At the left: A circa 1979 photo of Silas Joseph "Jay" Young. October 1, 1949 - August 23, 2006Here is the official obit , written (obviously with great affection) by a Baton Rouge Morning Advocate writer.
My personal feelings follow this official obit.
Former WBRZ-TV anchor Jay Young dies
By GARY PERILLOUX
Advocate business writer
Published: Aug 24, 2006
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Jay Young, a leading man on Baton Rouge’s TV scene in the 1980s, died in his sleep Wednesday after a lengthy bout with debilitating back problems.
He was 56.
Young bolted from Baton Rouge to become an anchor on Ted Turner’s rising cable network, CNN Headline News, for a short tenure in the late 1980s before health problems curtailed his broadcasting career.
He made a lasting impression as a weekend anchor and reporter on WBRZ-TV news broadcasts earlier in the decade.
Bob Kennon, a WBRZ assignment editor, recalled Young’s arrival in the local market in the late 1970s and Young’s work as a weekend anchor for Channel 2 and, briefly, its rival, WAFB-TV.
“He was an excellent field reporter,” said Kennon, “and he was an extremely handsome man.”
Young’s telegenic qualities paid dividends when he anchored weekend broadcasts for WBRZ from 1983 to 1986. “Those were the glory days,” said former WBRZ anchor John Mahaffey, who retired in 1999.
“We were probably peaking at our strongest audience point, and at that time we sort of owned the market.”
Cable’s incursion into broadcast network viewing hadn’t blossomed yet, and the station commanded dominant Nielsen ratings.
“Jay and John and all of us were part of the top-rated ABC affiliate newscast (for market share) in the nation, which was pretty impressive,” said Mike Rhodes, a former WBRZ sports anchor.
“It was a good group. (Jay) was definitely a part of some very positive happenings at Channel 2.”
Added Mahaffey, “I’ll tell you one thing that helped us is he was a good-looking guy. And he was just a good broadcaster.”
Some of Young’s talent, which he later would tap in a fiction-writing career in the 1990s, stemmed from his ability to write for the audience.
“He was just a really talented anchorperson, a good writer,” Rhodes said. “And I think one of the things that was so neat about Jay is he had such a great on-air personality back then.
“We used to call it ‘happy talk.’ He was just a good ad-libber.”
In a 1997 interview with The Advocate, Young chronicled a series of back ailments that made work increasingly difficult for him.
Physicians later believed he had a nerve tumor in his spinal cord, but in 1983 he underwent surgery in Houston to shave bone off his vertebrae to relieve pressure on his spine.
Later nerve damage limited his mobility, leading him to spend a month in a pain clinic and to try acupuncture and swimming therapy.
After he left a therapy session in 1987, a sedan collided with his sports car, leaving Young with a fractured neck and a serious blood clot.
He briefly returned to the air but was finished in broadcasting at 37.
Young then turned to his pen at the urging of his wife, Wyonna, and wrote three novels in the 1990s, each of them with autobiographical underpinnings.
The first pair — “Where Heathens Pray” and “Smuggler’s Forecast” — chronicled the experiences of fictional broadcast reporter Ross Chauvin.
The third, “The Flights of Fantsy,” followed the adventures of Rex “Fantsy” Morrell, a 14-year-old who overcomes asthma to achieve excellence as an archer, one of Young’s avocations. In his writing, Young’s poodle Muffin kept him company as he lay back in a recliner and propped a laptop computer on a pillow to overcome his back woes.
In addition to his wife, Young is survived by two sons, Brian and Rex.
Funeral arrangements are being handled by Resthaven Funeral Home of Baton Rouge. After a private ceremony Thursday, a memorial service will be conducted at 11 a.m. Saturday at First United Methodist Church in Eunice.
Story originally published in The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. August 24, 2006.
Here's what I wrote for the Opelousas Daily World and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser (published Wednesday August 30, 2006)
by Joseph Chaillot
Jay Young is dead at 56.
Our world, The Daily World, and KATC TV3 are all a little poorer because of Jay's death a week ago exactly (August 23) in Baton Rouge, where he has lived since 1977.
He died - according to the East Baton Rouge Coroner's office - from complications resulting from a 20-year bout with a number of severe spinal cord injuries (back and neck) and, at the end, diabetes and then a heart attack claimed him.
But oh, what a life he lead for those first 37 years.
Those who knew Jay will never forget him. He was whip smart with a quick and subtle mind, humorous, sarcastic in a funny way, matinee-idol handsome, a body builder, a guitar player, an archer, a bird and in fact all animals lover, a novelist, and, more than anything else - a first-rate newsman.
In fact, Jay was a native of Eunice, Louisiana, and grew up there as a contemporary of other future "Highway 13" newsmen (and ALL friends) Vernon Roger, Charles "Inky" Bush, Charles Manuel, Tom Voinche, John Voinche (all from the Eunice area) and me, from neighboring Crowley.
Jay Young's first job in journalism - after graduating from LSU's Journalism School - was with the Opelousas Daily World in the early-to-mid 1970s, and he often waxed poetic about it.
