Santa on the Radio

WKPT Radio's Santa Claus Program of the Forties and Fifties

In December 1955 I sat down and wrote the following:

“Dear Santa

“I am eight years old. For Christmas I want a Captain Space Solar Port, a Mandrake the Magician Magic Set, and a sheriff office that is 5 ft. 2 in. high. I would like a few surprizes also. I hope I am not asking too much.

“Love,

“Vincent Staten Jr.

I addressed the envelope carefully:

“Santa Claus

“W.K.P.T.

“Kingsport, Tenn.”

Then I gave it to my dad to mail.

And I waited.

Every night at 6:30 I would turn on our radio and listen to the “Santa Claus” show, which ran right before “Sleepy Joe.”

It seemed like they read letters from every kid in my third grade class, every kid at Johnson Elementary. Every night was like a Johnson roll call: Freddie, Bruce, Janice, Larry, Mary, Mike, Marty, Richard, Don, Diane, Betty, Brenda.

But no Vincent, never Vincent.

Frankly, I was getting worried. This was in the days before fax and before email. I knew that once W.K.P.T. read my letter they would have to send it on to the North Pole.

What if it didn’t get there in time? What would I get from Santa? A crummy fruit basket? A stupid belt?

I asked my dad if there wasn’t something he could do, he seemed to know everybody in town. He was working in the Mens’ Department at Penney’s then. Surely he knew someone at W.K.P.T.

Get my letter on, please, please.

He said he’d see what he could do. Then he gave me hope: “Maybe they read it the night we were at your Uncle Albert’s in Johnson City.”

Yes, that had to be it. I had sent my letter in plenty of time.

They’d read it that one night we were out of town.

I slept better. Even on Christmas Eve.

And I awoke on Christmas morning to find a Captain Space Solar Port under our tree. And a Mandrake the Magician Magic Set. And a letter from Santa explaining that he was out of the sheriff’s office and would try to bring it next Christmas. 

Good enough for me.

And that made 1955 one of the merriest Christmases of my young life.

How do I know all this, how do I remember exactly what I asked Santa for in 1955?

Well, the other day I was cleaning out some of my father’s old files and an envelope tumbled out.

It was addressed:

“Santa Claus

“W.K.P.T.

“Kingsport, Tenn.”

And there was a letter inside.

My father had never mailed my letter.

But somehow Santa got my Christmas wish after all.

That’s my letter above along with the envelope.

You may be surprised. It’s typed. No, as an eight-year-old, I was not what we used to call a “touch typist.” I typed using the Biblical method: seek and ye shall find.

Who read those letters to Santa over WKPT?

Here’s the story:

The Santa Letters show came on the radio every night, starting in late November, at 6:30 p.m. and it ran 15 minutes, until it was time for “Sleepy Joe.”

In the radio listings it was called simply “Santa Claus” although it had a longer name that wouldn’t fit in the tiny listings space, “W.B. Greene’s Santa Claus Program.” It was sponsored by W.B. Greene hardware and department store.

“W.B. Greene’s Santa Claus Program” premiered on WKPT radio in 1943 and ran through 1956. And for all those years it was a big part of Kingsport kids’ lives at Christmastime because a big part of the show was the reading of letters to Santa from local kids.

Margaret Taylor Hilliard, who worked at WKPT when the Santa Claus show ran, told me she remembers typing the letters to Santa that came in the mail from kids all over the WKPT listening area and then turning them over to WKPT copy writer Isabel Baumgartner. It was Baumgartner who fashioned them into a script that was read by Reverend Kent of St. Paul Episcopal Church.

Margaret remembered, “Rev. Kent read the letters and also played Santa in the script. He had a ‘jolly’ deep voice. In fact, I remember one little boy recognizing his voice at church and telling his mother that Rev. Kent sounded exactly like Santa Claus!”

Rev. Kent was an interesting fellow. He was born Leicester F. Kent in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1884. Perfect, huh? Bethlehem.

In his early life he trained as an engineer then worked as a newspaperman before hiring on as a teacher at a small church school.

He told the Kingsport Times in 1947, “The head of the school was a saintly clergyman who began, in his quiet, unaffected manner, to bring home to my mind what a sincere servant of the Lord was really like. He impressed me deeply, and it was during that year with him that I made up my mind to tackle the problem of the ministry in earnest.”

