4: Between the Lines: The Sounds of WBYE

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Ralph Sears’ tape recorder captured Montevallo teachers with twists on children’s stories. Mary Frances Tipton’s Little Red Hen was a perfect choice for Library Week. Goldilocks, written by Mary Frances Tipton and read by 2 faculty members, is another favorite of librarians today. Its punchline? Things go better with books! 

Friday night football games with Montevallo High School Bulldogs playing rivals from all over central Alabama were popular recordings, broadcast on Saturday mornings. Alabama College News Service employee Steve Huffstutler called the play by play, while Ralph used the big audiences to entice advertising, which he read during pauses in the football action. The final game of the 1964 season is linked here. Bulldogs starting players for that game were: Dave Smitherman, Ken Smitherman, Marlon Payne, Tommy Baker, Eddie Lawley, Leon Lucas, Capt. Bill Scott, Ed Simpson, Alan Barkley, Mike Pickett, Jimmy Birdsong.

“Between the Lines” broadcasts (linked below) provide choice reminders of ideas current in the turbulent late 1960’s and 1970’s. Some are strikingly familiar today.  Ralph chose to include stories from the Associated Press which often reflected his own interests in national and world affairs: women’s liberation, crippling railroad strikes, Soviet hegemony, Patricia Nixon’s wedding. He broadcast fears of democracy fading in South America. Could Chile voters really elect the first Marxist on the continent?  

Some of the language is dated. One story on relations between China and the Soviet Union names the People’s Republic as “Red China.” The Soviet Union is no longer a union. “Red” no longer simply means communists. But today’s news reminds us that while the language may change, the tensions endure. The broadcasts were not all lofty or international. Ralph Sears often chose stories closer to home, stories that intrigued or entertained him. Cars, Draft dodgers, hippie surfers, Nebraska farms sold for factories; the eclectic choices spoke to his boyhood and current interests.  He and Marcia both grew up in Nebraska, each graduating from the University there in 1948 and moving to Montevallo that fall where Ralph was hired by college president John Tyler Caldwell to teach speech and radio. 

In later years, when the University of Alabama football team played the University of Nebraska in college bowl games, Ralph installed a special horn inside the Chevrolet Impala convertible he drove in the 1960’s. Many Montevallo folks rooting for Alabama recall smiling as they heard his car horn playing the Nebraska fight song as he drove down Main Street passing the post office.