for Jersey children's charities. The Polar Bear Plunge at Seaside for Special Olympics. The Christmas Eve tradition of tracking Santa with Bob Williams and taking requests that has been running since the 1990s — a tradition as real to New Jersey families as Santa himself. Hundreds of millions raised for Jersey charities over a career that has never been about Big Joe. It has always been about New Jersey.
Twenty years ago I remember meeting Steve Edwards, the president of the New Jersey Hall of Fame, when NJ 101.5 first got involved with the Hall in its earliest days. We put Big Joe to work on the red carpet at that very first induction ceremony. He interviewed the inductees. He celebrated them. He told their stories. He did it the way he does everything — with complete enthusiasm and zero ego. And now, at the 18th Annual ceremony on September 24, he takes his place on that same stage.
That is the full circle that radio people live for.
The rest of the day
After Big Joe the day kept delivering. Coach Greg Schiano called in and we talked Rutgers football and what Jersey — and his young players —means to him. David Bryan of Bon Jovi — a 2025 Hall of Fame inductee — joined us in the noon hour and was everything you would want David Bryan to be. The highlight of that conversation was recalling all the long gone Jersey rock and roll clubs, and how grateful that places like the Stone Pony remain.
Then Tommy James walked in. Hall of Fame class of 2016, inducted by Steven Van Zandt, 100 million records sold, and he brought a friend. Eddie Brigati of The Rascals — the voice on How Can I Be Sure in 1967, one of my mother's favorite songs. And I just watched his Ed Sullivan Show performance...just wow! Tommy was there to announce that The Rascals are the newest inductees into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Sixty years after forming in Garfield, Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati are going in. That announcement in that room on that day felt exactly right.
We wrapped the show with Joe Piscopo, who I have always thought of as the bridge — the human link between the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Johnny Carson era and the world we are in now. His stories are endless and I wished we had more time. Joe shared that very early in his career he was once a DJ on 101.5, long before our station was known as “New Jersey”. I plan on reading his memoir Average Joe to get the rest of them.
What the Hall of Fame actually is
Before the broadcast I walked the exhibits by myself for a few minutes. The Thomas Edison display. The Wall of Fame with all those medallions. The karaoke stage mural with Springsteen and Bon Jovi and Sinatra and James Gandolfini and Harriet Tubman and Albert Einstein all together in one spectacular pop art image. The artifacts and the stories of people who came from this specific place and changed the world from here.
New Jersey produces extraordinary people and does not always stop to appreciate it. The Hall of Fame at American Dream stops and appreciates it. It is worth your time and your parking strategy. Get there!
And on September 24 at the Dream Live Performing Arts Center, Big Joe Henry takes his rightful place among them.
Nobody more deserving. Nobody.
The 2021 inductees to the NJ Hall of Fame
Gallery Credit: Jeff Deminski
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