San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Memorial celebration: Ray Taliaferro, longtime radio host, to be celebrated
Ray Taliaferro, whose job was to keep people awake in the middle of the night, knew exactly how to do it.
“This is entertainment, sir!” he told one caller to his radio talk show. “This is not information! This is not news! I do an entertainment show just as surely as a disc jockey spins discs!”
Taliaferro, who did it well and did it for decades, was a pioneer, a gentle soul, a fierce advocate, a testy debater and a proud lifelong liberal. His radio station, KGO 810, was on the left-hand side of the dial, and Taliaferro’s views were on the left-hand side of the spectrum.
“I’m doing my job,” he liked to tell people, with a resounding twinkle in his voice. “Ray Taliaferro has found a way to keep people awake!”
Taliaferro was found dead on Dec. 2 outside Paducah, Ky., three weeks after his wife reported him missing while the two were on a trip. He was 79 and was believed to have been suffering from dementia. The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco will host a memorial celebration of his life on Jan. 12.
His legions of fans remember him for the joyful hours he filled from 1977 to 2011, when his voice boomed from speakers in the dashboards of vehicles and on bedside clock radios between the challenging hours of 1 and 5 a.m. The sky may have been dark at those times, but Taliaferro’s outlook never was.
In a typical exchange, a caller named Jeanette asked Taliaferro if he believed in God. Taliaferro left her on the air for 20 minutes, perhaps because he found Jeanette engaging and perhaps because few other folks were waiting to go on the air — a not uncommon problem for wee hour talk show hosts. The two of them kept interrupting each other, particularly after Taliaferro explained that his religion consisted exclusively of following the principle, “It’s nice to be nice.”
“Can I speak?” Jeanette replied, and Taliaferro allowed her to, through two commercial breaks and spirited discussions about whether the Almighty was personally involved with the King James Bible, free will, earthquakes and fires.
“Religion has nothing to do with whether people help each other,” Taliaferro said at last, just before cutting to a string of car, bank, jewelry and miracle cure commercials.
Taliaferro’s program was called “The Early Show,” and he talked, opined and rambled passionately about anything, including politics, culture and current events.
Station managers had offered Taliaferro an earlier time slot with more listeners, but Taliaferro, a lifelong fan of the symphony and the arts, turned it down, partly because it would have interfered with his attending evening performances.
A native of New York City, Raphael “Ray” Taliaferro moved to San Francisco with his family as a youngster and grew up in Hunters Point. He was an accomplished pianist, vocalist and choral conductor, and he served as music director for the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Before joining KGO in 1977, he worked at radio station KNEW in Oakland and at television stations KHJ in Los Angeles and KRON in San Francisco. He was said to be the first black host of a major-market radio talk show. He won awards from the San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Black Journalists, and he was an early civil rights activist and advocate.
For two decades, Taliaferro was a board member of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and a frequent host of its meetings.
“He was gracious and gentlemanly,” recalled Gloria Duffy, the club’s president and his friend. “Courteous, always ready to help. On the radio he was a provocateur who knew how to push people to express their views. That was part of his radio persona.”
Fellow KGO broadcaster Ronn Owens recalled his partnership with Taliaferro for two decades on the radio station’s annual 24-hour leukemia fundraiser. After staying on the air all night, the two friends would banter — Owens saying it was time to wrap things up and Taliaferro contradicting him, saying, “There’s a lot more money out there that people want to donate.” The fundraiser would invariably run overtime.
Owens said Taliaferro was “just a nice man” who was “truly gentle and perfect for his job.”
Former Mayor Frank Jordan, another longtime friend and lunch companion, said Taliaferro was a “sensitive, caring and loving man (whose) deep baritone was perfect for radio, for being an emcee or for stoking up the crowd at a fundraiser.”
“I miss him, and all San Francisco misses him,” Jordan said.
Former ACT Executive Director Heather Kitchen called Taliaferro a “great listener” — not always a prerequisite for being a radio talker — and praised his “enormous contribution to San Francisco and the Commonwealth Club.”
The Jan. 12 memorial celebration will be held at 11 a.m. at the Commonwealth Club’s auditorium at 110 The Embarcadero.
Perhaps in the audience will be the 2001 caller to his show who complained on the air that Taliaferro was “persecuting” her and was being “too assertive.”
“Of course,” Taliaferro replied. “I’m a talk show host. I’m not supposed to be nambypamby.”