Marion Sayle Taylor
Toronto Daily Star, December 3 1934
Marion Sayle Taylor (1889-1942) was a radio advice columnist. The son of a Baptist preacher, Taylor started his career as a social worker and organist and planned to study medicine. When a car accident ruined his hands, he became a touring lecturer, at one time debating fundamentalism with William Jennings Bryan.
In 1925, he was asked by a Spokane radio station to fill a gap in the day's radio programming. He branched out from lecturing into radio and, by 1928, he decided to become the Voice of Experience, registering the title as a trademark. In 1932, he had a radio spot on station WOR in New York, and went national in 1933. By the time of this photograph, he was receiving more than 15,000 letters a week and required a staff of more than 30 to handle them. (One reference claims that all of his assistants were male.)
Taylor also produced a number of pamphlets and books, mostly on the subject of sex, and was earning a million dollars a year at his peak. (Apparently, he gave a lot of it to charity.) Taylor's works included:
- Social Diseases: A National Menace
- Sex Vigor for Men: How Retained, How Regained (scanned through optical character recognition here)
- The Secret of Youth and Charm: Plain Sex Truths for Women
He continued broadcasting until 1939 and passed away on February 1, 1942; I do not know his cause of death.
The book On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio has a biography of Taylor. I also found these links:
- A blog entry on Taylor that has collected some articles on him.
- His New York Times obituary, which somewhat snarkily pointed out that he gave advice on domestic problems but was married three times.
- An article which claimed that Taylor persuaded his second wife to divorce him so that his first wife would not initiate an alienation of affection suit. He then went and married his third wife.
- There is a book about him, written in 2013, called Lies, Sex, and Radio.
Created October 8, 2025.