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Nail: Reporter, Character, One Of A Kind
Dawson "Tack" Nail, long-time executive editor of Warren Communications News and Communications Daily, died March 25. Here, William O’Shaughnessy, president-CEO of Whitney Radio, parent company of WVOX-AM and WRTN-FM Westchester, N.Y., offers some personal reflections on the man who was one of the most prominent reporters covering broadcasting and telecommunications in Washington for the past 50 years.

“Tack” Nail was a journalist and reporter the way the men of our fathers’ time imagined them to be.
His beat was communications and television, the business thereof, its doings and deliberations. And his turf was the capital city of our nation where he covered congress, the regulatory authorities and commissions like the FCC and also those who resided in the White House itself for the last 50 years.

Tack Nail was sui generis: altogether unique and able to be defined only in his own terms. He looked like nothin’ you ever saw: craggy, rumpled, disheveled and his jowls were always in need of a shave. And, on information and belief, he enjoyed a cocktail of an evening. Or two. I was crazy about the man.
And as John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable observed: “He looked like a cross between Gabby Hayes and Abraham Lincoln.” He had it exactly right. Just perfect. 

How appropriate, too, that a B&C scribe had the best line as we mourn his passing … because for all those decades when Dawson B. Nail covered Washington, his only real competition came from the formidable Taishoff stable at Broadcasting & Cable over on DeSales Street. 

That essential journal, long our sentinel on the Potomac, had the legendary Sol Taishoff himself; his son Larry of sainted memory; the estimable Don West, now president of the Library of American Broadcasting, who was with Tack last week when he wrote 30 to his colorful life; and graceful, cerebral editors like Harry Jessell, Ed James and Mark Miller. It has only Eggerton now to keep us honest.
Writing for B&C’s rival, Warren Communications’ TV Digest and later Communications Daily, Tack covered the business side of this pervasive and powerful industry from its infancy all the way up to the reality of reality shows.
As the scribe and chronicler of this great communications force, he would often rage against the evils of consolidation. And like his competitors and colleagues at B&C, he held broadcasters’ feet to the fire on First Amendment and free speech matters. But there was no meanness or venom in the man. And his writings and reporting held no animosity toward even the conglomerateurs, absentee owners and speculators who view a television station only as an instrument, a vehicle and a conduit for importunings about products and goods and services few of us need and most can ill afford.

For all his off-handed, gnarly, un-PC, rough-edged demeanor and the southern twang, Tack could get through to any D.C. bureaucrat or solon of the Congress and always to any media mogul in whose care and keeping the powerful instruments of communications reside.

I want to end by telling you also that my own kids always loved Tack Nail ever since they encountered him many years ago at one of Joe Reilly’s high councils in upstate New York. Or it may have been at NAB. My daughter Kate always lit up when she saw Mr. Nail, the kindly looking man with the funny name. When I suggested to Kate that he was a very humorous fellow with a marvelous wit and widely known as a great character, she said:  “Daddy, there’s more there … I like him. He’s a really good man.”
And now as soon as I finish this piece I have to go into the office of Kate’s brother David Tucker O’Shaughnessy to tell him Tack Nail died over the weekend. For the last 30-some years, you see, David has carried around every day in his wallet a $2 bill given to him by Mr. Nail at one of those conventions.

David, who is now president of our two radio stations, will reach in his pocket, I expect, and produce that wallet from which he’ll gently remove the folded $2 bill. And if I know my son and heir, he’ll wipe away a tear and tuck it safely back in his wallet.
Forgive the personal story about this marvelous character. But our profession — I know I’m supposed to call it an industry — can’t lose too many more Ward Quaals, Marty Becks or Steve Labunskis only to be replaced by those “Make it happen” … “Doin’ what it takes” … “Getting’ it done” … “Sounds like a plan” … empty suits who sit in airport lounges tapping away at their BlackBerrys and iPads communicating their ratings and financial results to corporate masters a whole continent away. They call themselves, these new mandarins of the trade, “market managers” and “chief revenue officers.”

Tack Nail knew all of his. He wrote of it. And he did what he could to remind us that a television — or radio — station could elevate and energize a community and make it better and stronger and its people sweeter and kinder.
It must also be remembered that when he had filed his last stories, Tack would somehow drag himself up to New York for board meetings of the old Broadcast Pioneers, which became the modern day national charity known as the Broadcasters Foundation of America.

