David A. Windham
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2024-04-21-posts.md

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

:::danger[DRAFT] I've started this draft as a place to make some notes and list some resources so that I could share them with others for feedback. Future published URL will be @ https://davidawindham.com/woody-windham :::

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 because of the upcoming funeral. 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 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. I'll ask for some feedback for additional edits here before I publish it.

Woodrow Draten Windham 1940 - 2024

Photo of Woody Windham found in my parent's old slides in a box dated 1975

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 ( I greyed out the ad even though Woody or The State wouldn't likely approve )

The South Carolina House of Representatives noted...

 

As I Knew Him

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.

Personality

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 is now an attorney handling litigation against drug companies and my cousin also seems to have faired pretty well himself as a young adult so you can toss out the lackadaisical loafer stereotype. For Uncle Woody, I don't think the truth was entirely based on 'shock value' as some might have speculated. 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 even though he gave Bob Fulton credit. 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[^3] 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 solely for 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[^5] 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'.

Photo of Woody Windham found in my parent's old slides in a box dated 1978

:::note[Todo]

  • Transition to FM
  • WCOS in cornell arms building
  • Bob Fulton
  • theatre of the mind / humor / characters
  • public service / role of media
  • influence(s) - Gene R', WLAC, John R, Gene Nobles, Hoss Allen
  • streaming, iWoody, internet :::

Music

A fella named George Buck[^6] 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[^7]. 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 along the lines of Charlie's Place[^8] in Myrtle Beach. In his book Charlie’s Place - How the Ku Klux Klan Tried to Stop the Rise of Rhythm & Blues, the author writes "Woody Windham gave me a list of names that would set me on my jouney to Charlie's Place" in the first paragraph of his acknowledgments.

Woody and dad would sometimes quote the most obscure trivia about musicians. Clarence Carter's Patches would come on and Woody would say "you know they called him The General because his dad was in the Navy and he's the only one of his siblings not to enlist because his dad also wanted to be a singer"... referring the songwriter Norman Johnson. It's the type of trivia it now takes three of four online sources to verify[^9].

The Showman - It Will Stand - (1961) - General Norman Johnson
Although they're particularly good with American Rhythm and Blues, they kept up. The first time I heard Afroman wasn't from some college flunkie, it was when Woody gave the CD to dad and it got passed to me. We listened to a lot of music together the year we spent driving up and down the coast. Dad says that he and Woody almost always had music playing in their house growing up. It was almost always big band music because their parents and my grandparents met at a dance in Chicago. :::note[Todo] - Country WCOS - Dollar Gas - Vinyl Oil - The Breeze Format - Conversation about Boogie ::: ### Dance ![](/img/woody_windham_1983.jpg) As much as Uncle Woody like music, I think he actually liked dancing more mainly due to just watching people have a good time. That's me up above 👆🏼 looking like I'm dipping food at the table while Woody dances. The connection to the Shag[^10] 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[^11][^12][^13], 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 :::note[Todo] - Bandstand - Hoparoonies - Shag - Big Apple Club - Diamond Disco ::: ### Sans Radio Some years ago when Woody and dad were setting up a new radio station in Charleston, I remember trying to convince them to include a podcast explaining how it worked on the first iPhone. Dad would quote then that "they said television would kill radio". Streaming royalties were barely even a thing back then and radio had begun to consolidate under a couple big companies. Woody insisted on keeping up with the technology and he did so unabashedly. When Twitter started to go mainstream, the first thing he asked for was lessons. As soon as all of the baby boomers started joining Facebook, he was there. My brother and I set up a way for them to stream audio directly to the web and interact online. When he moved back to his old home and built a house, he converted the room above the garage into a studio. I think he just enjoyed having an audience. ![](/img/woody_tech.jpg) Just a week before he passed, he was posting videos to TikTok most likely because his granddaughter had introduced it to him. Judging by the last couple of weeks, he looks like he went out laughing and smiling. ![](/img/woody_tiktok.jpg)
Woody Windham on TikTok 👆🏼 👇🏼

An eighty-year-old just having fun with TikTok. I'm gonna make a push to get some of the old audio recordings and other media and get WoodyWindham.com[^14] back rolling. I've joked with my dad about having his voice duplicated with AI and having some fun keeping them spinning the tunes ad infinitum. Nothing could ever replace the ad lib though. I think the reason a lot of folks liked him is that he made them feel good because he was having fun and it was contagious.

 

Epilogue

I read a good bit of the comments on the various social media post regarding his passing. The ones 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. I think Uncle Woody's flare for being social revolved around his understanding that everyone just wants to be somebody. I think he saw the ability to shape the future how you'd like it and that's how history is made.

As far a legacy goes, his daughters run The Woody on Main Street in Columbia[^15] and the old mayor said he named the street in front of the Wastewater treatment plant after him although I couldn't find it on a map.

I got a couple text messages and emails from various folks about it. One email that came in through this website was from an old childhood friend who reminded me of a bunch of our childhood activities. 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 really anything you could do more valuable in life than to spend it trying to get folks to laugh and have a good time.

 

References

[^1]: Woodrow Windham Obituary - https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/thestate/name/woodrow-windham-obituary?id=54916348 [^2]: Beach Music Master, Legendary SC Radio Host Woody Windham has died - The State - https://www.thestate.com/news/local/article287498025.html [^3]: WDAR-FM - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDAR-FM [^4]: FM Broadcasting History in US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting_in_the_United_States#History_of_FM_radio_in_the_U.S. [^5]: WCOS-FM - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCOS-FM [^6]: George H. Buck - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Buck_Jr.
[^7]: George H. Buck Jr. Jazz Foundation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Buck_Jr._Jazz_Foundation [^8]: Charlie's Place - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie%27s_Place [^9]: General Norman Johnson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Johnson_(musician) [^10]: The Carolina Shag - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_shag [^11]: The Big Apple Dance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Apple_(dance)
[^12]: Betty Wood obituary - University of Cambridge - https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/news/betty-wood-obituary [^13]: Betty Wood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Wood [^14]: WoodyWindham.com - https://woodywindham.com [^15]: The Woody on Main - https://www.thewoodyonmainsc.com