Taylor was born on the east side of Cleveland in the Buckeye neighborhood, moving at a young age to suburban Bedford, Ohio.
Taylor suffered from bronchial asthma as a youngster, though he overcame it and graduated from Bedford High School in 1961, and going to college at Kent State University.
It was there that Taylor earned recognition for his live coverage of such historic news events as the second Sam Shepard trial, the Hough Riots, the Glenville shootout, blastoff to splashdown live coverage of the aborted Apollo 13 mission and the Kent State shootings, for which he received an Emmy for his 25th anniversary perspective piece on the Kent State tragedy.
He moved to WJW three years later, and in 1979 became a co-anchor on the weeknight newscasts, a post he held until his retirement in December 2005.
[1] While at WJW, Taylor did live reports from Three Mile Island, interviewed four presidents, and even traveled to Japan to cover the then growing Japanese auto industry.