My father lived the Positive Image brand

My Dad would have been 79 today. Tom Mathis had a Positive Image and a huge impact on how I live my life. He’s responsible for my work ethic and for much of my outlook.
He took a leap of faith in the late 60’s to launch WTLC radio – which today is one of America’s most enduring Urban Radio brands. He picked the call letters while listening to a Nancy Wilson jazz album – With Tender Loving Care. He lived the brand through community service. The station launched programs to get drop outs back in school, gave free advertising to black-owned businesses and raised money for a school teacher to become the world’s first black recipient of a heart transplant. Louis B. Russell was for a time the longest surviving heart transplant patient and now has a school named in his honor.
On the night Martin Luther King was killed, Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis campaigning for the Indiana primary. His campaign manager, a colleague at WTLC, called the house to ask if the station would do a live broadcast of a speech Kennedy was going to give in a local park. The campaign appearance had already been scheduled but Kennedy feared the crowd gathering there had not heard that King had been assassinated. Police escorted Kennedy to within a block of the park and then left him. My dad was perfectly comfortable going to that park to set up the live broadcast. He knew full well the Kennedy supporters there were peaceful. The words Bobby Kennedy spoke that night to the crowd and on the radio are etched on his grave in Arlington, and for those of you who watch the video, that’s my dad’s hand over his shoulder, holding the microphone. Indianapolis was the only major city not to see violence on that night.
My brothers, my little sister and I were all free labor. We gathered interviews and cut commercials for the family radio stations over the years. We had to tape again and again until we got it right. But we all made money off those pipes he helped us to develop.
On a lighter note, Dad launched the wrestling career of Bobby the Brain Heenan. Yes, we’re proud of that, too. He is a genius and his act is utterly memorable.
In later years my dad bought a couple of radio stations in Idaho, one of which we still own and operate.
I never thought it was possible to miss someone so much who has been gone now for four years, but I do.