Before YouTube, William Pace built and owned his own TV show
For 38 years, the Dayton broadcaster has produced The William Pace Show on his own terms. Now he's working to save more than 3,000 episodes recorded on aging tape.
By RoShawn Winburn, Dayton Weekly News
In the late 1980s, William Pace kept walking into Dayton television stations with the same pitch. He kept getting the same answer, "bring us an advertiser and we'll give you a show."
Pace compares it to The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy is told to fetch the witch's broomstick before the wizard will help her. In other words, go do the impossible.
He went and did it. He signed advertisers who believed in him, including the Mad Hatter costume shop, which he recalls committing about $4,000 right away. The stations still stalled. So, Pace changed the deal.
"I'll tell you what I'll do, fellas," he remembers saying. "I'll just start my own production company, William Pace Productions, and we'll produce the show and we'll just give you a check for it."
Pace set up an advertising agency to handle sales and public relations for the program, and the stations sold him airtime. He hired and paid for everything else himself, including camera operators, editors and studio space.
Thirty-eight years later, he estimates The William Pace Show has produced more than 3,000 episodes. His company has always held the rights, he said, which is something he still finds himself explaining.
"Most people think the stations owned it," Pace said. "They never did squat. They didn't do nothing but collect a check."
"I made my name by the sweat of my brow, the seat of my britches, and my bootstraps."
Pace grew up on Marion Street on Dayton's West Side. He was one of seven children in a three-bedroom house that also held his parents and his grandmother. His parents came to Dayton in the 1950s and met downtown, back when the city had a row of movie theaters.
With 10 people under one roof, the front stoop was the only place to think. He'd sit out there and picture himself in a big house someday. He lives in a four-story home now, near Salem Avenue and Fountain Boulevard, three or four miles from where he started.
"I was born talking," he said. "I couldn't hush up."
None of his siblings shared his drive to perform. His mother used to say he should have been an only child.
He sang in school programs throughout elementary school. At 13, he joined a professional Black summer stock theater company that began on West Third Street and later moved to a theater on East Fifth Street near the YMCA. The performers were paid, and Pace still has the newspaper clipping from that summer.
In high school, he acted with the Dayton Community Theater downtown. His parents also enrolled him in the Living Arts Center, an after-school program for creative students, where visiting artists gave him master classes. By then he was singing in churches across the city, including paid soloist work at Westminster Presbyterian, First Baptist, Christ Episcopal and Christ United Methodist.
Television got its hooks in him early, too. As a boy, Pace watched Ruth Lyons' "50-50 Club," the Cincinnati midday show built on interviews, music and live commercials. He still models his own program on it.
At Wilberforce University, music was the obvious major. Broadcast journalism was not. He kept taking the courses anyway and graduated with a double major.
"God can have a plan for your life without you even knowing it," he said.
Scholarships filled his college summers. At 20, he studied and performed at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, and he says he was the youngest singer the program had accepted. The next summer took him to the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado. Teachers first trained him as a tenor, before he settled into his true voice, a lyric baritone with a tenor's range.
After college he sang with orchestras and concert bands in Ithaca and Syracuse, New York; Salinas, California; Miami; Detroit; Wisconsin and elsewhere. He negotiated the contracts himself and served as his own agent.
The early William Pace Show aired on WRGT Channel 45 and WDTN Channel 2, usually around 1 or 2 a.m. Pace followed WWF wrestling in a stretch of the schedule otherwise filled with infomercials. People stayed up to watch him anyway. For a time, he said, the show aired daily.
He found a second audience on public access. Those channels wouldn't run programs with paid ads, so Pace edited out the commercials and sent them the show. He estimates the program ran on both broadcast and public access for about 28 of its 38 years. The extra exposure grew his following.
That's why many Daytonians who caught him on Dayton Access Television assumed he was a public-access host. He wants the record straight.
"From day one, the show has always been a commercial show," Pace said.
Creators now call that cross-platform distribution. Pace was doing it by mailing tapes.
Booking big names without a network was its own grind. His show was a paid program, so he couldn't pitch himself as part of a station's news operation. He had his name and his persistence.
For B.B. King, that meant weeks of calls with the blues legend's road manager ahead of a concert at Memorial Hall. The answer didn't come until King arrived in town: five minutes, in the dressing room, at intermission.
Pace scrambled for camera operators and lights. When King walked offstage and sat down, there was one take.
"I didn't even have time to be nervous," Pace said.
They talked about building self-esteem in young people. The interview is posted on the William Pace Show YouTube channel.
He landed Mr. T and comedian Jimmie Walker the same way. Mr. T, he recalled, talked about wanting to take care of his mother and make her proud.
"This is not the mecca to be doing what I have accomplished," Pace said.
Pace admits that in the early years he mostly wanted to be a celebrity. That changed in a Trotwood grocery store in the late 1990s.
By then, the show aired at midnight on Channel 51 and had started including scripture and short inspirational segments. A woman recognized Pace in the store and chased him down an aisle. She told him that one night she had gone into her kitchen intending to end her life. Something told her to turn on the small television on the counter, and there he was. Something he said changed her mind.
He has never known what it was. "I don't know what I said," he told DWN. He walked away believing the show's purpose was to lift people up, not to make him famous. "In many ways, I look at it as a ministry," he said.
That belief shapes his work off camera. Last holiday season, Pace organized a food drive that he said collected more than 100 bags of groceries. This year's fundraiser is set for Dec. 19 at Submarine House, where he plans to raffle an acoustic guitar to buy groceries for Dayton-area families and tape a segment for the show.
Pace has also run for Dayton City Commission and Montgomery County Commission. He lost both races, but he said he picked up votes in every precinct in the county, which told him people knew his name.
He decided his calling wasn't in politics. He still worries about Dayton, though, and dates its slide to the years around the 2008 housing crash, when major employers left. The city needs leaders who will go out and recruit business, he said, and residents with enough stake in their neighborhoods to keep them from slipping.
3,000 Episodes on Tape
Pace came up in the reel-to-reel era, and much of his catalog is on videotape. He is paying to convert it to digital files, a process he describes as expensive.
"The William Pace Show will go on for hundreds of years to come," he said.
YouTube has given the show a new life. His channel runs episodes around the clock, and he hears from viewers in Texas, North Carolina, upstate New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and California. Remote recording means a guest no longer needs a concert date in Dayton to sit down with him.
He produces new episodes about nine months a year, and how many depends on sponsors and guests. He's hoping for regional and national sponsors and, eventually, syndication. If that happens, he wants to buy land outside the city and build his own studio.
Who keeps the tapes?
No one has independently reviewed what's on Pace's tapes. Nearly four decades of local television almost certainly holds conversations with entertainers who have since died, along with Dayton singers, businesses and community figures who rarely made the evening news.
A good deal of Black Dayton's history lives in places like that, in church files, family photo albums, back issues of neighborhood papers and boxes of tape in someone's closet.
Videotape deteriorates, and the machines that play it are getting scarce. Converting a tape is also only the first step. Someone still has to label it, date it and store it where people can find it.
Pace's own story shows how quickly the details slip away. At 13, he was paid to perform with a professional Black theater company in Dayton. Few people in the city today could tell you its name or who founded it.
Libraries, universities, historical societies and families all have collections that could help fill in that record. Right now, Pace's archive is being saved one tape at a time, and he is paying for it himself.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
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