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Priscilla Parker
An only child, Priscilla was born in Bar Harbor, Maine but grew up in the Miami area where she attended St. Patrick’s School in Miami Beach. By the time she was in high school, she was living in Polk City, just north of Lakeland, and graduated from Lakeland High School.
Priscilla enrolled at Rollins College in Winter Park as a theater major and was featured in numerous campus productions. After graduating from there in 1942 she went to New York and did some dramatic radio shows and fashion modeling. After a year, she joined WWNC in Ashville, NC for two years. Around 1946 she moved to Reading, PA and took a job with WHUM and did some fashion work. While in Pennsylvania, she also conducted a seminar at New York University on radio copy and techniques and, for a couple months, commuted to Philadelphia to do a show on KYW.
Coming to Tampa in 1953, Priscilla became the Fashion Coordinator for Maas Brothers, a job she held until becoming a free-lancer in 1959. Shortly after coming to Tampa she began her radio show and worked at WSUN, WDAE, and WINQ in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Her shows focused on topics of interest to women and often included interviews with celebrities such as singer Mel Torme, stage, screen, radio and TV star Eddie Cantor, and actor Bela Lugosi.
In 1984 Priscilla passed away following a lengthy illness. The Rollins College alumnus, who never married, and whose success in college theater helped spawn her career in radio broadcasting, left a bequest of nearly $1 million to establish a talent-based theater scholarship for Rollins students. The Priscilla L. Parker Scholarships were believed to be, at that time, one of the largest private bequests in support of educational theater in the country, paying for up to 11 annual scholarships of $5,000 each for incoming theater students.
Station History
1953 - 1974 Other Tampa Bay Area Stations (On Air Personality)
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