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Wanted: Job in Radio. Experience: Legendary.

4 min read

The voice on the phone jolted me back four decades, to 1980, freshman year at the University of Central Arkansas. The adult world was enchantingly new, and so was an FM station called Magic 105.

And the first voice I heard on the station was Tom Wood’s, spinning up hits by Blondie, the Stones and Pink Floyd.

Now Wood is an Arkansas radio icon, but unemployed. He was let go April 10 by iHeartMedia, a casualty of modern radio’s big chain era. Freed in the 1990s from FCC rules capping ownership at one AM station and one FM station per market, chains now dominate the industry.

“All power to corporate radio,” Wood said. “I don’t blame them for snapping up hundreds of stations after deregulation.” But as he told Michael Hibblen of KUAR-FM, he hopes the chains soon see that the money is in the top 50 U.S. markets, and allow midmarket stations (Little Rock ranks about 85th) to revert to local ownership.

Wood’s warm Midwestern voice still rings with optimism, and he expects to leverage his celebrated leadership at KMJX, 105.1, into a new job. For one thing, he helped make a star of another Arkansas survivor, Tommy Smith, now of KABZ-FM, The Buzz.

“I’m just looking for the next adventure,” Wood told Arkansas Business, “hoping to stay in Little Rock and stay on the air. I was bitten by the radio bug as a kid. My first job was in 1972, while I was at Southern Illinois University.”

In 1979, he moved from Illinois to build Magic 105 with its founding partners, Dick Booth and Gordon Heiges. “They said they had a station licensed to Conway, cleared by the FCC to move the transmitter closer to Little Rock.” It took a year to finish the building and hire a staff, with Wood, Booth and Heiges speeding construction by hanging sheetrock.

“I wasn’t a financial partner,” Wood said. “I was 26 years old. I had an uncle in finance in Chicago, and I asked if it was possible to borrow $10,000 to get in. He did some research and came back to tell me that broadcasting was the worst investment. He was kind, but said there was no way I’d get the loan.”

Smith was one of Wood’s first hires, along with Sandy O’Connor, Michael P. (Langley), Jessie (Karen Green) and Sharpe Dunaway, now owner of Sharpe Videography in Conway.

“What strikes me now is how different it was,” Wood said. “Live personalities around the clock, being proactive to the community. It was the kind of necessary communication that the internet provides today. Gratifying, and tons of fun.”

Wood took the morning shift while Smith blossomed in the afternoons, drawing audiences with a fresh and provocatively funny approach. “We concluded he should be the morning star. The trick was convincing him to get up at 5 a.m.”

Smith set his alarm and became king of Little Rock radio for years, Wood said.

“We had a well-oiled machine, and we knew how to not screw it up. Managing talent in radio is a flimsy, nebulous thing. You nudge and encourage, and set soft borders, so people will take chances.” Dunaway and Smith, known as “The Outlaw,” embodied that spirit.

One favorite segment, brazenly stolen from other markets, was the “secret sound.” Listeners would guess the source of “some sound from everyday life, like the flicking of a Bic lighter.” The jackpot grew with each wrong guess, sometimes reaching into the thousands. “We knew how to promote that, and the great franchise of a beloved morning show.”

But Smith ran afoul of corporate management not long after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” which unnerved media executives, Wood said. “Losing Tommy was brutal. One executive [for Clear Channel, the chain that had bought Magic 105] heard Tommy’s show and thought it was too blue. I tried to tell him not to kill the golden goose, but he ordered a change in tenor. Of course Tommy went back in and did the same exact show; the fellow heard it and fired Tommy on the spot.

“Everybody blamed me. It was a huge PR black eye, and all the TV stations covered it.” That was 2004. By 2008, Magic 105 had changed its name, frequency and format.

“A radio station that runs for 28 years is a great anomaly. I’ve enjoyed going to work every day for 46 years. Hopefully I’ll get to keep doing it.”

Fun memory: “When the Bill Clinton library was being built, we had a billboard with an arrow pointing to the site. It said, ‘Carry On, Wayward Son.’”

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