Published: July 02, 2009 08:54 am      

Where Fine Tobacco Grows

Carl Keith Greene

Seems that my radio column of a couple of weeks ago brought memories from others.

If you didn’t see it, I’ll explain that I was, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a disk jockey and news director at London’s thousand watt WFTG AM station, short for Where Fine Tobacco Grows.

I wrote about the huge clear channel 50,000 watt stations that could be heard in London from as far away as New Orleans, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago and in particular St. Louis.

With many of the low power stations on lower power at night because atmospheric propagation would cause the radio waves to travel even farther at night than during the day, those 50 kilowatt stations could be heard loud and clear.

I mentioned in the piece an announcer at St. Louis’ KMOX, who’s name I couldn’t remember.

Thanks to another local person who was a disk jockey also during that time, I got his name, Jim Butler.

A fellow named Don dropped me a note about how he, as had I, listened to Jim in the early morning as we were driving to the stations where he worked.

He recalled the “world weather report,” aired by Butler just as we were arriving for our stations’ 6 a.m. sign-ons.

As Butler gave the global weather reports, he would make comments such as, “In the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza, it is 89 degrees under the clear skies of Cairo, Egypt,” as Don remembered it.

According to some historical information he included, Butler died on July 30, 2003 near San Francisco.

The AP dispatch Don sent said Butler was once so popular at KMOX that he was called the “night mayor of St. Louis.”

He started at the station as a morning man but his nighttime show brought him his glory. He came to the station in 1951 and retired in 1989.

Butler trained some other important voices in radio and television sports, such as Joe Garagiola, Jack Carney and Bob Costas.

You meet interesting people in the radio business.

I first worked at WFTG while I was in college at Sue Bennett, and I acquired a friend there who worked at WCTT here in Corbin.

Ed Harber and I would meet at each other’s location occasionally. He’d come to WFTG in the tiny structure in Morentown at London in the shadow of its antenna.

I’d come to Corbin and meet him in the WCTT studios on the second floor of the Times-Tribune building, not far from where I sit even as I write.

Ed married a northern Kentucky gal and lives up there as, I think, an emergency medical technician.

I was lucky in my life as a radio announcer. I got to meet lots of people, particularly those who came to the station to do their programs. Sunday afternoon was one of the best times to meet the preachers of the area. Some sent tapes, but others brought some congregates, a couple of guitars and even someone who could play the dilapidated, nearly antique out-of-tune piano in the studio opposite the control room.

The highlight of my Saturday mornings was the George Humfleet and Charlie Harrison show.

George, owner of a huge mobile home business then and now, would sit with Charlie — a country music writer, performer at Renfro Valley and a funny guy — and talk.

They’d talk about mobile homes, but really they were there to just plain have fun. They’d tell stories of local people and plug events coming up. I’d sit in the control room with a stack of country music and on their cue play one of the records.

Occasionally Charlie would reach for his guitar and sing one.

But most of all they’d just have fun.

Charlie died after I left the station, and George just couldn’t do the show anymore.

Getting back to the preachers, we did a daily devotion at 10:45 every morning and members of the local ministerial association would come and do about 15 minutes of prayer, meditation and a little music.

But on the weekends, the churches that bought time would sometimes make the walls rock.

Now I wasn’t there that Sunday, but I was told that a new group bought some time and came in and began preaching and singing and one of them opened a box full of reptiles.

Needless to say, the next Sunday they did their show from their church over a remote telephone line.

And as I said in the earlier column, old time radio, the homemade stuff, the voices that sounded so familiar, the humor that could be tied to local preachers, to businessmen and businesswomen, to school teachers and principals and band directors and most anyone else, is pretty well gone from the airwaves.

There are still a few stations with their “trading posts,” local obituary announcements and church announcements dropped into slots that are provided by the service that sends digital programming down phone lines or through satellites, but the real local stations are gone.

To some extent, that local flavor remains in some of the public radio stations that dot the low end of the FM band, but they too program from National Public Radio or other public networks. And as much as I talk about how good local programming is, the public radio programming is for me much better than the rock and roll, religious, country, talk radio and other formats that fill the rest of the bandwidths.

In fact, as I write this I’m listening to some very soothing music on WKYU, Western Kentucky University’s station. Its format is soothing, relaxing, entertaining music and intelligently broadcast news from the nation, state and world.

Yes, I admit that I, too, have turned my back on the radio entertainment that 40 years ago I produced myself. Please forgive me.

Carl Keith Greene is a writer for the Times-Tribune. He can be reached at cgreene@thetimestribune.com