John Mays died on March 5, 2002, following a long illness. This website was conceived and created to remember and recognize the lives and contributions of John and the other men and women that were part of the early years of KBOA.

Shortly before John left KBOA to run for Dunklin County Assessor, I recorded this 17-minute interview. He talks about his 30+ years in broadcasting. 

“I was working in Kansas City as a file clerk for the IRS. I learned that there was a chance to go to night school three nights a week basis on the G.I. Bill and get paid to go. This was in 1948. The name of the school was the Pathfinder School of Radio. I remember the guy that ran it. His name was Waldo Hazelburg Brazil and he looked exactly like Xavier Cugat. I got paid ninety dollars a month to go to school. I went just to pick up the dollars. I got to liking it so I quit my job and went to day school full-time. I got a little more money, one hundred and twenty dollars a month.

The school was a six month school and in about five months Mr. Brazil said you’re ready to go. And if you weren’t ready, you could stay on a couple months more, but you didn’t have to pay anymore. He was that kind of guy. We had a thing through the school where KCKN in Kansas City, Kansas worked with us and I got to do a five minute newscast. I remember how nervous I was. That was the longest five minutes I ever experienced in my life.

I mailed letters to every station in Missouri and I heard from one by phone within a week. It was KBOA. They had a guy that had just quit. His name was Lucky Watkins. He was the night-time announcer and he was working with the Charlie Harrison who used to be station manager and did sports. Lucky just quit all of a sudden without any notice to take another job and so Ray Van Hooser called me and said we need a man quick. He hired me over the phone

I came down without the family until I got settled in. I took a train to Poplar Bluff and Ray picked me up and I talked his leg off. I was using all the vowels properly because I was really keyed up and wanted to make a good impression. I talked his leg off.

(At the Pathfinder School of Broadcasting) you didn’t have to run the board. They had an engineer at the control board and you had a script you went by. That’s how I was taught to be a radio announcer, like I was going to go to Chicago or somewhere. I wasn’t prepared. And the first few weeks of that night shift, I was ready to go back to Kansas City, but I made it.

We had a lot of live entertainment in those days. We had three or four country bands on… usually fifteen minute programs, occasionally thirty minutes. And we’d have two or three, maybe even four quartets on in a days time. We had some real, real fine musicians. One of the real good bands was Curly Hickson and the Rhythm Busters. You can’t mention country music around this part of the country without Chuck Harding and the Colorado Cowhands.

We had some top notch quartets. The All-American Quartet with Manual Battles, we had The McDonald Brothers. We had a lot of church programming during the day. I’ll never forget one guy, his name was Jack Henderson and he just kind of sauntered in off the streets and he had a guitar and we put him on the air and he sold song books. I remember his theme song very well. ‘Tis Sweet to be Remembered. He opened every show and he talked real smooth and he sang gospel songs by himself. He did a good job, had a good voice, and he sold song books for a dollar. Apparently he made enough money that he left here and he went down south and bought himself a radio station.

Sunday is when we had the big crowds. We had a lot of live church programs. We had them in the morning and the afternoon. All day on Sunday and either people from the church came out, I’ve seen as high as a 100 people crowded in that big studio. I remember Little Troy Lumpkin. He and his wife they sang together and sold a lot of song books and they made evening appearances in the church.

You could mail in a penny postcard or a letter with a three cent stamp and that’s how you got your songs on the air. We read every letter and we got them from everywhere. We had country music but we didn’t have a country show where you could request (songs) and then we hired a disc jockey named Jimmy Haggett. When Jim came to work, he started getting requests.

We ended up with a big contest in which you voted –with a penny postcard– whether you like pop music or country music the best. The loser –Jimmy– had to wear a skunk costume while pushing me in the a wheelbarrow during the Fall Festival Parade. We pulled well over thirteen thousand pieces of mail, either cards or letters in one month’s time. That was a lot of mail.

I remember one (program) that I did that was really tough to do until you got used to it and that was on the night time shift that we had a show called the Mythical Starlight Ballroom. We only had two turntables in those days and we tried to simulate a live band from a night club. Everything was either live or it was cut on a disc. We had on one of these big sixteen inch discs with one long cut with five or ten minutes of crowd hubbub. We had another one with applause.

So we’d have on one of our turntables a theme song and we’d start off, “Ladies and gentlemen, we now take you to the mythical–we had to say the mythical so we were legal, that it wasn’t real, but a lot of people missed that– the mythical Starlight Ballroom located on the beautiful shores of Lake Missouri. Tonight it’s the music of Benny Goodman and his Orchestra…” and here’d come the theme song and I’d reach over and turn up the other turntable while the music was playing and here would come the applause and you simulated that you were actually doing a remote from a nightclub with this top band.

I had salesmen — staying somewhere in one of the local hotels or motels– call up and ask how to get to the ballroom. I’d have to explain to them while the record was playing that this was mythical. They were slightly disappointed.

We had some very popular programs. Platter Party that was a night-time request show I ran that for a year and a half or two years, until I moved into the daytime announcing. It was the sequel to the All Request Jamboree that Johnny Mack ran. We tried to take requests in those days you got so busy you just couldn’t do it. We had two people around most the time but you just didn’t have time to look them up. So we’d have people call in ahead of time or write.

Jimmy Haggett was our country deejay and had a lot of contacts down in the Memphis area. He booked Elvis Presley to appear on a Saturday night at the B & B Club, a well attended beer tavern . I remember Jimmy telling me he (got) Elvis for one hundred dollars. String Bean was the headliner that night and I went out to the B & B to see him, not Elvis. But Elvis hung around the studio and I remember hearing some of his Sun recordings. He didn’t impress me. I’m the guy who said, “This guy’s got nothing. He’ll never make it.”

When Johnny Mack was promoted to station manager I was promoted from day time announcer and I helped John a little bit in news. I went on to spend eight years in that capacity. It’s the most fascinating job of a radio station, in my opinion.

Congressman Jones owned the Daily Dunklin Democrat in those days and we had what we called the Home Town Newspaper of the Air. The paper sent somebody out with the stories and we read it. Finally the Congressman sold the paper and then we started doing it on our own.

We had a show that came on immediately after Hometown News called Coffee Time. It was a fifteen minute show where we read household tips and recipes and played some soft music. I was kind of the anchorman and did the show with Sue Etta Rae, our record librarian.

Even’ Tide Echoes was a program where you read prose and you had this real soft music in the background and a lot of times it was organ music and you read these things and it was pretty fancy for this part of the country. It was kind of mushy and aired just as the sun was going down. That that may be where the “sundown” came from. It was a script show.

We were always a strong agriculture station (and Johnny Mack did a show called) Man on the Farm. He usually did it during the week and played it back sometime on Saturday morning. Johnny Mack did a tremendous job on interviews. I think he was probably one of the best interviewers that I have ever run across.

(Radio) has changed drastically but it’s still an honorable, good profession, and one I recommend to anybody. You (have) to like it to be in it thirty years. It’s something that not everybody’s cut out to do. I guess you got to be a little bit of a ham, you know, to enjoy it.”