Mr. Rudy died on December 7, 2003, at home with friends and family.

Recorded April 9, 1997, in Kennett, MO. Excerpts:

“I remember I jumped off that Great Southern bus in front of KBOA in Kennett, Missouri and they hired me right then. You know, I got a job right then. This was about the first of July, 1947 1948, so the radio station hadn’t been on the air quite a year. I was working part-time at KBTM in Jonesboro, Arkansas and going to school. They said they needed a night man. I worked one night and then they put me on days.

At that time it was mostly live entertainment… musicians and singers. There was the McDonald Brothers, oh they were very big gospel singers and they were appearing somewhere seven nights a week. They would go out and sing at the churches and the halls and people would come from near and far to see and hear the McDonald Brothers. They were really celebrities in the mid-south.

And then there was Chuck Harding and the Colorado Cowhands. One of our country bands and there were several other country bands. They kind of came and went.

And the Wilburn Brothers–the Wilburn family–at that time. Doyle and Teddy went out on their own as a kind of solo duet later on when they moved to Nashville and they became quite popular and were on the Grand Old Opry for a number of years until Doyle died.

Looking back on it, it was fun. All the commercials were live and you got to go in the studio to read these commercials while the band was taking a break for the commercial and these country singers would slip up behind you and pull your shirt tail out and mess up your hair, and the studio audience thought that was so funny. We always had a huge number of people in the studio for the live radio show.

And we got letters. My word, we got letters. Dear Mr.Rudy, they’d write. That’s how I got my nickname. I was like from 8:00 in the morning, something like that, to 2:00 in the afternoon as I recall. That was before I went on the early shift. But they would send those cards and letters in.

We played the big bands primarily. We’d have some country music maybe for an hour and maybe gospel music or quartet music for an hour that we interspersed with the live bands. And in the afternoon I remember we’d have some live duet that’d come in there and the guy would play the mandolin and the girl would sing and they’d sell song books or something. They made enough money to buy a new automobile one summer. We all thought they were crazy, but the cards and letters came flooding in with a dollar bill in each one. This old boy bought a new automobile and moved on over to Nashville, Tennessee to the Grand Old Opry.

At that time country music was really hillbilly music and really bad, bad, bad. There was very little of it that I cared for at all. So I was a popular music fan. Ray Van, the station manager was doing this old program called “Old Camp Meeting Time” which consisted of hymns and gospel songs. Apparently he got tired of getting up early in the morning or he left or something, so I was stuck with the Old Camp Meetin’ program.

Old Camp Meetin’ Time was sponsored by a country store called the Gobler Mercantile Company which was located on the Pemiscot/Dunklin county line about five miles east and five miles south of Kennett. This entrepreneur out there by the name of Denny Mitchell was a tremendous merchandiser. He was the Sam Walton of his day. They sold everything out there, from tractor tires to hamburgers, furniture, clothing, groceries, you name it, Denny Mitchell had it at the Gobler Mercantile Company and had it at a lower price than you could find anywhere else. They came from all over the country to buy from Denny.

I changed the format dramatically when I took over. I started telling stories and some of the people probably didn’t approve of some of my stories, not that they were risque, they just never heard them before or they didn’t get the point. And I played a little bit more of that up tempo gospel music than Ray had. He’d play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and I’d play something much more up tempo like “I Like the Old Time Preachin.'”

Sons of the Western Bootheel – Dr. Everett Mobley, Matthew Mobley, Ranger Ron Roberts

Photo courtesy of Brandon Rowe