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Crash kills Freda Wright-Sorce, wife of radio's Don Geronimo

Radio personality Don Geronimo's wife, Freda Wright-Sorce, dies in car accident

Date published: 7/12/2005

By MICHAEL ZITZ

Area fans of radio's Don and Mike Show may have felt as though they'd lost a member of their own family yesterday when they learned Don Geronimo's wife, Freda Wright-Sorce, had been killed in a car crash.

WBOC-TV in Ocean City, Md., reported that a 10-car pileup about 2 p.m. Sunday on westbound State Route 90 near St. Martin's Neck Road led to a collision that killed Freda Wright-Sorce, 50, of Great Falls.

The TV station reported that an eastbound Ford Explorer crossed the median to avoid the stopped traffic and hit Wright-Sorce's westbound Lexus SC430 head-on.

She was flown to the University of Maryland Hospital's shock trauma unit in Baltimore, where she died from her injuries, according to WBOC.

The driver of the eastbound Ford Explorer, Jevgenijs Dunajevskis, 22, of Berlin, Md., was reportedly treated and released at Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury.

Don Geronimo is a radio name. The broadcaster's real name is Mike Sorce.

Freda Wright-Sorce was often heard on the show, calling in to join in on-the-air conversations between Geronimo and co-host Mike O'Meara.

Though she sometimes disputed her husband's version of events, Freda was always congenial, and concluded her on-air conversations by affectionately calling Geronimo "Booger-Bear."

The Don and Mike Show's official Web site had been temporarily taken down yesterday afternoon.

DCRTV.com, a Web site that covers Washington-area broadcasting, quoted O'Meara as saying of Freda Wright-Sorce: "She was the conscience of this show. She was an integral part of this show, and an integral part of all of our lives."

Neither Geronimo nor his son Bart was in the car when the crash occurred, DCRTV.com reported.

The Sorce family owns a vacation home in Ocean City, and lives in Great Falls, near the studios of radio station WJFK in Fairfax, where the nationally syndicated Don and Mike Show originates.

Yesterday, O'Meara did the show solo, playing "best-of" tapes involving Freda Wright-Sorce to honor her memory.

"It's very, very sad," said Henry Spiller, an advertising representative at Pohanka Auto Group in Spotsylvania County who's been a longtime listener of the show and has called in to speak with Don and Mike on the air.

Spiller, who lives in Caroline County, said he and many of his co-workers listen to the program every day and felt they knew Freda.

"It's tragic," he said.

"We were sitting here at work and my boss's wife came in with the news, and everybody stopped what they were doing," Spiller said. "That's how shocked we were."

To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com

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Date published: 7/12/2005