Robert H. Byler, Jr., collection

Robert H. Byler Jr. was born June 28, 1930. He would receive an A.A. certificate from Hannibal-LaGrange College in June 1950 and would earn his B.A. in English two years later from Illinois Wesleyan University. In August 1954 he received an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri. By March 1982 he graduated with his PhD in Speech Communication from Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Byler was a reporter and photographer as well as a classified ad salesman for two daily newspapers while attending college in Bloomington, Illinois and Columbia, Missouri between 1950 and 1954. Starting in 1954, for almost two years, he was a motion picture photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, heading the still lab in Frankfurt, Germany. Commercial and free-lance photography was an important sideline for him since 1957. Between 1956 and 1960 he was assistant editor of Caterpillar Folks newspaper and News and Views magazine at the Caterpillar Tractor Company in Peoria, Illinois. From 1960 until 1962 Dr. Byler worked at Reynolds Metals Company in Richmond, Virginia as the editor of Reynolds Review. Between 1962 and 1964 he was working in Washington D.C. for the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association as editor of PMA Bulletin, Annual Report Editors’ Notebook and serving as a public information writer. From 1965 until 1967 he would be public information manager at Mead Johnson & Company in Evansville, Indiana. By 1968 he would head the Journalism Division of the University of Evansville before coming to BGSU in 1973 as a professor in the Department of Journalism.