Taft Snowdon has died, an FCC official confirms. He was supervising attorney in the FCC Media Bureau Audio Division. He was 64.
According to several accounts he had been vacationing in Kenya.
“If you had a radio deal that needed commission approval in the last 20 years, more than likely Taft looked at it and signed off on it.” That’s how the law firm of Fletcher Heald reacted to the news. For more than three decades, the law firm wrote on its blog, Snowdon supervised the processing of assignment and transfer applications in the Audio Division.
“It is a measure of Taft’s talent that, under his watchful eye, thousands of radio assignment/transfer applications have been processed with a clockwork consistency and predictability not often encountered in the federal bureaucracy.
“Taft was reasonable, and he was smart, and he would listen. He treated you with courtesy and respect, and he gave you a straight answer. He could be very funny, too. Maybe he’d give you what you asked for, maybe he wouldn’t — but it was always a pleasure to interact with him.”
He joined the FCC in 1974.
