Let me be the 1,476th to say how much I enjoy your site. I grew up in Knoxville and was inspired by some of the people you're writing about to have majored in broadcasting at UT. I moved to Nashville in the early 1980s and have ended up in publication work and public affairs at Vanderbilt Medical Center, but have done my best from afar to keep up with the radio landscape in Knoxville. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I had a medical talk show that was used as a drop-in on a lot of NPR stations called Medically Speaking--so technically, since it was on WUOT for a while, I was on the air there...Anyway, I'm attaching a column I wrote a while back for an employee magazine at Vanderbilt. The real point of the column is the impact and emotional power of radio, but I talk about an incident that I'll bet one or more of your readers might shed some light on. My memory is that WKGN's night guy in 1971, I think, Johnny Walker, had announced a few days before Halloween that listeners could come by and"roll" the 'KGN studio building--at that time above a bank on Alcoa Highway--on Halloween night. Again, relying on my possibly faulty memory--I recall that a caller said he was going to be out of town on Oct. 31, and asked if he could come by and roll the studio that night--a day or two before Halloween--and Walker said, sure, come on.Walker then spent the rest of the night reporting on the various people showing up to roll the studio parking lot. I recall that this stunt was even briefly mentioned in the newspaper. And a few days later, he was off the air at WKGN, replaced by a blander DJ who went by the name Brother John. Cause and effect? I didn't know then and don't know now. This is surely not the only time a DJ has pulled a stunt like this--there may have even been other Halloween rollings in Knoxville!
Empire of the Air by Wayne Wood...
In a summer a long time ago, there was a nighttime disc jockey that I listened to obsessively. On WKGN The Famous 1340 from 7 p.m. to midnight, Johnny Walker played the top forty, played a nightly phone-request oldies countdown called the Dusty Dozen, and would always conclude his show at midnight with his closing theme, the Beatles instrumental version of And I Love Her. At school, my friends and I would talk about what Walker had been up to the night before. He was doing the kind of show at night that would later become a staple of morning drive time radio, filled with not only music but topical humor and characters, including Rex King, the Singing Weatherman, whose rendition of Partly Cloudy Tonight, Sunny Tomorrow could have cleared an abandoned house of mice. That fall, just before Halloween, Walker announced on his show that anybody who was thinking of rolling a neighbor's yard with toilet paper should come down and roll the WKGN studios instead. He then spent the rest of the night reporting between records on the dozens of rolls of toilet paper being deployed all over the studio lot. Within a few days, Johnny Walker was gone. I tuned in to hear his show, and there was some generic DJ on the air playing records. I don't know if Walker was canned for his impromptu stunt, whether he knew he was leaving anyway and decided it would be fun to have the entire station covered in toilet paper, or what. I heard later that there was a popular DJ named Johnny Walker working in Baltimore but I'm not even sure this was the same guy. He just disappeared. I realize this is a lousy anecdote because I don't know how it comes out, but here's the point: it's been almost 30 years since I last heard the voice of this guy over a cheap plastic transistor radio, and it¹s still with me.That¹s what radio will do for you. It gets into your head and under your skin and doesn't let go. If you have a favorite TV show, don't worry, it will be around forever. All of us will be dead, gone, and forgotten, and Andy Taylor will still be getting Barney out of whatever dumb scrape he's gotten himself into this time.But most of radio is live. All those DJs who played the soundtrack to your life, all those baseball games that filled the summer nights with the crack of a bat from distant ballparks, most of that stuff was never taped, never archived, and was gone forever before the sound had even reached your ears. But still, somehow, it's all there in your mind. Radio is a paradox, an intimate mass medium. It doesn't really require your attention. You don't have to be looking at a tube, like with a television or a computer, or a printed page, like with a newspaper or magazine. The sound is portable and fills the air around you. In much of the world, radio is still the dominant medium. I didn't fully appreciate it until last year, when my wife Sharon and I were with a group traveling in the African country of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was holding a national election while we were there, and there had been a fair amount of unrest in the country leading up to the balloting. People had been killed, and it was feared that the government might engage in some kind of crackdown either before the election or afterward, if the voting didn't go its way. The press in Zimbabwe is not totally state controlled, but by the standards of the Western world, it is not free, meaning that objective information was hard to come by, except by short wave radio. As it happened, Sharon had given me as a gift a small shortwave radio, and had found the frequencies for the Voice of America Africa Service and the BBC. It is a bizarre paradox that in order to find out what was happening a few blocks away from where we were in the Zimbabwean capital city of Harare, I was tuning to broadcasts based in Washington and London. But there, in the early morning hours after the election weekend, I heard reports from correspondents who were not under the thumb of the government. And don't think the Zimbabweans didn't hear them, too. The same medium that allowed a kid growing up to hear the antics of a local DJ allowed people to find out news about their country, whether the people in charge of that country liked it or not. I've loved radio for as long as I've known what radio was, but I didn't know until recently that the inventor of radio, Guglielmo Marconi, is interred in a church in the center of Florence, Italy, called Santa Croce. In the same church are the crypts of, among others, Enrico Fermi, the nuclear physicist who built the first nuclear reactor; Galileo, who proved that the earth travelled around the sun; and Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artist who ever lived. That's just about perfect; he belongs in that company. Wherever you are Marconi, thanks. Thanks again for collecting the memories of those of us with the transistors to our ears late into the night and Doc Johnston announcing the school menu on the radio the next morning.
(Wayne Wood Director of Publications Vanderbilt University Medical Center Nashville)
