Roy Exum: My Dear Friend Luther

  • Thursday, October 23, 2014
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

One sunny morning in June years ago, the renowned radio icon Luther Masingill was on his way back to the WDEF studios on South Broad Street when he stopped for a red light and noticed a young couple in a car idling next to his familiar light blue Ford pickup. “What caught my eye was a buck-toothed boy eating a banana in the back seat,” he explained in an aside to that day’s lunchtime cronies.

Virtually certain the family were tourists, headed towards Rock City or Ruby Falls, the greatest radio personality who ever lived immediately yelled through the open window, “Welcome to Chattanooga! Can I help you with some directions?” to which the driver replied, “No, Luther, we are just driving back to our house in St.

Elmo … ”

Luther loved the story, his humble, self-effacing style delighting those at the table, but it wasn’t lost on me that he had never seen the people in that car but -- because of his voice alone – each felt as though he was a member of their family. We all did. He greeted us every morning for years. “Put your feet on the linoleum … rise and shine and say Good Morning!”

I suspect there will be huge crowd something akin to a playoff game this afternoon at Historic Engel Stadium when, at 2 o’clock, the life of our “Luther” will be celebrated where it all first gloriously began. If ever there was a fitting stage, a funeral at the ball park where I first met the delightful maestro of microphone is just slap perfect. The truth is that I’ve known him for 65 of the 74 years as he became the longest continuous disc jockey in the history of radio.

During those very first years, I watched him call a Lookouts game by simply reading ticker tape and ad-libbing the balls and strikes. This is the truth. He had an eight-inch piece of bamboo hanging from a string and whenever there was a hit, he’d rap the hollow bamboo with his pencil and those people in radio land, so help me, could “see” the ball screaming towards center field.

I knew him in the “golden years,” when Joe Engel would pal around with Gus Chamberlain and trade baseball players for live turkeys. Joe, who was a close friend of my grandfather and owned the Lookouts in such a way he was declared “The Barnum of Baseball,” was this town’s biggest character at the time. Joe actually had his portrait painted of the back of the toilet seat in the rest room of the press box “to honor of my friends in the press,” and Luther loved to tell the stories when we’d share time together.

I’ve owned two dogs, thanks to Luther, and would always laugh when he’d counsel the lady listeners, “I’ve told you time and time again … don’t put your purse on top of the car when you are unlocking the door.”

He could cause a run on the grocery stores by simply whispering “snow is in the forecast” and it was rumored he and he alone had the command to close entire school systems if the superintendent didn’t call in time. Seriously, school systems would blatantly instruct their students, “Do not call the school … listen to Luther!”

Our friendship blossomed early. One morning he played a record of Roger Williams playing “God Bless America” on the piano and I searched for a copy everywhere to no avail. It was the greatest rendition ever, outside of Kate Smith, and several days later I found a cassette Luther had made for me on my typewriter. He did stuff like that all the time – the mark of a man – and every Saturday he cut the grass at the Avondale Baptist Church out of his love for the Lord.

As soon as his son Jeff was old enough to drive he joined our sports staff and the entire Masingill family, with Mary involved in so many community events and Joanie such a charmer, have been such blessings to our community. Remember this, we didn’t lose Luther – the life lessons he taught and shared every day simply came to an end, with each listener richer for it.

I will forever be indebted by the fact in my formative years, his music selection formed my love for the “old standards,” my collection today over 12 days from end-to-end on my iPod, and, while I was left in the wake of Counting Crows and Coldplay and Smashing Pumpkins, after all these years the lyrics by Sinatra, Streisand and the “songs Luther played” still accompany my every day.

The great Indian Proverb teaches us, “All men must die but death cannot kill their names.” So it’s true, we will remember “Luther” forever, not because he reunited man and dog, or lived so long it was him who first told us of Pearl Harbor. No, instead it was as Abraham Lincoln once said, “In the end, it’s not the years of your life that count … It’s the life in your years.”

The difference was “Luther” shared those many years, every day between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. on WDEF, and we will never forget him for it.

royexum@aol.com

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