When WAMU’s Ray Davis notched his 60th year in radio broadcasting, Richard Thompson put together a nice career retrospective for us here on Bluegrass Today.
This past week, Ray was celebrated with a profile in Radio World, an influential trade journal for the broadcast radio industry. The article by Ken Deutsch follows Ray from the time he left his home in Maryland to take a radio job in Delaware, to his current position with WAMU’s Bluegrass Country doing five live bluegrass shows each week.
There is a classic photo of Ray from 1951, and some wonderful stories about his early days in radio.
“I sold every kind of product on the air,” said Davis. “You had to ad-lib copy back then and you could tell if you were doing OK by how many orders came in.
“They had a mailroom in Del Rio, Texas, where I lived. It was huge. I’d drive across the border every day to work at the station, which was in this compound with armed guards. One night when I was leaving, I found a scorpion in my car.”
Long before Ronco’s Vegamatic, Davis had his own unique items to peddle.
“The weirdest thing I ever pitched on the air was something called the ‘Walk-Away,'” he said. “That was a concoction that claimed to cure rheumatism or something. I said on the air that it was made from the sands of the testing grounds of the atomic bomb. That product was only on for a few days.”
Read the full article online at www.radioworld.com.
