Editor’s Note: After Bill Taylor’s passing last year, his son wrote the obituaries, which made sense. I had always heard Tom Taylor talk about his father and his radio career from a time before I really started following the radio business; last February, I fully came to understand the magnitude of that life and career, but also to further appreciate the impact of every broadcaster on their community in that era.
Tom Taylor chronicled and made sense of the radio business for readers through his work at Inside Radio, M Street Journal, TRI, and Tom Taylor Now before retiring in 2018. For Father’s Day 2022, Ross On Radio asked Taylor to expand his memories of Bill Taylor into a full-fledged appreciation. He wrote something for all second-generation broadcasters, and maybe even a few still to come.
When you were four years old, what did you think of your dad? That he went to “the office” to perform some mysterious “work” that paid the bills? Or if you did have some inkling about his job, was he also famous, in your hometown? My dad was – and I got to watch him at work, hosting mornings at the local radio station in a small Southern town.
The first time my mom woke me (at 4:30 a.m.) to accompany him, I literally couldn’t talk. My vocal cords weren’t awake. But his were, and when he played “Carolina in the Morning” to introduce his show at 5 a.m., he was entertaining and relatable and plugged in to whatever was happening. You trusted him. And if you were me, you thought, “Maybe I could do that, too.” (My on-air debut at age 4 wasn’t promising. I misread Perry Como’s name as “Cow.” I still have the acetate — my first aircheck.)
My dad was Bill Taylor, and he spent 30 years in radio and TV, first in his hometown of Hickory, N.C., and later in Orlando and Charlotte. My point here isn’t that my dad was some kind of one-in-a-million special talent. He was indeed a pro, partly because he’d started performing in his family’s country-music act when he was eight or nine, on a daily morning radio show.
But radio attracted many thousands of bright, articulate, funny people, from the time it entered the scene in the early 1920s. Some of those folks had sons and daughters who later considered radio as a career. And they had an edge – dad (or mom) could warn them that working in radio meant you might be moving from job to job, and town to town, on very short notice.
Of course, most of today’s radio pros didn’t have a parent in the biz. Perhaps you had an “American Graffiti” moment when you visited a station as a high-schooler, or you were exposed to a college station. Or you just dug a particular jock and wanted to emulate him or her.
So if you’re a parent of a potential broadcaster in 2022, do you steer them away from the business, because of the shrinkage of jobs, the vastly increased competition from other media, etc.? That’s maybe the obvious call. But one thing my dad showed me was the possibility of radio as a platform for many other endeavors. (He loved emceeing live events, he did voiceover work, and he used his acting chops to appear in Air Force training videos – gigs he got because of his visibility in radio.) My father also simply relished being on the air, live. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think podcasting, for all its cachet, offers quite the same feeling (of delight or terror).
It’s possible to be on TikTok – and radio. Podcasting’s cool, but marry that to radio, and you greatly amplify the potential impact. One thing that young people understand is branding, especially personal branding. And heaven knows that local radio needs the social media savvy and pop-culture awareness of people who grew up clutching an iPhone. Let’s not give up on showing them what our business looks like. However you got into radio, it was probably to have fun (and ideally earn a living). My dad showed me that was possible, and I’ll be forever grateful. Yes, radio’s fun-to-work ratio has shifted dramatically. But if you’ve been in the business a while, you at least caught the tail end of a marvelous era.
If you’ve been in the business a while, you probably apprenticed with people who had my dad’s kind of skills, and marveled at them. In one 10-minute period at Orlando’s WDBO, I saw him ad-lib a 60-second spot from a newspaper ad, run to set up a network taping during a recorded spot, then solder an ITC cart machine back together while a record played. He never broke a sweat. And you know what? Any teenager watching a skilled jock perform his or her shift in a studio today might feel similarly struck. We forget something about radio – that at times, it can still be magic. And that’s what we liked about it, isn’t it?
Happy Father’s Day to your own father, or father figure. We owe those folks.
Tom Taylor
If you’d like to read the obituary I wrote in February 2021 for Bill Taylor, it’s here.
