Sunday evening, Marione and I stumbled across a music special from Austin, Texas, that honored Johnny Cash. I think it was several years old, but that didn't matter. It featured a couple dozen well-known artists, such as Kris Kristopherson and Willie Nelson, singing the famous songs of Johnny Cash.

Marione agreed when I said, “It was fun being in the radio business when we got to play songs like that.” We were both in that business from the late 50's through 1989 – about 40 years.

I really did not appreciate some great privileges I had early in my radio career. I got to travel to WSM in Nashville for the purpose of photographing a local country and western singer who was befriended by some of the country greats of the time – Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, etc.

Security was almost zero in that era and I was able to roam all over Ryman Auditorium taking pictures with my Minolta twin-lens reflex. I was able to create a couple of LP album covers from those photos for our local artist, Austin Wood. Oh, we had an AMPEX audio recorder at our Rolla radio station that was the finest available in that era. So we used it to cut the tracks for his album using a studio “ribbon microphone.” Now you can purchase a digital stereo pocket-sized recorder for $99 at Radio Shack that runs circles around the equipment I was so proud of in the 1950s.

One other memory I pulled up while watching the Johnny Cash recognition show is I found plans in Popular Electronics magazine when I was about 12 telling how to build a bass folded-horn reflex speaker. It had a large 15 inch woofer. I made it out of asbestos-laden celotex that was easy to cut. After gluing it together, I placed it at the top of the stairs so I could fill the whole house with Johnny Cash's “I Walk the Line.” That was as close to deep bass as we had back then.

Now I can come up on cars or pickups on Oklahoma Boulevard whose bass is so pronounced MY entire car shakes.