Bill was the son of William and Marion Gaylord, and brother of Edith, and Alice. He attended elementary and high schools in St. Helena and enlisted in the Navy in 1944. While attending Naval training at UC Berkeley he met and married his beloved, Shirley. Bill and Shirley lived in St. Helena, where they started their family. Bill was a loving husband and a caring and fun father, uncle, grandfather and great grandfather. He often wrote commemorative poems which he recited at family gatherings to celebrate accomplishments and the joys of being together.

It was also in St. Helena where Bill began his newspaper career as a photographer and photo engraver at the St. Helena Star. In 1951 Bill joined the Sacramento Bee as a photo engraver and moved the family to Sacramento. In 1976 he retired early to start a shop with his wife Shirley. Gaylord’s Mercantile, located in the newly formed Old Sacramento Historic District, was a perfect venue for Bill to fully develop his longtime passion of collecting and trading advertising antiques of all kinds. Bill wrote several articles published in collector’s journals about advertising memorabilia, and coined the term “advertiques”. Bill was a photographer, writer, graphic designer and self publisher of books and catalogs.

Bill Gaylord was a kind and generous man, who gave his time and money to causes of all kinds. In 1956 he was recognized by the Salvation Army for having donated to flood victims the entirety of his overtime pay at the engraving shop at the Bee, during the great Yuba City flood. He regularly donated blood to the Sacramento Blood Bank. He and Shirley were annual volunteers at the Sacramento Jazz Festival and various Old Sacramento and history related booths at the California State Fair.

Bill was dedicated to preservation of the history of Sacramento. Bill was a founding planner of the Sacramento History Museum, and in a return to his early print shop days at the Star and the Bee, volunteered for several years to operate the press in the print shop at the History Museum. He and Shirley were central planners and contributors for Old Sacramento celebrations, and one of Bill’s favorite duties as the “Governor” of Old Sacramento was parading down the boardwalk dressed as Santa and surrounded by excited children during the Old Sacramento Christmas festivities. Bill also volunteered numerous hours at the archives of the Sacramento History Center, preserving photographic collections. His efforts in all of these areas earned him formal proclamations from the Mayor and City Council of Sacramento as well as more than one key to the City.

Friends were important to Bill, and he had many of them, including those with whom he attended school in St. Helena from Kindergarten to High School. A few years after Shirley died in January 2010, Bill reunited with his high school sweetheart Beverly. Bill sold the family home in Sacramento and moved to Bev’s home in Napa in 2018, returning to his childhood haunts. The two of them enjoyed a sweet reunion of shared memories and companionship.

In 2019, Bill's declining health required more intensive care, and he was welcomed into the home of his son and daughter-in-law in Pittsburg, California for the next fourteen months. It was Bill’s wish to have his son and daughter-in-law provide care and support in the autumn of his life, and the family is grateful for their loving dedication. Bill loved the food provided by his daughter-in-law, especially the daily desserts, usually with a dollop of whipped cream on top, which would elicit an outcry of “Ooh!” from him.

The COVID-19 pandemic made Bill’s eventual move to Friendship Care Home a difficult one. He had to be constantly reminded about why we were all wearing masks. People’s masks interfered with Bill’s practice of reading the lips of those who spoke to him, but he developed a habit of pulling his own mask down slightly to share a greeting peck on the cheek with the ladies.

He is survived by one son, Scott, his wife Pamela, grandson and granddaughter-in-law Zack and Teresa and great grandchild Owen; and by one daughter Pamela, (husband Lowell died in 2020), grandson Josiah, and grandson and grand-daughter-in law Eagle and Samantha. He also leaves four nephews, and one niece, and their partners and children.