Posthumous

This has been a tough year for funerals and its only July.

We found out tonight that Paul Williams will be inducted, posthumously, into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame. It would have meant so much to him to have been able to stand up and receive the honor in person. He deserves it. He was long a loyal Texas radio veteran. He did it until the very day he died. We didn't get to the event last year because of a ticket snafu but we had attended others including one of the first when my first radio boss, Bill Weaver, was inducted in a ceremony that took many hours to complete. The ceremony will be in the Houston area in the fall. I hope Kathy will be able to attend.

Marty Ambrose will be on the inductee list as well. His sweet wife will probably accept. Marty was the inventor of radio traffic reporting in Houston ... forty plus years of it. He was still on the air after being diagnosed with ALS in the Spring. His funeral was just last week.

This week I went to Ken Grant's funeral. He was already in the Hall of Fame. Can you imagine going to work at Houston radio station in 1949, before anyone had ever thought of rock and roll or top forty radio, and remaining at that station (those stations, KNUZ and KQUE) until they ceased existence in 1997. Forty eight years of remarkable change in the broadcast world, from acetate to blue boxes to cartridges and CD's. Ken was the kindest man, the cleverest man, and he survived through all those changes. It was Parkinsons that laid him low just after moving to North Carolina to be near his daughter, Terry.

All of this serves to remind me how important it is to celebrate the great and special people that we know while they are standing here before us.

One last posthumous note. Many years ago, after a gig by his then wife, Jeannie Seely, Hank Cochran, the Yanceys, and Paul and I, went out to dinner at the San Jacinto Inn. After dinner we came back to our house for whatever we could find for nightcaps and to listen to them play and sing some more. Now, Hank wrote several monster hits, "Make the World Go Away", etc., but his own biggest selling recording was of a song he didn't write. That night he sang it to me,
"Sally Was a Good Old Girl." I've met a lot of famous musicians in all those years in radio but that is the only time one of them sang their hit to me. Hank died this week, too, at 74.

I'm telling you ... it is becoming a posthumous life.