Tribute to Jorge Rodriguez

by Michael Allen Smith - July 6, 2020

On Friday July 3rd, Jorge Rodriguez died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 55. Jorge was the long time producer and guest host for the Neil Rogers Show. After the Neil Rogers Show ended, Jorge continued with the Jorge Rodriguez Show, which he broadcasted online from his own SoFloRadio channel.

I never met Jorge, but exchanged a few emails with him over the years whenever we recovered old episodes of the Neil Rogers Show where he was a guest host. Prior to Neil being inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, Jorge reached out to me to create a video to be used in the ceremony.

My partner on the audio restoration project John Baker had more contact with Jorge. They worked together to bring all the Neil Rogers tribute shows that Jorge recorded over to the Neil Rogers Tributes playlist on our YouTube channel.

With the passing of Jorge Rodriguez, the list of people that really knew the history of the Neil Rogers Show continues to shrink.

Shortly after Neil died in 2010, his web guy Eric Harold died at the age of 48. It was Eric's death that was the spark that ignited the race to recover as much audio as we could from the Neil Rogers Show. John Baker was a tremendous help in making that happen. Almost 2,000 shows and 1,000 photos were added to the archive. John passed in 2017. Then Suds Coleman died in 2019. Now Jorge is gone.

Jorge will be missed. In addition to the several tribute shows he donated to the Neil Rogers Show YouTube channel, we have recovered 239 shows where Jorge was the guest host for Neil. Those shows can be found by following the links on the Neil Rogers Audio page.