R.I.P.: Charlotte Radio Personality Robert Raiford

Longtime radio personality Robert D. Raiford died Friday.  He was 89, according to The Charlotte Observer.

Raiford started on radio as a teenager and left the airwaves only in August 2015, after a stroke robbed him of his mobility and his voice.

For 30 years, Raiford served as “curmudgeon at large” on the “John Boy and Billy Big Show” that originates at Charlotte’s WRFX 99.7 FM and syndicated to 57 other stations nationally

A curmudgeon, Raiford once explained, is a person who provides the public service of observing all things and interpreting them for others. “I call it a curse of sensitivity,” he said.

Wry and stern, his commentaries – all composed on an Underwood manual typewriter he refused to relinquish – were often tough-love fusillades targeting the acolytes of political correctness. They tended to sting – but not wound – and were served with a formal theatrical zeal set a notch below serious.

“Bob Raiford had the mind of a well-read intellectual, trapped in the body of a grumpy old guy who holds court at the end of the counter at Waffle House,” said Johnny Isley, known to listeners as John Boy. “He was a fan of Nat Cole and Sinatra, but could command a rowdy crowd at a bar with a heartfelt rendition of ‘Dixie.’ ”

Co-host Billy James said that Raiford’s unpredictable musings were a key part of the success of the show for three decades.

Raiford hit the professional airwaves in 1944 at age 17 in his native Concord as a play-by-play announcer on WEGO 980 AM for the Concord Weavers, a minor-league team that featured pitcher Tommy Lasorda (who went on to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers). Even then, he had what they call in radio “good pipes”: a voice resonant, distinctive and authoritative.

He went on to study communications at the University of South Carolina and by the early 1950s was a leading announcer on Charlotte’s WBT 1110 AM, one of the nation’s pioneer radio stations, then known as the “Colossus of the South.”

Raiford has been fired many times – usually for good reason, he would readily admit – and his career at WTOP in Washington DC ended with a prank when he lit off a firecracker in the studios. “I had half a jar of corn liquor in me,” he later admitted.

He found his way back to Charlotte in the early 1970s with a morning talk show on the old hard-rock WIST-AM and uncloseted his liberal views.

At WIST, Raiford railed against Richard Nixon, fundamentalist preachers and cast himself as a middle-aged hippie. His in-your-face weather report: “It’s the same as it was last month. When it changes, I’ll let you know.”