Radio show airs spirit of town patriarchs

From East Texas Journal, February 2016

By Hudson old, Publisher

Mt. Pleasant, Texas- K-Lake Radio 97.7 aired the annual Lions Club Talk-A-Thon, March 19, 2016, that let you get your name on the air in turn for anything they can sell when the hokiest show in town went live.

“It seems like the sillier we got the better it worked,” said Joe Buford. The last of the club patriarchs who began the show to fight polio passed away in February, 2016. Beginning with a live broadcast on the back of a flatbed trailer on the courthouse parking lot, the show first built around the vision of a donated dime for every child in America when radio station founder Winston Ward put it on the air.

Sixty-odd years later, East Texas Broadcasting continued donating hours of airtime on K-Lake, one of nine stations now run by company President Bud Kitchens.

“It’s an honor for us to be a part of a rich community tradition,” Mr. Kitchens said.

From taking bids to push the district attorney around the square in a wheel barrow to friends baiting him into singing a fairly on-key rendition of “The Eyes of Texas” the show naturally assumes an audience knowing enough to catch the town’s inside jokes.

Joe Buford’s allegiance to Texas A&M rose to a spiritual nature. He was the only man in town with a bumper sticker declaring himself a Catholic Aggie. “The Eyes of Texas” is, of course, the traditional rival University of Texas school song.

“Winston Ward was one among many who stands out in the memory of my father’s stories,” said local attorney Bird Old III, son of the lawyer in the wheel barrow. “If Winston said ‘ride in a wheel barrow’ you did it because Winston’s philosophy of business came from understanding that whatever he could do for his community built a better foundation for everybody’s success.”

Joe Buford and Winston Ward were part of an informal band of investors digging money out of their pockets for industrial development. They were part of a wave of young businessmen and veterans returning from a war that had saved the world from the Axis powers and they understood the value of people pulled together by a common mission.

They put up money to fund a boat manufacturer.

“We all bought stock and the company went broke and we all lost our money,” Mr. Buford said, laughing about it 50 years later. The boat company might have gone under but the property today is home for DeKoron Cable on Industrial Boulevard.

Car dealers and rival bankers were prominent in their ranks. Competing businessmen and opposing politicians worked together.

“In terms of defining a town, the times they lost might be more important than their successes,” Mr. Old said. “Whether they won or got beat, they did it together and they pulled their town together. Whatever natural conflicts they had were secondary to a bigger agenda.”

The March of Dimes and the plight of polio that launched the Talk-A-Thon was one of the greatest grass roots campaigns in American history. It galvanized national spirit around a cause that had touched every community in the land.

From the late 40’s until the 1955 approval of the vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, the rate of rise of polio cases eclipsed the national birth rate at the height of the baby boom.

Instead of dimes, the Talk-A-Thon harvested dollars. The vaccine that put an end to polio didn’t end the fundraiser, just what the club does with the money. The club funds summer league sports and tailored adventures at a camp for handicapped children. They provide glasses for every student referred by school nurses.