The Last Local Man on the Radio

Rodger Morrow

Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business

Listen to a podcast discussion about this article.

Scott Tady has spent his career listening for the sound of a place becoming itself: a guitar riff from a Beaver County band, a commissioner answering an angry caller, a vanished restaurant remembered over dinner, a town showing up when something serious happens. For decades, he found those sounds in newspapers. Now he finds them on the radio.

There was a time when a young man who loved rock ’n’ roll could imagine a perfectly respectable career that involved going to concerts, staying out late, and then telling several hundred thousand people whether the guitar player was any good. Scott Tady discovered this loophole in the American work ethic while growing up in a two-newspaper household where the Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette arrived regularly enough to establish certain expectations about civilization.

He read the Pirates box score first. Then he discovered the concert reviews.

“What a way to make a living,” he remembers thinking.

It more or less worked out.

He spent much of his career at the Beaver County Times, where he eventually became the paper’s entertainment reporter, covering concerts, restaurants, festivals, television, movies, and the peculiar assortment of people and places that collectively constitute a local culture. He interviewed famous musicians, watched careers rise and fall, and became one of those increasingly rare newspaper people whose name readers recognized even if they had never met him.

But Tady’s particular gift was never merely interviewing celebrities. It was noticing the talent growing in his own backyard.

One of his favorite examples is guitarist Billy Godwin, a Beaver County musician Tady believed deserved a wider audience. He did what local journalists once did naturally: he became an evangelist. He direct-messaged Pittsburgh radio friends, buttonholed them in person, and urged them to listen to Godwin and give him airplay.

That distinction matters. Tady wasn’t working some old-fashioned telephone tree from a newsroom desk. He was using the relationships he had built over decades to say, in effect: Pay attention to this guy. He’s good.

It is a small example of what disappears when local journalism disappears. A national algorithm can tell you what Taylor Swift released this morning. It is considerably less likely to know that somebody playing guitar fifteen miles down the road might be worth hearing.

Tady’s eventual move from newspaper to radio was not quite the abrupt career change it might appear.

Frank Sparks, general manager at WBVP-WMBA, saw the possibilities before most people did. In 2017, Sparks took a chance on Tady and brought him onto the stations for a weekly half- hour program called Notes on Local Entertainment. It was a natural extension of what Tady had already been doing in print: telling Beaver County what was happening, who was performing, where to go, and why any of it might be worth leaving the house.

Sparks deserves some credit for recognizing that Tady’s value wasn’t confined to newsprint. He understood that the reporting instincts, contacts, curiosity, and local knowledge Tady had accumulated could work just as well behind a microphone.

And Sparks himself is very much part of the local-radio tradition. He hosts the stations’ weekday news-talk program from 10 a.m. until noon, maintaining the sort of locally grounded broadcasting that has disappeared from much of the American radio dial.

Tady eventually became a regular presence at WBVP-WMBA, where his work has expanded well beyond entertainment. Radio has given him something newspapers increasingly struggle to provide: immediacy.

If something happens in Beaver County, people can talk about it now. Not tomorrow morning. Not after an editor has found six inches of space on page B3. Now.

That suits him.

There is an intimacy to local radio that newspapers never quite possessed. A newspaper reporter enters your house folded beneath somebody’s arm. A radio personality rides around with you in the car. He sits in the kitchen while you make coffee. After enough mornings, you begin to feel you know him.

Tady’s newspaper background gives that intimacy some ballast. He understands reporting. He knows the difference between something somebody said and something somebody can prove. He knows Beaver County well enough to understand that every story has a history, and usually an uncle who remembers it differently.

He also understands that entertainment is not the frivolous side of community life.

Ask people about the place where they grew up, and they may eventually tell you who the county commissioners were. But first they will tell you about the restaurant where their parents took them after church. The amusement park that disappeared. The band they saw before anybody knew its name. The tavern where everybody seemed to end up sooner or later.

Bocktown Tavern, for instance.

These things become landmarks of memory. Someone has to notice them while they are still here.

For much of American history, newspapers and local radio performed that function almost accidentally. They recorded the ordinary life of a place because they had reporters living there. The entertainment writer went to the concert. The photographer went to the parade. The radio host interviewed the mayor. Nobody called this “community engagement.” It was simply Tuesday.

Much of that infrastructure is disappearing.

Which makes people like Scott Tady—and Frank Sparks—more important, not less.

The technology has changed enormously since Tady first discovered those concert reviews in the Pittsburgh papers. Newspapers have shrunk. Radio stations have consolidated. Streaming services can deliver almost every song ever recorded to a telephone in your pocket.

We have more access to the world than any generation in history.

What we are losing is access to the place where we actually live.

That is why local voices still matter. Somebody has to know the musicians before they become famous—or after they don’t. Somebody has to remember the restaurant that closed. Somebody has to ask the commissioner the question everybody else has been muttering about over breakfast.

And somebody occasionally has to corner a Pittsburgh radio friend and say, “You really ought to listen to this guy.”

Scott Tady has been doing some version of that for most of his adult life.

The medium changed.

The job didn’t.