McNeil, Bill, 1924- : William R. "Bill" McNeil was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1924. He studied at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, leaving after one year because he ran out of money for his tuition. McNeil went to work as a coal miner, intending to return to school when he earned enough money to complete his university studies. He married and continued working as a miner. McNeil's ambition was to work in radio broadcasting. In 1950, he got a job at CBI, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio station in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He attracted the interest of the CBC radio network by submitting story ideas and radio broadcasts for network use. In 1953, McNeil moved to Toronto to work for the CBC radio news series CBC News Roundup as assistant to editor Norman DePoe. In January 1956 he became the editor, leaving this position by the summer of 1956 to prepare the CBC radio series Assignment. Assignment, which began on 1 October 1956, was a magazine show combining interviews, feature stories and commentaries on a broad range of subjects, making extensive use of magnetic tape and other developing technology to transmit the sounds of people and events recorded on-the-spot. McNeil hosted the program for 15 years, also contributing to Assignment as a writer, editor and program organizer. Assignment's format changed over the years, but McNeil's specialty continued to be his interviews with a broad range of people from Canada and elsewhere. Over the course of his career as a CBC broadcaster, McNeil also worked for other CBC radio series such as the religion series Concern and Christian Frontiers, and the documentary series Project. In 1968, he became writer-producer of the CBC radio interview series Voice of the Pioneer, which went on the air on 6 October 1968 with J. Frank Willis as the host. After Willis died in 1969, McNeil took on the job of host. The CBC broadcast Voice of the Pioneer as part of its Sunday-morning programming. McNeil hosted other segments of these Sunday morning programs, starting with the Ontario segment of Sunday A.M. in 1968 and ending with the series Fresh Air, doing his final Fresh Air broadcast on 3 May 1992. His publications include two books of selected Voice of the Pioneer interviews, a brief biography of John Fisher, Voices of a War Remembered: an Oral History of Canadians in World War Two, and a history of radio in Canada, Signing On: the Birth of Radio in Canada, co-written with Morris Wolfe.