Cameron Dilley, the last WMNF Tampa co-founder on the air, signs off on Friday

To describe WMNF’s early days as humble beginnings doesn’t quite cut it. Add hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth, quixotic, Sysyphean at times.

Cameron Dilley was there, one of a handful of idealistic young people from around the country who in 1978 joined with locals in Tampa to stand up a public radio station at 88.5 on the FM dial.

They had little more than a $30,000 grant and good intentions. It took the scrappy group about a year of boots-on-the-ground fundraising to get the station on the air. They hoisted the antenna themselves and began broadcasting on Sept. 14, 1979. The “studio” was on the second floor of a roach-infested, termite-ridden house on South Boulevard. The staffers didn’t use the ground floor because of the rats.

“I almost screamed on the air one day because a big palmetto bug ran up my arm,” Dilley told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Fortunately, I had just snapped off the mic before I screamed and flew over backwards and hit my head on the wall behind me. I watched the bug fly around the room.”

As Dilley, 71, prepares to log his final edition of The Morning Show on Friday, May 24—a program he’s hosted for 45 years—he took some time to reflect on his tenure at MNF. He’s the last of the original co-founders to sign off from the station. “This represents the final passing of a baton to the next generation,” Dilley said.

He and his wife, former Tampa City Councilwoman Mary Mulhern, are returning to their Midwestern roots, moving to a place in uptown Chicago. “We got tired of suffering through the summers down here,” he explained. “We’ve found the heat, the hurricanes and the political climate all to be increasingly stressful, inhospitable.”

WMNF is handing the Friday Morning Show reins to DJ Spaceship (Greg Bowers) , who Dilley said is “younger (41), better looking and uniquely talented.”
[content-1] Not satisfied with restricting his radio-activity to three hours a week, Dilley has made significant contributions to the station behind the scenes—all of it volunteer, save for the very early days when all staffers earned a hundred bucks a week. He’s had stints as a board member, been on a variety of committees—long-range planning, fundraising, volunteer, marketing, mission—and played a vital role in implementing a strategy to move, some might say drag, WMNF into modernity with an audience-focused strategy that’s been underway for about five years.

Nancy Johnson, former member of the WMNF board and co-host of the “Mo’ Blues Monday” show, has worked closely with Dilley over the years.

“Cam has been pivotal in many of the directions that the station has taken,” she told CL. “Primarily, that everything needs to grow and we need to be conscious of the times. He feels strongly that [the product] needs to be station-driven, not personal-driven. He’s been determined and persistent. That didn’t make everyone happy all the time, but that’s the way leadership works. Still, I think the majority of people at MNF just love him.”

For too many years, volunteer deejay/programmers treated their shows like fiefdoms—protective of their slot, resistant to direction from station brass. As a listener since the early-‘80s, I’d often roll my eyes when jocks rambled on, lapsing into minutiae about the music and, worse, yapping about themselves and sharing inside jokes with co-hosts.

That has always made Dilley cringe. “It’s WMNF, not W, I, Me, My,” he quipped. Fortunately, that sort of on-air self-indulgence has been gradually declining.

Dilley keeps his commentary between music sets tight and professional, and does so in a relaxed, conversational style. He spends several hours prepping for his weekly three-hour block—drafting an initial song list, adjusting for times and flow, building short instrumental tracks to announce over, and other details. Dilley also leaves room for requests. “The final playlist and order [are] always different from the one I start with,” he added.

The best word to describe his programming, however shopworn, is eclectic. Make that wildly-eclectic. Dilley strives for inclusivity, incorporating singer/songwriters (the show’s bedrock in the early days), R&B, old Motown and British Invasion rock, Americana, hip-hop, neo-soul/jazz, ‘80s new wave, reggae, Afrobeat and other world musics, plus any number of hybrids that defy genre. Here’s a few selections that Dilley sequenced on his April 26 show: a delicate Joan Baez ballad (“Farewell, Angelina”), jangle-pop by Better Oblivion Community Center (“Dylan Thomas”), neo-soul from Samm Henshaw (“Enough”), modern Afro-pop courtesy of Les Amazones d'Afrique (“Flaws”) and the classic Temptations hit “I Wish It Would Rain.” These segues, rather than jarring, are connective. You’re left considering the tunes more in terms of commonality than contrast. Dilley massages his playlists to take his listeners on a little sojourn of discovery.

I dare any music lover to listen to his Friday show and not go scrambling to Spotify or YouTube to check out a few artists you’ve never heard before. “I’ve had people tell me they Shazam songs while they’re driving,” he said with a chuckle. Spotify users can check out back playlists of his shows by searching “Cameron Dilley.”

Dilley grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in a two-parent home with two younger sisters. Like the other kids, Cam listened to Top 40 radio, but had his “DNA changed” at around seven years old when he happened upon a live television broadcast of a James Brown concert.

