Bill King
American sportscaster
Wilbur King (October 6, 1927 – October 18, 2005) was an American sports announcer. In 2016, the National Baseball Hall of Fame named King recipient of the 2017 Ford C. Frick Award, the highest honor for American baseball broadcasters.
King was the radio voice of the Oakland Athletics for more than 20 seasons as well as the longtime radio play-by-play announcer for the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders and the San Francisco/Golden State Warriors. Earlier in his career, he had been a member of the San Francisco Giants original broadcasting team (together with Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons) when the Giants moved west from New York in 1958, and had called football and basketball games for the University of California.
King was widely recognized by his distinctive handlebar moustache and Van Dyke beard, as well as his broadcasting catchphrase, "Holy Toledo!".
Early broadcasting career
King was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and was stationed on the island of Guam at the end of World War II when he began his broadcasting career with the Armed Forces Radio Network, converting play-by-play accounts of games as they came in over the wire and broadcasting them in a manner that made it sound as if he were actually at the game. After the war, he began his professional sportscasting career in Pekin, Illinois, broadcasting high school football and basketball games as well as Minor League Baseball games. In the early 1950s, King served as the lead play-by-play announcer on WTAD 930 AM in Quincy, Illinois. He later announced basketball games for Bradley University and basketball and football games for the University of Nebraska. King moved to the Bay Area in 1958, when the San Francisco Giants hired him as an announcer.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bill King” as american sportscaster. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american sportscaster. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4909734. VIAF identifies the subject as 4457149198333874940009. The Library of Congress control number is n82022702. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2005, 2016 and 2017.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Bill King”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Bill King primary sources, Bill King archive and Bill research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bill King”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Bill King” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.