When I was a kid growing up in East Texas back in the 1940s and 1950s, I was pretty much physically isolated from the rest of the world. Travel wasn't one of my family's activities. But my imagination wasn't isolated. As soon as I learned to read, I was patrolling the streets of Bayport with Frank and Joe, roaming through the jungles of Africa and South America with Tarzan and Bomba, and walking the surface of Barsoom with John Carter. At the movies, I was riding the Old West with Johnny Mack Brown, Tex Ritter, Allan Rocky Lane, and a host of others. And I was visiting (via the radio) Allen's Alley, Duffy's Tavern, and 79 Wistful Vista. So I didn't feel deprived.
Later on, after I started driving, I listened to radio stations from such exotic faraway places as Chicago (WLS), New Orleans (WNOE), and Gallatin, Tennessee. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Gallatin, Tennessee?" That is, that's what you're thinking if you weren't out cruising the southern summer nights in the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s with your car radio reaching out to hear Gene Nobles, John R., and the Old Hoss Man advertising Randy's Record Shop, White Rose Petroleum Jelly, and Silky Strate hair dressing. I loved those disk jockies and the records they played, many of them records you didn't hear on just any station. And that's why finding this website sent me into a veritable frenzy of nostalgia. Listening to the sound bites near the bottom of the page and hearing the voices of John R. and Gene Nobles transported me to a time long ago and far away, to riding shotgun in Bob Tyus's 1940 Chevrolet and Fred Williams's '50 Ford, or driving around in my own '49 Dodge with the Clunk-O-Matic transmission. Those were the days.
2 comments:
My mother-in-law in Annawan, IL, listened to WSL. I have some booklets about the station that she had and saved.. Is there anyplace that I could send them so that others would enjoy them?
Maybe the station itself would like to have them. Or maybe you could post them on the 'net.
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