Patent medicine pitch launched early DJ's brush with legends
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At top, KIMP's original station opened in October, 1948. The voice of Bob Dunn, standing in the bottom photo, was the first heard on KIMP's assigned band, 960. Seated is Charlie Monk. |
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| That's country recording artist Webb Pierce at the microphone, backed up by Johnnie Bailes (seated) on the guitar during a 1950 performance of Jesse Pate's Mt. Pleasant Jubilee and Cornbread Carnival. Mr. Pierce was paid $5 for his performance. The big payoff was getting Jesse Pate to play his music on radio KIMP. |
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The man whose groundwork drew music's legends to KIMP radio hung his hopes on a patent medicine pitch the first time he went on the air. It worked.
In the years that followed, the late Jesse Pate brushed with the stars of the Golden Age of Radio. As Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Fred Allen were becoming household names, performers like Slim Whitman, Kitty Wells, Hank Williams Sr. and Red Sovine called on Mr. Pate, soliciting and courting, wanting air time for their music.
It's a tale that flirts with legend, including Mr. Pate's story of driving East Texas one day with Elvis, putting up posters advertising his upcoming appearance at the Mt. Pleasant Jubilee and Cornbread Carnival. Retired Nacogdoches County Judge Bob Dunn, whose voice was the first broadcast from KIMP, where he worked with Mr. Pate, remembers Elvis being booked as a warm up act.
"I can't remember if he was on before Webb Pierce or the Bailes Brothers and the West Virginia Home Folks," Judge Dunn said in a 1998 interview.
Shirley Jean Holt says it was the summer of 1954 that she saw Elvis at Mt. Pleasant's American Legion Hall.
"There was a drive in called Charley's across the street," she said. "When he came out on the front porch to sign autographs at intermission, we could hear him on the jukebox across the highway."
Radio was a novel thing and KIMP was instantly on the map, penetrating an un-tapped market when it came on the air in October, 1948.
Burton Harris played lead guitar for Mr. Pate's Jamboree boys, the house band for his broadcasts.
"Live radio was the thing," Mr. Harris said. "If you were on the air in those days, you were a celebrity. We all got stacks of mail." The boys in the band always drew a crowd of girls, he said.
With reference to the legend of a fan letter arriving from Canada, East Texas Broadcasting President Bud Kitchens says the story is too persistent to ignore.
"Mr. Pate told stories about letters from places that a thousand-watt station today just wouldn't reach," Mr. Kitchens said. "Mail came from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas." Maybe in the unjammed airwaves of the era, AM radio's "vertical" signal, leaping from cloud to ground, hopscotched the earth one day to the north.
Businessman Winston Ward built the station.
"You could give Winston an old vacuum tube and a coil of wire and he'd build a radio," Mr. Pate said. Mr. Ward's genius included shoe-string budgeting.
With nothing but a love for music and the excitement of something new, Mr. Pate asked for a job on the radio. Mr. Ward told him to go find a sponsor. Mr. Pate modified his plan, buying 15 minutes of air time for $6.
Recalling a patent medicine show, Mr. Pate bought a case of the stuff.
"Tate Medical," he said, recalling the name of the business whose medicine he "sold like hot cakes.
"I went on the air, played a couple of records and pitched patent medicine," he said, becoming an overnight success. Stuff he bought for 25 cents a bottle sold for $1.
"It was an incredible thing," he said, recalling the piles of mail, and not just orders for medicine. There was fan mail.
He hired a photographer to shoot a promo photo of the Jamboree Boys posing with him in the studio. Listeners could send in ten cents and get a copy of the shot. That lead guitar player, Mr. Harris, has been married fifty plus years to a Texarkana girl who sent in her dime.
Ruby Lee Stanley -- Miss Lee with the Hometown News -- broke into the broadcasting business in the usual way, when the regular newscaster didn't show.
"There was no doubt in my mind she could do it," remembers Judge Dunn. "She was the owner's sister-in-law."
And a ground breaker. Long before women broke into the once male-dominated world of radio, Miss Lee was a local icon. In January, 1996, she was featured in a Texas Highways story of pioneer broadcasters.
Those earliest days of radio glory here began quietly, pieced together by people who couldn't have known at the outset how it was going to be. A review of October, 1948 headlines from the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times revealed no mention of the station's debut. There was a report that M.L. Black's herd of 28 Jersey cattle led the county in milk production for the fourth consecutive month. L.C. Holland was trying to sell the 76 lines on the Argo telephone exchange and Private James J. Rodgers, 20, was buried at a country cemetery with full military honors, three years after being killed in an attack against Japanese forces in the Phillippines.
Today, Mt. Pleasant's two FM stations, KIMP's original AM frequency and five other regional stations are owned by East Texas Broadcasting.