david/til

draft: true title: Woody Windham slug: woody-windham description: Today I learned some more interesting facts about my uncle Woody. <!--- authors:

name: David Windham title: Something Else url: https://davidawindham.com image_url: https://davidawindham.com/wp-content/themes/daw/img/opengraph_image.jpg --> tags: [food, wine] image: https://davidawindham.com/wp-content/themes/daw/img/opengraph_image.jpg hide_table_of_contents: true ---

Today I learned some more interesting facts about my uncle Woody because he died last week and I've been chatting with my parents and relatives asking various questions. I like reflecting on people's lives when they die and I've found that writing out a personal obituary of sorts is a great process for doing so.

I looked by in my phone and listened to the last voicemail he left me a couple of months ago about helping with some technical aspects of his online radio station, so I called my cousin and offered to assist. I'm writing this not as he or any others would have liked, but as a personal account which I think he'd appreciate. It's just an easy way for me to work up a draft before I publish it to my main website.

Woodrow Draten Windham 1940 - 2024

His official obituary[^1] lists his middle name as "Woody with the Goodies" but it was actually Draten, the same as my grandfather so I could have called him 'junior'... he woulda loved that. Woodrow was my grandfather on my dad's side and even though his given name was a match, I always called him Uncle Woody and many folks called my granddad "Windy". My father has now lost his oldest sister and brother. He has two other brothers, Uncle Jim and Paul. I've called him several times in the last couple of weeks for some extra support. He had called to let me know, but I had already picked up on it from the newspaper who ran it as their lead[^2].

The State newspaper, April 16th 2024

My father's family would gather once a year for the holidays, so I got a chance to spend some time with most of his siblings. Uncle Woody would always slide my brother and me $100 bills for Christmas. And because my dad worked alongside Uncle Woody, we spent quite a bit of time with his family even taking some vacations and whatnot. Some of my earliest memories of him were traveling in a Winnebago RV he had when I was young. In the early 2000s I spent a lot of time with Woody driving back and forth to Port Royal where there was a second radio tower for a network of new radio stations they had started Charleston.

Woody was a great conversationalist and was always very forthright, which I admired. Truthful to a fault could be one way to describe it and it sometimes caused friction with family, bosses, and other folks. That's not to say he couldn't sling bullshit with the best of them and it's part of the reason his sense of humor was in tune. I once asked about one of his more questionable politically correct characters, a flamboyant mailman, and was told that the public loved it, especially gay people. Uncle Woody gave me a copy of a book he had begun writing years ago to digitize. Reading it gave me a lot of questions to ask on our trips between Charleston and Hilton Head and he gave me interesting facts that I would have never known otherwise and that my parents might not have wanted me to know. I hope he enjoyed my company as much as I did his.

Wagging the truth around is not exactly the ideal type of personality around these parts. People seem to favor the 'bless your heart' sort of passive aggressiveness. I know my mom was pretty peeved at him for some time and I think we still have an in-law, an aunt, who was still angry at him because my teenage cousin got arrested with some cannabis some years ago. Woody was pretty open about his fondness for cannabis long before it became somewhat socially acceptable and I'd imagine there was some entanglement. I had lived in Charleston for many years before he first moved back down and he asked me to 'hook him up' at one point. My friend, the 'hook up', is now an attorney handling litigation against drug companies and my cousin seems to have faired pretty well himself as a young adult. For Uncle Woody, I don't think the truth was entirely based on 'shock value' as some might speculate. I remember he would tell unwitting folks in passing conversation that the only two channels on television he liked to watch were The Golf Channel and Playboy. The truth is the punchline. It wasn't a joke. That's really all he watched.

