Bob Vitsocky still laughs when he recounts the mock-arguments he and Junior Taylor would get into following Junior’s ill-fated run for WVU student body president.
“I think he might have been actually a little mad at first,” Vitsocky said of his friend, the former Mountaineer mascot and Morgantown businessman who died in his home Wednesday at the age of 66.
He and Taylor were Phi Kappa Psi brothers in those hang-loose, bellbottom days on the Morgantown campus in the mid-1970s.
Taylor was an earnest, comically intense kid from First Ward who grew up loving the Mountaineers unconditionally.
And Vitsocky, just as humorous and coiled, was a journalism major from New Jersey who sold airtime at WAJR and WVAQ, on top of going to school to school full-time.
The frat brothers also became fast friends, which led to Vitsocky serving as campaign major when Taylor made that go for president.
Vitsocky, who is now a broadcast executive, author and motivational speaker in the San Diego area, can deliver himself right back to Almost Heaven when he talks about his friend and those days in Morgantown.
The candidate would tease the campaign manager over the aforementioned outcome at the WVU ballot box. Think Nixon-McGovern.
“Junior would say, ‘Bob, we got killed. You obviously didn’t do enough.’ I’d say, ‘Whaddya mean, me? You’re the one who lost.’”
Then they’d both laugh.
Lose a lot, gain a lot more
Besides, Taylor was already a WVU success.
He was a winning ambassador in buckskins, as the most visible member of the campus community.
And no one could take that 1975 football season away from him, anyway.
That was when WVU still played its home games at old Mountaineer Field, that gloriously rickety bowl down from Woodburn Hall.
Bobby Bowden still roamed the sidelines as head coach that season.
Artie Owens, the steamroller-running back, never met an endzone he didn’t like, that season.
Taylor was fulfilling his lifelong dream then, too.
He had to lose a lot of things along the way to make it as mascot, his kid sister, Carolyn Taylor, said.
A total of 210 pounds, to be exact.
“Junior was a big kid in high school. It didn’t help that everybody spoiled him. He weighed 350 pounds. One day he said, ‘I’m gonna to WVU and I’m gonna be the Mountaineer.’ So he started riding his bike.”
The scale read 140 when he was done.
Then Carolyn and his other sisters – he was the only boy in a single-mom family of five – told him to gain weight.
“He had that sunken-eye look for a while,” she said.
But his eyes were never brighter than on game day, Vitsocky said.
“At the old stadium the seats went right down to the field,” he said. “Junior was always coming over and engaging the fans. He loved that.”
The emotion was shared, Carolyn Taylor said.
“Anywhere we’d go in Morgantown, people knew him,” she said. “It was always, ‘Hey, Junior! Hey, Mountaineer!’”
Don’t get her started on the “Super Fan” days of the Velcro cape during that following basketball season, she said, laughing.
“Let’s Go” (forever)
No matter what social strata you occupy in college, you eventually end up with your moment.
For Junior Taylor, that football season of 46 years ago was youthful exuberance in amber.
All the golden-haired, West Coast girls who smiled at him during the road game at the University of California-Berkeley.
The Southern Methodist University sousaphone players who quit harassing him at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas when he reminded the Texas kids – “They didn’t know I was bluffing” – of the long rifle’s original, non-gridiron purpose.
And the Backyard Brawl in Morgantown, when Bill McKenzie drilled that 38-yard field goal as the clock ticked down, to take it away from Pitt.
It wasn’t what fully defined him, however.
Taylor was just as enthused about the classroom, eventually completing graduate studies in business management and public safety from WVU.
He ran a successful lawn maintenance and snow removal company, while working his way to a divinity degree from Oral Roberts University.
Arrangements are incomplete at Hastings Funeral Home, but a memorial will be announced at a later date for Taylor, whose survivors include Carolyn and two other sisters – plus his wife, Viktoriya and their son, Vlad, whom they adopted from The Ukraine.
To all who knew him, Taylor never stopped pushing for the big cheer.
Medical circumstances of some of those whom he loved led to his advocacy of children and adults with special needs.
And later, when he launched a ministry after his divinity degree, he’d say, “Let’s Go,” in a wholly different way.
“You don’t stop believing in people,” he’d say.
“You don’t give up on people. And you do what you can, to help.”
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