1948 and into 1949 was a real depressing time for Phil. His mother was ill and ultimately died of Rheumatic Fever. After visiting her "I would just walk the streets of Oakland and one time I was walking along...and I heard this guy playing a guitar outside the Time Out Club on Broadway and I hadn't heard that kind of music. I had been...kind of an aficionado of the Hit Parade, you know Patti Page, Mario Lanza. Frankie Lane, and Vaughan Monroe, and there were some black overtones to the music but at the time I didn't know that.

"I walked over and stood in the door for a minute and nobody bothered me and I just watched this incredible guy doing alt kinds of acrobatics doing the splits and playing the guitar with his teeth, playing with the guitar behind his back!' TBone Walker was getting ready for his show that night. Phil soon found KWBR, which later became KDIA, and started listening seriously to the music.

About 1965 when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came along "I knew enough about the music to realize nobody knows the guys who turned the Beatles and Stones onto the stuff. So I went down to KERS (which later became part of KXPR.) And said 'I'd like to do a show.'They said sure why not?"

In 1976 Phil put together the first Sacramento Blues Festival. He and a dedicated group of volunteers produced the festival through 1993. The festival became a local blues lovers' annual paradise for the level of talent that was consistently presented. Over the years the festival brought such blues icons as Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Milton, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Etta James and many others. Charles Brown and Lowell Fulson were among the artists first brought to the festival and they were still

coming in 1993. Many bluesmen came year after year not only for the opportunity to perform, but for the chance to hang out and socialize with their peers.

The Sacramento Blues Festival achieved such respect within the Blues community that in 1987 Phil was presented with a W.C. Handy award for Blues Promoter of the Year. He still doesn't understand why he was chosen. "Here we are, we've got the Newport Jazz Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival..." He wondered at the time, "Where did these guys even get my name? I had no idea."

After the 1993 festival a combination of health issues, pressures from his family and the continual struggle for funding convinced Phil and the close knit festival steering committee to put future festival plans on hold.

A big thrill for Phil was to nominate and then induct his good friend Little Milton into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1988. He also had the privilege of inducting Jay McShann that same year.

Although Phil's first stint with radio lasted only about six months, he got back into it in 1978, first on KERS (KXPR), and then on a commercial station KPOP He had a Sunday afternoon show that was #1 in Arbitron ratings for its time slot. but was eventually dropped because of a format change. He swore he would not go back to commercial radio.

KDVS offered Phil a spot in about 1981. He was fairly content there except for the constantly changing management and priorities of a college radio station. About 1984 he met then late Ken Crow, one of KVMR's first music programmers and the original host of the Saturday Night Blues Show.