Bo Roberts was on the radio Tuesday morning, as he had been almost every weekday morning since the second year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when he received the note: His bosses at classic-rocker KZPS-FM (Lone Star 92.5) wanted to see him after the show. Roberts, a fixture in Dallas radio since he and “Long” Jim White paired up at the late, great Q102 in 1982, didn’t give it much thought until he walked into the office and saw waiting for him two iHeartMedia executives, including the program director who’d flown in from Houston.
At which point, Roberts told me Thursday, he realized, “This can’t be good.”
It was not.
Roberts said he was “given my walking papers, and I was out the door a minute later.” He asked me not to repeat what he said on his way out that door. I imagine you can fill in the blank.
His firing was merely “a budget thing,” Roberts was told, one small part of the mass layoffs at iHeartMedia that began Tuesday and have continued throughout the week across radio stations stretching from San Diego to St. Louis to Nashville to Tampa. Such layoffs, caused by declining revenue and recent efforts to cut $150 million from the bottom line, have become a seemingly annual event at iHeartMedia, which owns some 870 radio stations in 160 markets — more than any other company in the country.
Roberts said he “kinda thought it was possible” he was being let go when he got that note Tuesday. “But all you can do is keep your head down and keep on trucking,” he said, “which is what I did until I hit a wall while I was trucking.”
Opinion
His firing came 13 days before his 72nd birthday.
Bo and Jim — as the pair were best known since the early 1980s, when they dominated Dallas rock radio alongside KZEW’s morning tandem of John Labella and John Rody — were inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in 2018. At the time, Kelly Kibler, then the region president for iHeartMedia Dallas-Fort Worth before her dismissal in 2022, said the pair were “true radio legends, but more than that, they are outstanding people.”
Jim White, left, and Bo Roberts, right, in 2009, when the duo were working the morning show at KZPS.
SCOTT, Andy / 144924
Just seven years later, iHeart kicked him out of the building without letting him say goodbye to an audience that likely consisted of listeners who, like me, still carry QCards in their wallets, crammed into their Sound Warehouse in-store appearances and were in the Cotton Bowl when Roberts and White emceed Texxas Jams. Roberts is a vestige of a time when Dallas radio stations didn’t just have audiences, but created communities.
A local radio executive told me Thursday morning that he belongs on the Mount Rushmore of local radio, alongside Ron Chapman, Kidd Kraddick and Hal Jay, who has hosted WBAP’s morning show since 1981. Roberts more than earned his right to say goodbye. But the radio business is often cruelest to those who’ve spent their whole lives giving it their everything.
“You never know when your last moment on the air will come,” John Rody told me Thursday. “But Bo deserved much better. I couldn’t believe it. … Bo isn’t the only one. There are 20 more like him nationwide who are probably not going to get to work anymore, and it just sucks.”
Roberts hadn’t discussed his termination publicly until we spoke Thursday. He said he spent the last couple of days shut down, not wanting to talk to anyone. But I imagine he woke up Thursday ready to talk. Because that’s what he’s done nearly every single morning since 1982.
He actually worked in this newspaper’s mailroom for a moment in the early 1970s, after attending the old Elkins Institute of Broadcasting on Inwood Road. Roberts’ first job was at a radio station in his hometown of Corsicana; then came stints in Brownwood and Beaumont. From 1975 until ’81, he spun records in New Orleans, where he met White.
Roberts began working overnights at Q102, where “you took phone calls from the psych ward,” he told me. He was then promoted to middays, then bumped to mornings, where White was his newsman before becoming his partner.
“We stayed together all that time,” Roberts said — at Q102, then at KZPS, then at Lone Star — save for three years Roberts spent alone on The Bone.
Occasionally there would be flirtations with syndication, but Roberts scoffed at the idea, because that would have meant “you have to vanilla it,” he said. “You can’t talk about the Cowboys, the Rangers or what’s going on in Dallas-Fort Worth. I wanted our show to be local.”
Sometimes Bo Roberts talked about the news. And sometimes he made it, as evidenced by this 1987 story about Q102’s rather tame billboards that managed to raise the ire of the Plano City Council.
The Dallas Morning News
Sometime, too, the show made news, rather than just discussing it, like in October 1987, when Q102 erected billboards across the area featuring nude, headless men and women with giant bows obscuring their naughty bits. The male billboard read, “Early Risers Love Bo”; the female version said, “It’s Bo or Nothing.” Former Republican state Sen. Florence Shapiro, then on the Plano City Council, demanded the removal of one billboard along North Central Expressway and Spring Creek Parkway, insisting it was “offensive” and bordering on pornography.
Bo and Jim wound up doing a live broadcast from beneath the billboard. Because that’s what good morning shows did back then.
“At Q102 they cared about us and wanted us to be successful and did their jobs keeping us successful,” Roberts said. “It’s not like that anymore.”
Roberts never missed work, save for those few weeks in the summer of 2009 when a heart attack and bypass surgery briefly knocked him off the air. White retired in May 2022. I asked Roberts if he thought about joining his best friend of 45 years when he decided to leave the industry before it abandoned him.
“No, because I still had a few shows left in me,” Roberts said, “so I stuck around.”
Just long enough to be forsaken by a business to which he’d given more than 50 years, most of them somewhere on your radio dial.
At the end of our long talk Thursday, Roberts mentioned that he’ll likely return with a podcast sooner than later because he’s not done talking. But at the end we both realized why he’d actually called: This was his chance to bid the farewell iHeartMedia had denied him this week.
“I am just an old disc jockey who doesn’t want to retire yet,” he said. “I am still going, get out of the way. I’ve had a great time. I’ve had a good run. I just hate it when I don’t get to say goodbye. So goodbye, thanks for putting up with us, and thanks for all the condolences, since it’s all over.” He paused.
“But not really,” Roberts said. “I’ll be back. It’s just another job I wasn’t prepared to be fired from. But I’ll be OK. I will be all right.”