Longtime WISN-12 news anchor Jerry Taff, known for his signature sign off, “Good night, and better tomorrows,” died Oct. 27 in his home state of Texas, according to the news organization. He was 85.
A fixture of the Milwaukee media landscape, Taff delivered the news from 1979 to 2005.
Taff was born in Lamesa, Texas, in 1940, and got an early start in radio at age 17 at his hometown station, WPET-AM. He had stints in Dallas; Flint, Michigan; and New Haven, Connecticut, before joining WISN-12.
By 1980, Taff was part of an anchor team that propelled WISN-12 to first-place in audience among local 10 p.m. newscasts, according to Journal Sentinel archives. In early 1985, he was fired by the station — but was asked to return in 1987 after ratings had dropped. In the late 1980s, in addition to co-anchoring two of WISN-12’s evening reports, he delivered four early morning newscasts on WISN-AM (1130).
He also DJ’d a weekly hour of Elvis Presley music on WOKY-AM (920).
Former WISN-12 journalist Kathy Mykleby, who anchored with Taff for more than a dozen years, described him as a know-it-all “in the most positive way” who “could always inject a little Texas-ism into things.”
The pair still exchanged emails, and in a recent one describing an operation he’d undergone, he wrote, “I looked like a cool watermelon on a hot summer afternoon. They pretty much split me right up the middle.”
Mykleby formed her first impression of Taff when she was hired to start a newscast at Milwaukee’s Channel 18. As she reviewed other local news shows to get a feel for Milwaukee, she remembered seeing Taff in Paris, accompanying an Oak Creek mother whose son was being held hostage in Iran. To ultimately get to share the anchor desk with such a larger-than-life figure, Mykleby said, was incredible.
His presence meant something in the harder moments, too, including her mother’s death, and her husband’s in 2023.
“He was there in your life and your work,” Mykleby said.
A 2005 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel profile before his retirement described Taff as having “a basso profundo that comes from an older school of anchors.”
In the interview, Taff joked that he’d become an unlikely celebrity around the city.
“I’m not pretty,” he said. “I’m not especially smart. I’m certainly polarizing … and wow, Milwaukee has taken me in.”
In a 2004 column by Mike Drew, former radio and television writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Drew noted Taff’s polarizing nature. The anchor placed first as the city’s least favorite anchor in a viewer survey conducted by the newspaper in the 1990s, and second as favorite.
Though no place “totally feels like home,” Taff said in his 2005 interview with the Journal Sentinel, “Milwaukee feels more like home than anyplace else.”
WISN-12 chief meteorologist Mark Baden wrote on Facebook that Taff was one of a kind and that the two had stayed in touch in Taff’s retirement.
“Jerry loved Milwaukee and loved all of you,” Baden wrote.
This story was updated to include new information.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Longtime WISN 12 anchor Jerry Taff dies at 85
Reporting by Madeline Heim, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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