It meant a lot to Tack because it assists broadcasters and their families when the roof falls in and life turns sad and difficult. 
Dawson B. “Tack” Nail heard that music, too.

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Remembering Tack Nail... By Michael Grebb
I was a young guy right out of school when I got a job at Comm Daily in D.C. in the Fall of 1993. The economy was still limping along, clawing its way out of a bad recession (sound familiar?)—and I was happy to have finally landed a job. During my first week, someone introduced me to a grouchy, Southern fried character named Dawson Nail. People called him Tack. He shook my hand out of obligation, growled something and then retired to his office for a nap. I remember thinking, “What the hell was that?” But my new boss Dan Warren just laughed, patted me on the back and said, “He’s a legend.” And he was right. Tack died on Friday. They’ll never be another one like him. Ever.   Tack came from the old school. Not the old school you and I know. This was an ancient old school from way, way back. The one where journalists took sources out to lunch and got them smashed on hard liquor, took down their secrets and then wrote up the stories in the afternoon while still swimming in Martini juices. Tack broke a lot of big stories like this back in his day. And he was still breaking them when I arrived at Comm Daily—despite those daily afternoon naps that commenced like clockwork at 2pm. He had earned the right after years of service, including practically putting the word “TV” on the map in the 50s at Broadcasting (now B&C) and then from 1964 on when he joined Warren’s Television Digest

Tack greets NBC's Brian Williams at a recent NAB event

Tack wore an Oklahoma drawl that dripped like warm molasses as he glad-handed his way through the world. A loud “How yew du’ne?” signaled his presence at any function, and it cut through the room no matter how noisy. When I got back from my very first business trip a few weeks after I joined Comm Daily, Tack—who until that point hadn’t said a word to me since I shook his hand that first day—sauntered out into the middle of the newsroom, loped toward my desk and loudly asked whether I had… how shall I rephrase this… enjoyed any female company on my trip. His exact words were significantly more blunt than I can repeat here. I stammered like a kid with no idea how to respond to this guy who was 40 years my senior (and looked like 60 years my senior). The newsroom broke out in laughter. I turned beet red. And as the laughter died down, Tack patted me on the back and winked. I knew right then that I had been hazed. And I was proud of it. 

 About a year later, Tack went missing one day. I asked about it, and someone told me he was at the doctor. The next day we found out he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Tack had lived like a permanent cast member of “Mad Men” for years, so it wasn’t exactly a shock to any of us. But we all feared the worst. For months, he got chemo at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. And amazingly, he still came into the office just about every day. He still did his job. We joked that considering Tack’s lifestyle, the chemo was child’s play. He never even lost his hair. But he did quit smoking. And he did beat that cancer back mercilessly until it slinked away into the night, never to return. Nobody ever admitted it, but most of us really thought he was going to die. We had prepared for it. Accepted it. But Tack hadn’t. He just went on with his life. And he lived almost another two decades because of it.

 I left Comm Daily shortly after the cancer scare, working for a string of TV and telecom pubs. Whenever I saw Tack at an industry dinner or confab, he’d give me a loud “How yew du’ne, kid?” He always tried to embarrass me, once berating me in front of five or six execs because I showed up at a one reception without a jacket (hey, it was the late ’90s dot-com thing… give me a break). None of his ribbing ever matched that first zinger after my business trip. But he loved to try. And I always appreciated the effort.   The last time I saw Tack was summer 2010 during a barbecue at Dennis Wharton’s house. Tack was still going strong then, chatting up everyone and still charming us all with his crusty sense of humor. There was just something about Tack. About the way he carried himself. He knew he was a legend, though he never acknowledged it. This was a guy who was a regular on “Meet the Press” when most people still had black-and-white TVs. He was a guest on the first C-SPAN call-in show in 1980. TV network CEOs took calls from him as if it was the President on the line. And he got away with it all because he was Tack Nail. There will never be another one. Rest in Peace. Somewhere, St. Peter is getting hazed. And he’s loving it.

(A memorial service for Nail will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thurs, Mar 31, at the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, Washington).

President Gerald Ford and Dawson B "Tack" Nail