When he and I were both TV news anchors at KATC TV 3 in Lafayette in 1975-76, and a big story broke about the killing of an escaped circus lion in Opelousas City Park, he said:
"This is the kind of story where you want to be working for the Daily World. TV just can't get into the real guts of this story - every nut and bolt - like that local newspaper can. We can only give this story one minute on TV !"
Being an animal lover, Jay also registered his displeasure that evening on the TV3 news cast as he revealed that a St. Landry law enforcement officer felt it was necessary to kill that lion even though it had just been fed (right before it escaped) and was bothering no one (though the barks of the local dogs would have made you think differently).
Often, Jay would be approached in public by children who recognized him. The kids would sometimes ask him why his first name was only one letter ("J" is how they heard it).
"My parents were so poor," he would wink at the parents here, "that they could only afford one letter." Some children were shaken by this, and he would have to comfort them later.
True, Jay had his "canaille" or "rascal" side, and those of us who grew to know and love him and his wife of 40 years, Wyonna, knew she put up with a lot from him, but Jay always knew the truth about her patience:
"She holds such power over me, because of how much I love her, that if she ever found out (about her own power over him), all of my shenanigans would stop forthwith," he would quip sheepishly.
Wyonna admitted after Jay's death this week that her natural shyness throughout most of those 40 years of marriage kept her from either discovering OR exercising that power, and she openly wondered how different things might have been for Jay had she been more aware of it.
"Who knows? He sure lived his life and had fun," she mused.
" But i DO know that he loved me deeply and that he certainly suffered a lot for these past 20 years because of his back and neck injuries, and I know that what got to him the most was the mind-numbing boredom of not being in the middle of where the action was."
Not to worry, Wyonna. He is definitely in the middle of the action in heaven right now. Probably investigating St. Michael for Angel brutality when he roughed up Lucifer and threw him out.
And he'd be doing it with good humor and a wink.
editor's note: Joseph Chaillot worked with Jay Young during the Edwin Edwards gubernatorial campaign of 1971, at TV3 in Lafayette, and at WAFB Channel 9 in Baton Rouge. He resides in Lafayette as a storyteller and LSU Master Gardener.
Here's the tribute I placed online at www.2theadvocate.com :
| Dear Wyonna, Brian, and Rex. For one of the few times in my life, I am almost speechless. I have lived out of the state for 15 of the last 16 years, and hearing the news of Jay's Aug 23rd death floored me today - i am still in shock. From our very first meeting in the summer of 1971, Jay Young and I were fast friends. I was working for then Congressman Edwin Edwards as a statewide coordinator of colleges and volunteers, as EWE was running for Governor. Jay was added to our Crowley office staff through a recommendation from Edwin's brother Nolan Edwards, who had known of Jay because of testimony Jay had given in a trial in which Nolan was involved. Jay's articulate responses to would-be withering questions from the other attorney impressed Nolan, and Jay was hired to work in Edwin's Crowley headquarters with Anne Davenport and Charlotte Wilmer, both brought down from Edwin's Congressional office in Washington. During the fall of 1971, Jay returned to journalism school at LSU but still worked with me on selected weekends on EWE's successful campaign for governor. We had many grand adventures during that fall. During one adventure driving Edwin's campaign bus, Jay and I had a secret signal to do a particular thing - and the code word to begin doing this thing was your name, Y, because it was so unusual - and no one guessed it. I recall spending many nights on you and Jay's couch, and soon grew to love you and your sons over the years. Four years later, in the late summer of 1975, Jay saw to it that I was hired as a TV anchor on weekends at KATC TV3 in Lafayette. Two years later, he again saw to it that I was hired as the Capitol Correspondent in Baton Rouge for WAFB TV Channel 9. I shall always be grateful to him for that. He let me live with you and Brian and Rex for a few weeks until I could find an apartment of my own. All throughout my 16 months with Channel 9, Jay and I stayed close friends as well as professional teammates. We especially loved working on a story together - to get the lead just right, to get the angle of the story just right, etc. And we socialized often together, too. We always had plenty of fun, and I enjoyed his intelligence and easy-going nature. He kept asking me to read little portions of a book he said he was going to write one day (Where Heathens Pray)- so we would often talk about stories we'd heard growing up so he could included some in his book. He did in fact include at least one I recall - the one about the wildcat in a suitcase. He kept reminding me that TV news was all about the show - and he often proclaimed that he missed the nuts and bolts of print journalism, and how a really good story begged for more exposition than the 90 seconds it was given on the nightly newscast. Jay was many things to many people - but to me he will always be fondly recalled as a mentor, a teammate, a buddy, a pal. I will miss his intelligence, his smile, his good humor, his booming voice and his mostly gregarious, positive personality. Right now I can still see him either smiling as he would read a story I had turned in and that he loved the lead for (he had to read the lead-in as anchor), or frowning and asking me to re-write the lead so it would be better. I loved it either way. Working with him was a joy. Same with the two sides to his life and personality some saw: one upbeat, positive and forward-looking, the other suspicious, skeptical, and at times pessimistic - he ALWAYS had an opinion, either way. And I loved him, either way.### - |
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