Ruminations upon the loss of a distinctive voice

Editor's note: issues with the built-in player resulted in the wrong sound clip loading up for some readers. The player has since been replaced with a link to the correct sound clip. Apologies for any confusion.

You've probably heard this voice on multiple adverts and Stations IDs, particularly if you've lived in the Kansas City area:

The man behind the voice, Richard Ward Fatherley, died today in a KCK hospital after suffering a heart attack a month ago. Fatherley came to the Kansas City area in the 1960s to become programming director of Top-40 giant WHB. That, along with his start at WHB's cross-state sister KXOK in St. Louis, gave him the chance to perfect his voice into the consummate radio salesman. When Fatherley retired from radio, he began his own voice-over company, AdVoice. National brands like Baskin Robbins and Simplicity Vacuum Cleaners hired Fatherley to provide his distinct, booming voice for their ads.

Not only was Fatherley a gifted producer and salesman, he too was a historian in his trade. Along with Ray Otis, a fellow former program director, Fatherley researched, wrote and produced an hour-long audio documentary into the role WHB owner Todd Storz played in developing and proliferating Top-40 radio. As Fatherley summarized in Radio's Revolution:

“[Top-40] germinated in the heartland – Omaha – moved quickly down the Mississippi Valley, was perfected in Kansas City, and copied from coast-to-coast. The Storz formula for a successful radio station became the antidote to combat television's raid on radio's revenues.”

Fatherley's account of Storz's contribution, including the story that disproved the fable involving the barroom jukebox in Omaha, would ensure Storz' place in history as the man whose innovations would catch on in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and even prompt the BBC to debut Radio 1 and Radio 2.

As part of this ongoing endeavour, Fatherley built a tribute site to WHB and helped establish the Great Plains Radio Symposium at Kansas State University in 2006.

In a roundabout way, it was because of Fatherley's work as a historian and not a producer that attracted me to radio. I came across his work in the fall of 2005, when I was working on a research paper about WHB. I made use of materials Fatherley sent to Truman upon hearing of my project, including a hard copy of Radio's Revolution. As I dug into this material, and other Web sites such as Reel Radio, I found myself drawn more and more into the unique craftwork that is radio production.

By trade I'm a journalist, a current events junkie, rooted in newsprint from as far back as wanting to be on the junior high newspaper in 8th grade even though it was a freshmen-only class. But hearing this production by Fatherley, and other clips he uploaded, lured me away from the grind of weekly print deadlines and into the land of overheated equipment rooms, strung-out wires, and outdated cart-playing software crashing on me every fortnight. Fatherley extended an invite to me to the first symposium in April 2006, but a death in the family prevented me from attending, and thus I never had the chance to meet him.

I'll remember Richard Fatherley, not just as a great voice and radio professional, but also as a historian who preserved the stories of his colleagues and provide an insight into how radio evolved into what it is today in North America. And for that, I say thank you to "our Fatherley friend".