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Bo Roberts was on the radio Tuesday morning, as he had been almost every weekday morning since the second year of Ronald Reagan\u2019s 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 \u201cLong\u201d Jim White paired up at the late, great Q102<\/a> in 1982, didn\u2019t give it much thought until he walked into the office and saw waiting for him two iHeartMedia executives, including the program director who\u2019d flown in from Houston.<\/p>\n At which point, Roberts told me Thursday, he realized, \u201cThis can\u2019t be good.\u201d<\/p>\n It was not. <\/p>\n Roberts said he was \u201cgiven my walking papers, and I was out the door a minute later.\u201d He asked me not to repeat what he said on his way out that door. I imagine you can fill in the blank.<\/p>\n His firing was merely \u201ca budget thing,\u201d Roberts was told, one small part of the mass layoffs at iHeartMedia that began Tuesday and have continued throughout the week<\/a> 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<\/a>, have become a seemingly annual event at iHeartMedia<\/a>, which owns some 870 radio stations in 160 markets \u2014 more than any other company in the country.<\/p>\n Roberts said he \u201ckinda thought it was possible\u201d he was being let go when he got that note Tuesday. \u201cBut all you can do is keep your head down and keep on trucking,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich is what I did until I hit a wall while I was trucking.\u201d<\/p>\n Opinion<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our\u00a0Terms of Service<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n His firing came 13 days before his 72nd birthday.<\/p>\n Bo and Jim \u2014 as the pair were best known since the early 1980s, when they dominated Dallas rock radio alongside KZEW\u2019s morning tandem of John Labella and John Rody \u2014 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<\/a>, said the pair were \u201ctrue radio legends, but more than that, they are outstanding people.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Jim White, left, and Bo Roberts, right, in 2009, when the duo were working the morning show at KZPS.<\/p>\n SCOTT, Andy \/ 144924<\/p>\n 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\u2019t just have audiences, but created communities.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s morning show since 1981. Roberts more than earned his right to say goodbye. But the radio business is often cruelest to those who\u2019ve spent their whole lives giving it their everything.<\/p>\n \u201cYou never know when your last moment on the air will come,\u201d John Rody told me Thursday. \u201cBut Bo deserved much better. I couldn\u2019t believe it. \u2026 Bo isn\u2019t the only one. There are 20 more like him nationwide who are probably not going to get to work anymore, and it just sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n Roberts hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s what he\u2019s done nearly every single morning since 1982.<\/p>\n He actually worked in this newspaper\u2019s mailroom for a moment in the early 1970s, after attending the old Elkins Institute of Broadcasting on Inwood Road. Roberts\u2019 first job was at a radio station in his hometown of Corsicana; then came stints in Brownwood and Beaumont. From 1975 until \u201981, he spun records in New Orleans, where he met White.<\/p>\n Roberts began working overnights at Q102, where \u201cyou took phone calls from the psych ward,\u201d he told me. He was then promoted to middays, then bumped to mornings, where White was his newsman before becoming his partner.<\/p>\n \u201cWe stayed together all that time,\u201d Roberts said \u2014 at Q102, then at KZPS, then at Lone Star \u2014 save for three years Roberts spent alone on The Bone. <\/p>\n Occasionally there would be flirtations with syndication, but Roberts scoffed at the idea, because that would have meant \u201cyou have to vanilla it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t talk about the Cowboys, the Rangers or what\u2019s going on in Dallas-Fort Worth. I wanted our show to be local.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n 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, \u201cEarly Risers Love Bo\u201d; the female version said, \u201cIt\u2019s Bo or Nothing.\u201d 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 \u201coffensive\u201d and bordering on pornography.<\/p>\n Bo and Jim wound up doing a live broadcast from beneath the billboard. Because that\u2019s what good morning shows did back then. <\/p>\n \u201cAt Q102 they cared about us and wanted us to be successful and did their jobs keeping us successful,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like that anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Roberts never missed work, save for those few weeks in the summer of 2009 when a heart attack<\/a> and bypass surgery briefly knocked him off the air. White retired in May 2022<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n \u201cNo, because I still had a few shows left in me,\u201d Roberts said, \u201cso I stuck around.\u201d<\/p>\n Just long enough to be forsaken by a business to which he\u2019d given more than 50 years, most of them somewhere on your radio dial.<\/p>\n At the end of our long talk Thursday, Roberts mentioned that he\u2019ll likely return with a podcast sooner than later because he\u2019s not done talking. But at the end we both realized why he\u2019d actually called: This was his chance to bid the farewell iHeartMedia had denied him this week.<\/p>\n \u201cI am just an old disc jockey who doesn\u2019t want to retire yet,\u201d he said. \u201cI am still going, get out of the way. I\u2019ve had a great time. I\u2019ve had a good run. I just hate it when I don\u2019t get to say goodbye. So goodbye, thanks for putting up with us, and thanks for all the condolences, since it\u2019s all over.\u201d He paused.<\/p>\n \u201cBut not really,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cI\u2019ll be back. It\u2019s just another job I wasn\u2019t prepared to be fired from. But I\u2019ll be OK. I will be all right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bo Roberts was on the radio Tuesday morning, as he had been almost every weekday morning since the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[16103,25056,156,1073,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-68977","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-commentary","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-media","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Jim](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/OFNYTNV3K5CMHFMCYS7QGYZAHI.JPG\")
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