“I came out of the basement looking like I’d been shot out of a rocket,” Dilley remembered. “The babysitter said, ‘What’s wrong?’” She didn’t approve of me watching it.”

There was The Beatles, of course, a formative influence on just about everyone coming of age in that era. His first rock station was WLAV-FM in Grand Rapids, but he also tuned into AM Top 40 outlets in Detroit and Chicago.

Dilley played drums in cover bands in junior high and high school. He attended Grand Valley State University, about a half hour from home, earning a Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy with a major in Eastern Religions and a minor in Communications. Yes, he was a hippie. Dilley deejayed on the college radio station, WSRX, and worked at the PBS outlet based on campus.

After graduating, he did short stints at public radio stations in the San Francisco Bay area, never landing a full-time gig. In the summer of ’78, a friend called Dilley with an opportunity. “It was basically—‘Do you want to come down and help some locals get a public radio station going?’” Dilley recalled. “‘There won’t be much money, but you’ll get all the radio you can eat.’”

He didn’t hesitate. Dilley packed up his 1971 Datsun 610 station wagon and drove to Tampa. “We lived six to eight people in a house and paid ourselves out of the money we were able to raise going door to door,” he said.

That’s right, door to door. The founders needed way more than $30,000 to get up and running, and the grant money was off limits because it was set aside to buy equipment.

“By the time I got there, Tampa had been pretty much covered,” he said of the group’s shoe-leather fundraising. “We’d meet and drive over to far-flung places in Pinellas County, like Belleair Beach, and knock on doors asking for contributions. I had people come to the door and point guns at me. One time, a dog came flying out the door, heading for my throat. I caught it in mid-air with my clipboard. I lowered the dog down to the floor with its teeth clamped to it.”

Despite the occasional harrowing encounter and tons of rejection—not to mention his long, billowing locks and droopy mustache—Dilley was a successful solicitor, as were his colleagues. “Enough people had moved here from up north where there was good public radio,” Dilley said. “And even though we weren’t on the air yet, we were the only game in town.”

After a day of knocking on doors, the radio panhandlers combined their cash and checks and put it in the station bank account. At week’s end, they each pulled out their hundred bucks, “which you could live on in Tampa back then,” he said.

But not well. “I realized I was not going to make a real living [at WMNF] so I walked into the PBS station [WEDU-Ch. 3] and got a job on the studio crew—and went from making $5,200 a year to $9,400 a year.” Dilley remembered with a laugh.

In 1981, he landed a job as a junior copywriter with Louis Benito Advertising. That started a career as a writer and creative director for an array of agencies and companies. He’s leaving his gig as creative director for United Landmark Associates, but said he’ll continue to do some freelance work for the real estate marketing firm.

Dilley met Mulhern on a flight from Madrid to Atlanta in 1997. “We happened to sit next to each other and had a nine-and-a-half hour blind date,” he said.

She was a fellow Michigan native who was living in Chicago. Mulhern relocated to Tampa within a year, accompanied by her daughter Isabel (now 34). Dilley and Mulhern also have a son, Miles, 24, named after Miles Davis ( Kind of Blue was playing in the delivery room when he was born). Mulhern served two terms on the Tampa City Council, from 2007-2011, then left politics for health reasons. Cam and Mary are leaving the house in South Tampa where they lived for 25 years.

When Dilley signed on at WMNF in ‘79, the station didn’t have enough volunteer DJs, so it only broadcasted in the afternoon and evenings. (It went 24 hours within months.) Announcers used a homemade soundboard and two turntables, and brought in their own records. For the most part, the roaches left them alone. Dilley did a New Wave (now old wave) show from midnight-to-2 a.m. on Tuesdays, the Wednesday night Bop City jazz show and the Friday morning program. In short order, that schedule got pared down to Fridays only.

When he hosts his final show, he’ll do so in a spacious, state-of-the-art control room in WMNF’s stylish, tree-shrouded building on Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. His departure is bittersweet.

“I’m the last of the Mohicans, the last of the OGs,” he said lightheartedly, then turned serious. “I’ve been an advocate for change and progress, just pushing the station forward, focusing on the mission. And the audience.”

During our conversations, Dilley repeatedly gave flowers to his WMNF colleagues over the years.

“We were so fortunate to have such incredible talent come out of the woodwork,” he mused. “I’m really in a place of overwhelming gratitude for the opportunity I got, for the people I worked with, for the opportunity to turn people on to great music, for helping realize the station’s mission to provide independent news and a platform for a variety of voices.”

Then Dilley called upon an early WMNF slogan. “We’re still carrying forward the spirit of ‘Radio Free Tampa,’” he said, signing off.

UPDATED 05/21/24 10:27 a.m. Nancy Johnson is a former member of the WMNF board.

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