Dan Wooding with Dick Bott at NRB 2008

NASHVILLE, TN (ANS) -- On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, Richard P. “Dick” Bott, Sr. was inducted into the National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame at the organization’s annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

The NRB is the world’s largest association of Christian communicators, with over 1,400 member organizations, and the Hall of Fame Award is the highest honor the organization confers. Past recipients have included Dr. Billy Graham, Dr. James Dobson, Dr. Theodore Epp, Dr. Charles Swindoll, Dr. D. James Kennedy, and Dr. Charles Stanley.

According to the NRB, the Hall of Fame Award “is presented to an individual who has made invaluable contributions to the field of Christian communications, all the while exhibiting the highest standards of conduct and evidence of faithfulness in Christ.”

Dick Bott began his broadcasting career in 1952 at KSAN Radio in San Francisco, California. He was soon named the station’s General Manager, thus becoming the youngest GM of any major-market radio station in America. Dick and his wife, Sherley, then purchased their first radio station, KDON, in Salinas/Monterey, California in 1957, quickly achieving a high level of commercial success.

However, Mr. Bott wanted to achieve something more. His vision was to own and operate a radio station fully devoted to quality Bible teaching, as well as Christian news and information, a concept that was virtually unknown at the time. He and his wife sold KDON and moved their family to Kansas City, where they launched KCCV, “Kansas City’s Christian Voice,” in 1962. That single radio station became the flagship of Bott Radio Network, now comprising 80 stations in 10 states, with a total combined coverage of nearly 40 million people. Bott Radio Network also broadcasts nationwide over the Sky Angel Direct Broadcasting Satellite Service, and worldwide at www.bottradionetwork.com.

Dick Bott agreed to talk about his award and his life as a Christian broadcaster at NRB 2008 and I began by asking him to talk about how Bott Broadcasting got started.

“In founding Bott radio network in 1962, what I wanted was a broadcast voice that would serve the Lord by serving His people,” he explained. “Now that’s a nice phrase, but how do we accomplish that? So the foundation for our network programming is quality Bible teaching programming and then, laced with that, is a wide array of public policy news and information programming. It really was, back in those days, a pretty new concept to think of all Christian talk.

“However, it isn’t whether you’re talking or not, it’s what you’re saying that makes the big difference and we wanted our Bible teaching programming and those ministries we were carrying to be the foundation the absolute cornerstone upon which everything else was built. So then the Christian news and information and discussion programming of course would flush that out. I call that ‘faith in action’ -- putting legs on what you say you believe and what are you doing in society and in the culture to make a difference.

“Radio is not necessarily relegated to only music. Of course, these days, we have a lot of secular stations that are all talk and a lot of people listen as a matter of fact they’re very good. The same thing in cable television you know with Fox News. But you see, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it and it’s more than talk, it’s got to be composed of what you’re saying when you talk that reaches the hearts of people and then does the job.”

I asked Dick Bott if he had seen tremendous changes in Christian broadcasting since he began.

“It’s probably become more diverse in many, many ways,” he said. “Like anything else there is the good and the bad that have come along the way and so you have to make decisions. Everybody has choices; nothing is automatic and you’ve got to be very careful. Now in our particular case we are not of a specific church or denomination, however the Bible is the cornerstone of what we do. So while there may be some differences in doctrinal elements, they’ve got to be true to God’s Word in what they teach on our network and then our news and information programming has to conform to the Christian principles that these programs talk about.”

I concluded by asking Dick Bott him then how felt about receiving the NRB Hall of Fame Award.
“Well, of course, it’s an honor for me,” he said. “I notice that they give these awards when a person’s kind of getting older.”

He smiled and then added, “I suppose it’s because over those forty-five years, we have just decided if ‘it’s not broken, why fix it?’ The Bible is two-thousand years old for goodness sakes and the Gospel of Christ, which is the centrality of it, and that is what we started out with in 1962, and we’ve just stayed unerringly on that course since that time.”

Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview

Dan Wooding, 67, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma of 44 years. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. Wooding is the author of some 42 books, the latest of which is his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com. danjuma1@aol.com.