By DARIN ALRED
July 07, 2009 03:15 pm
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When Dee Blanton returned to the local radio airwaves on March 3, 2008, for many in Cooke County it was as if a long-lost friend had returned home after several years of being away.
Even though he never left Gainesville, area radio listeners had missed his familiar voice. After all, many of them had been listening to him for 30 years.
But after several years of either being off the air or working in radio out of town, Blanton is back where he belongs.
Blanton started working at KGAF in 1974 while he was still in high school.
“My family had been friends with the Leonards, who owned the radio station then for years, so I hung around here as a kid with my dad (Ken Blanton),” Dee said. “My dad would make insurance calls on Joe Leonard or Bud Leonard and I would come out with him. I kind of fell in love with it then. In October of ‘74, I came out to record a public service announcement for the (Gainesville High School) band boosters. Pat Bolin took me into the production room and got me all set up and sat there as I recorded it. When I got through, he said ‘man you read really well. Would you be interested in going to work.’ So it just kind of fell into my lap. He didn't know it had been a dream of mine.”
After that, Bolin offered Blanton a weekend shift on the radio and told him he needed to get his radio license.
“So I started training, oddly enough, with (current boss) Steve Eberhart, and studying to get my FCC license, which you had to have at the time,” Blanton said.” I went down and took my test in Dallas and started within a couple of weeks. The rest is history.”
Blanton graduated from GHS in 1975 and worked part-time at KGAF doing weekend shifts and filling in at nights. In October of 1975, the company that owned KGAF purchased an FM station in Mineral Wells and offered him a full-time job out there. He worked there until 1977 when he returned to KGAF. In fact, his first day back at the station was the day Elvis Pressley died.
“I remember going into the teletype room when it happened,” Blanton said. “We had an old Associated Press teletype and I remember the bell going off saying there was a bulletin. Anytime that bell went off you knew something big had happened. And it said Elvis Pressley was dead. It was an earth-shattering day because he had been interviewed in that very building 20 years earlier.”
Blanton stayed at KGAF full-time until 1982 when he got out of radio to work for the Cooke County Appraisal District. He still worked at the station part-time until 1984 when he returned full-time as the news director and midday announcer. When Bolin left the station in 1987, Dee became the program director and morning show host.
He stayed in that position until November of 1991 when he left and went to work for Charley and Pam Henderson at KXGM as the program director and morning show host. He stayed there until 2002 when the station was sold. He then got out of radio briefly to become the first emergency management coordinator for Cooke County.
But he still had the radio bug.
So nine months later, another opportunity came open when the Hendersons bought KNTX in Bowie. Blanton was there from June 2003 to February 2008. He made the 92-mile trip drive every day before Eberhart, his friend and former co-worker, took over management of KGAF.
“That's the most fun thing. Steve had been talking to me about this possibility for a couple of years,” Blanton said. “To come back to where I started 35 years ago and be able to work with Steve, the guy that trained me and worked with me here as kids and remained friends all these years, for him to want me and trust me means a lot to me. I guess I have come full-circle. It's fun to come to work. I love it.”
When Blanton returned to the KGAF airways after being gone for almost 17 years, he returned to the same studio but it was furnished with new equipment.
Needless to say, technology in radio has changed a lot since he started in 1974.
“When I started, you sat in the studio your full shift. You had to cue up every record, you had to play every commercial manually in a four-track tape deck,” he said. “Then eventually, CDs came into play in the mid 80s. We had one CD player, but the commercials were still played the same way on cart machines. When I went to KXGM in ‘91, KGAF was still using records, CDs and tapes. KXGM was the first place I was introduced to computers running things. We used a computer system there that utilized two massive CD jukeboxes that each held 60 CDs. So the music was still played off CDs, but the computer told it what to do. Then we upgraded systems around 1997 to a totally digital system where all the music was on a hard drive and there were no more CDs. It just continued to evolve and get better.
“Basically, the technology has made this a much easier job as far as the presentation on the air because you have the ability to do so much of it in advance and make it sound like it's happening right now,” he added. “In a way though, it has made a lazy man out of old-timers like me who remember the old days when you did everything manually. But getting things ready requires a lot of intensive work to get the schedules right and making sure everything runs like it is supposed to. I do more off the air with the station than I do on the air now. It's not just my show in the morning, but getting the shows ready for every day.”
Blanton wakes up at 3:45 every morning and is at the station by 4 a.m. He goes on the air at 6, so the first two hours are spent prepping for his show and working to get schedules, commercial logs and news and weather ready for the day. His shift ends at 10 a.m., but he usually stays at the station until around noon doing computer work.
His return to KGAF also marked his return to broadcasting Gainesville Leopards athletics. This past season, Blanton did play-by-play of Leopard football games and home Leopard and Lady Leopard basketball district games.
He recalls that he broadcast his first Leopard sporting event with Bolin back in 1975. Since then, he estimates he has broadcast around 350 GHS football games and almost that many basketball games.
“Although basketball is not my favorite to do on the air, my favorite memory was when Gainesville won the State championship in 2002,” Blanton said. “That was the most exciting. I had seen them get close in football and I had almost thought it was one of those things that would never happen. Even after that, I thought it might not ever happen in football, then they won the football championship the next year.”
Blanton didn’t get to broadcast that football championship because he was working in Bowie at the time.
“That was a big letdown to be doing games all those years and not get to call the State championship game,” he said. “I was on the sidelines when they won the championship, but not getting to do it on the air was tough.”
Although he has seen lots of changes during his 35 years in radio, one of the things that hasn’t changed much is Leeper Stadium, the home of the Gainesville Leopards football team. There has been talk recently about either renovating Leeper Stadium or building a new stadium at the new high school.
“I could get on a major soapbox about the press box and about Leeper Stadium in general,” Blanton said. “It's a grand old stadium in general, but I really don't know if I feel safe going in that press box. It moves, even in a light wind. You can certainly feel the wind blow through the press box, even when it's completely closed up. Everytime you take a step, boards creek and pop like it's about to fall apart. I just don't feel safe there.”
But Blanton has seen some incredible games and moments from that press box.
“The one that stands out to me was in the early 90s when Gainesville was playing McKinney,” he said. “It was funny because it hadn't rained all week, but the night of the game there were three inches of water on the field. We won that game and of course the press box is right on top of the visitors bleachers and there were a lot of McKinney folks complaining that we had watered the field down to slow down their running back. Whether we did or not, it worked and we won the game. I'll never forget (co-worker) Tommy Daniels getting into a verbal cussing match with one of the McKinney fans while I was trying to do the wrap-up on the air.”
Over the past 35 years, Blanton has had opportunities to move on to bigger markets and maybe make more money, but something has kept him in small-town radio.
“My wife says it's because I suffer from the ‘big fish in the little sea’ syndrome. But for me, I stay because I'm comfortable and I just believed, and rightfully so after all these years, that if I did a good job, I could work here forever,” he said. “I'm from here, I love it here. I just liked it and didn't want to go anywhere else. Everything in the Metroplex is so ratings driven. Here, I never had to please anybody but the boss. Small market wasn't based on ratings. I just wanted to stay where I was comfortable in a nice place to raise my family.”
Cooke County radio listeners are certainly glad he did.
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