The article from the Hartford Courant, thanks to cut and paste::

Domler: A Folk Legacy

By ROGER CATLIN
The Hartford Courant
April 04, 2001

Over the years, there have been near constant complaints about the lack of a rock scene in Hartford, occasional lamentations about the rise and fall of jazz and rumblings about the threadbare nature of country-western around here.

But in all the years I've been here, there has never been a complaint about a lack of folk music.

Indeed, the folk-music presence in Hartford, in all its variations and permutations, has been as rich and large as the audience that has been cultivated to enjoy it.

And a lot of its success is due to Bill Domler, who died Monday at age 53, two weeks after a bizarre accident outside his print shop in Simsbury, where he fell and hit his head.

Domler was a folk-music disc jockey on the University of Hartford's WWUH-FM (91.3) for more than 20 years, until he quit last fall. He was the first to bring folk to a weekly morning slot, which eventually grew to daily folk programming there.

Building on the interest he created, especially in traditional folk, Domler started the Sounding Board Coffeehouse. The weekly Saturday night series, held mostly in West Hartford church basements, has run for more than a quarter-century, largely under the direction of his parents, Len and Fran Domler, making the Domlers Hartford's first family of folk presenters.

Bill Domler also started the New Harmony folk series in Canton, which was to become the Roaring Brook Concert Series - also still running.

In recent years, he helped establish the Connecticut Audubon Coffeehouse Series in Glastonbury. In 1974, he helped start the free Connecticut Family Folk Festival in Elizabeth Park, which ran for 25 years.

And there were all kinds of offshoot temporary stages for Domler's shows, from the Auer Farm in Bloomfield and the Wallace Stevens Theatre at The Hartford to a short series at Timothy's Restaurant last year.

His most arresting series married his love for music with his job - running a print shop. There he provided some of the first Hartford audiences for acts like Dar Williams, the Nields and David Massengill.

When I began writing about music in Hartford 15 years ago, my beat was folk, and Domler was a key ally - bearish, garrulous, a singular promoter of the art who was instrumental in bringing a number of acts to Hartford for the first time, including Nanci Griffith, Silly Wizard and Gordon Bok.

My strongest memory of any of his shows was one in his shop, Speediest Printer in Town, when it was on South Whitney Street in Hartford's West End. There, amid the ink and the racks of vinyl (for a print shop, it was the best folk record store around), was the perfect setting for the union songs of activist U. Utah Phillips.

Bruce Pratt, the Connecticut folksinger who now lives in Maine, remembers Domler for his "wide reading interests and a love of the arcane. He enjoyed fife and drum corps musters; traditional folk music, primarily American; some singer-songwriters; and, more than anything else, running concerts and concert series.

"He loved the Paton Family, founders of Folk-Legacy Records in Sharon, and most of their roster," Pratt said, "but he also liked some more contemporary players and writers: Eric Bogle, Kate Wolf, Stan Rogers, to name a few."

Susan Forbes Hansen, a longtime radio host of FM folk programs in the region, said Domler always championed traditional folk music.

"He certainly hired, and played music by, contemporary performers in his coffee houses and on his radio shows," Hansen said. "But not much time would go by without bringing back music recorded by Folk-Legacy from its early days, or playing something from Harry Lauder, or, most amazingly, singing a song himself on his show.

"He was by no means a polished singer, but he seemed to feel that the music wasn't only to be made by the stars or those who made their livings at it, but by all of us just because we felt like it."

"I will miss him," said Pratt, "mostly because he really loved this music. He always wanted to enrich the musician's pocketbook, and he never flagged in his belief that the folk community was comprised of genuinely good people."

Domler also will be missed by those who simply appreciated his printing skills. "He was an absolutely reliable printer, and he not only gave a good price but unbelievable service," Pratt said. "He would sometimes drive an order out to Hartland on a Sunday, or work a Sunday to help someone on a deadline."

Indeed, it was Domler's need to go to his shop to do work March 18 at 6:30 a.m. that may have been his undoing. After Domler's slip and fall, a co-worker did not find him until 10 a.m.

Besides his parents, Domler leaves two sons.

Calling hours are Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Brooklawn Funeral Home in Rocky Hill.

Plans are in the works to help defray medical costs in a manner Domler would have certainly approved - a benefit folk music concert, to be organized next month.