Following up to my earlier post about Richard Ward Fatherley,
Kansas City historian and former program director of Storz's WHB,
it's sad to report that he passed away on March 8 at the age of 69.

A few weeks earlier, Fatherley had fallen after suffering a heart
attack. The Kansas City Star's Aaron Barnhart had published a
remembrance on his TV Barn blog on February 20.
(http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2...fatherley.html)

Curiously, though, after Fatherley's death, there wasn't a
follow-up in the Star until March 25.
(http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/25...therleys.html).

In St. Louis, where Fatherley had worked at KXOK, starting in 1964
until being dispatched by the Storz chain to Kansas City in 1967,
the online Globe-Democrat news site posted a brief story about his
death on March 15.
(http://www.globe-democrat.com/news/2...ishing-it-out/)

The length of time it took the Star to publish news of Fatherley's
passing caused a slight dust-up between the Star's
Barnhart and former Star gossip columnist Hearne Christopher, who
now posts on a site called KC Confidential. Christopher criticized
the newspaper for not having anything about Fatherley's death in
the Star's print editions other than a brief obituary. Barnhart
pointed out that he had posted a story online and that other news
crowded out a longer treatment of Fatherley's career. (You can
see this exchange at http://www.kcconfidential.com/?p=13838#more-13838.)

While Barnhart made some fair points, it still seemed (and seems) odd that it
took the Star two and a half weeks to publish something about a man
who did so much to shape Kansas City radio, not just through his
work on WHB, but for other stations, too, and in advertising and
marketing. Fatherley also documented the history of WHB and
produced audio documentaries of the station's heyday as a Top 40
giant, with a 10,000 watt regional signal that reached into six
states. Where I lived in southern Iowa, I could receive both KIOA
from Des Moines and WHB, and much preferred WHB, which had an
exciting big-city sound that you just don't get on radio any more.
Surely I must have heard Fatherley many times, but I remember his
voice mostly from his later voice-over work and documentaries.
It's a shame to lose his voice and his memories so soon.

--
Mark Roberts - E-Mail address is valid but I don't use Google Groups
If you quote, please quote only relevant passages and not the whole article.