He would give you a funny expression when he said something off-color or controversial, but I think it's mostly because he enjoyed watching people react and he did like the attention. Doesn't everyone? Isn't that the truth? There's a bit in his obituary about him mouthing into a pencil like a radio announcer, but he told me another story about skipping school one afternoon to visit the filming of American Bandstand in Philadelphia. My granddad was a medic in the Navy and they moved around a good bit. My Aunt, their oldest sibling brought her family up in Philadelphia. Woody was born on the Pearl Harbour Naval Base a year before it was bombed and my father was born at Camp Lejeune NC. Woody told me that the visit to American Bandstand sealed the deal on his future. He loved people dancing to music. Granddad moved the family to Charleston at the time Woody graduated from high school and he worked a job at "The Goodie House" which was a 24 hour restaurant that I also frequented when I was at The College of Charleston. It was there, he told me, that he originally had a chance to pick up on the nightlife. Although I don't know for sure, I'd imagine this is where he picked up the "with the Goodies" slogan. When Granddad retired from the Navy, he moved the family back to the old family homeplace in Lamar, and Woody picked up his first radio gig at WDAR in Darlington.

Radio

The first FM broadcast took place less than a year before Uncle Woody was born[^4]. The studio for American Bandstand in Philadelphia was the first TV studio in the nation constructed for the purpose of television broadcasting. Bandstand went national on ABC in 1957 when it was taken over by Dick Clark and Woody was 16 years old. In 1964 the Federal Communications Commission set standards for FM stereo broadcasts and created a non-duplication rule that prohibited AM and FM stations from simulcasting the same programming. I've heard the story more times than I can recount about how when they were given access to the FM Bands, they went around to every car dealer in the region insisting that they order more cars with FM radios installed. I wasn't born until several years later when Woody had gone to work at WCOS in Columbia, South Carolina and brought my dad on board. I was born when my parents lived at on Sumter Street in Columbia. It was just down the road from Doug Broome's Drive In and Gene's Pig n' Chick where Woody would do weekend gigs back in the 'cruising' days. On WCOS Bob Fulton did the morning show and Woody did the afternoon show based around his 'Top Sixty in Dixie'.

Music

A fella named George Buck[^5] bought WCOS in the early sixties. He was a true music enthusiast and avid jazz fan. He later created several record labels and a foundation to support jazz music[^6]. One of the things I'm most proud of my dad and his brother for doing is promoting race records as they were called then. The influence they had on a generation of baby boomers, especially in the South, were important for civil rights in such a potent way. Dad described to me how they would hit the black clubs back and forth to the beach for the good stuff. These clubs were like Charlie's Place[^9] in Myrtle Beach.

Dance

As much as Uncle Woody like music, I think he actually liked dancing more mainly due to just watching people have a good time. The connection to the Shag[^7] comes from a small juke joint in Columbia where the Big Apple dance is thought to have originated. A professor from Cambridge University, Betty Wood[^8][^9], who was studying the history of slavery in South Carolina saw this dance and started performing it at Myrtle Beach and was invited to perform it at the Roxy Theatre in New York leading to it's rise in popularity in radio/tv by Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Mae West, and Ginger Rodgers

SC House of Representatives - 2009-2010 Bill 4474: Woodrow Draten Windham, Jr. Shag the official State Dance WCOS in cornell arms building where Pat Conroy's kid committed suicide

Summary

I read a good bit of the comments on the various social media post regarding his passing. The one's that really stand out... one guy who was a vending machine guy pointed out how Woody always remembered him and called him the nab guy because he sold nabisco peanut butter crackers.

jack in the box

the ability to shape the future how you'd like it. That's how history is made.
I got a couple text messages and emails from various folks about it. I used to say "Don't hold that against me" when discussing my relatives but the truth is that I'm very proud of the type of my Windham personality traits. Is there anything you could do more valuable in life than to spend it trying to get folks to laugh and have a good time dancing to music.

2024-04-21-posts.md 11 KB History Raw

Woodrow Draten Windham 1940 - 2024

Radio

Music

Dance

Summary

2024-04-21-posts.md 11 KB

History Raw