Kent left teaching and entered seminary. “Those three years were the hardest in many respects, in my whole life. My background had been semi-scientific. Here at the seminary I was handed out great chunks of doctrines and dogma and told to swallow It. In desperation I would cross the Potomac River to Washington and spend every spare moment I could gain in the Library of Congress searching for the Truth; some solid ground upon which to rest my spiritual feet. How I ever got through the seminary I don't know to this day.”

His first posting was in Alaska in 1925. From there he was sent to Valle Crucis, North Carolina, near Boone, then on to Shepherdstown, West Virginia on the Maryland border.

“From West Virginia we returned to North Carolina; to that charming, quiet, homelike little community of Louisburg. I was very happy there. I had achieved a little peace of Soul and was about ready to say that Louisburg was to be my home for the rest of my life. But I was mistaken; I came to Kingsport.”

That was in 1943. Among his many accomplishments in Kingsport – aside from his long running gig as Santa on the radio – was the founding of the Kingsport Art Guild.

He retired from the priesthood in 1962, replaced at St. Paul by Rev. Douglas Berndt, and retired to Mountain City where he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Merry Christmas from 1919

(ads from the 1919 Kingsport Times)

(Kingsport Stores would become J. Fred's)

Merry Christmas from 1923

(ads from the Kingsport Times in 1923)

And finally...

Merry Christmas from 1964!

The Eastman Christmas Party

"Santa Sounds a lot like J.D. Wininger"

Tennessee Eastman Christmas Card from 1972 -

Nativity Scene at Church Circle by Raymond Williams

Seven-year-old Bruce Haney was climbing down from Santa’s lap at the 1955 Eastman Christmas Party, the social event of the year for grade schoolers in the fifties, when Santa began calling to his father, “Hey, Usif! Usif Haney! What do you want for Christmas?”

Little Bruce was astounded. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, Santa Claus knows my dad.’ And I also remember thinking, ‘Santa Claus sure sounds a lot like J.D. Wininger.’”

Little boys and little girls all over Kingsport grew up with that same secret:  Santa sounds a lot like J.D. Wininger. From the Eastman Christmas party to the Palmer Center holiday celebration to the Bethel Presbyterian Church Christmas party to Christmas Eve at Holston Valley Community Hospital, Santa had the same resonant voice as the man who coached the Civitan Midget League baseball team, who led Boy Scout Troop 48 and refereed high school basketball games.

For generations of Kingsport kids, those who grew up between 1944 and 1988, Santa sounded a lot like J.D. Wininger.

J.D. Wininger was a strapping young man of 30 with a full head of black hair when he first played the role of Santa at the 1944 Tennessee Eastman Recreation Club Christmas Party, bouncing a thousand or so kids on his knee that holiday. By the time he retired from the Eastman Party 44 years later, he had grown into the job with white hair and a bowlful-of-jelly belly of his own. And he had bounced tens of thousands of Kingsport kids on his knee.

He was Santa because he got into the Santa suit early. A Santa sighting was a rare occurrence in the forties and fifties. There was the annual Santa Parade the day after Thanksgiving, when Santa would ride a sleigh down Broad Street, then descend from his float and amble into W.B. Greene’s for a two-hour session in the department store’s downstairs Toyland. But none of the other stores had Santa’s - or at least they didn’t advertise the fact in the paper. Santa wasn’t a necessity for the local department stores. They closed at 5:30. They only stayed open on Parade Friday till 8 p.m. to accommodate parade goers. The rest of the holiday season, it was business as usual: 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except Wednesday when they closed at noon.

When a kid needed to tell Santa what he wanted for Christmas, he wrote him a letter. Or if he were a lucky Eastman kid, he sat on his knee at the annual company Christmas party. And the man behind the beard was J.D. Wininger.

 “He loved playing Santa,” recalls his daughter Glenda Wininger Denny, who now lives in Sumter, South Carolina.

“And we used to love it when he put on the suit,” adds her sister Peggy Peterson, now a resident of Sewanee, Tenn. “I especially used to love it when mom would drive him to a party. Glenda and I would ride in the back seat and people would look in the car and point, ‘Look there’s Santa.’ I’d think, ‘Aren’t we cool, we’re in the car with Santa.’”

The 1955 Eastman party, when Bruce Haney first connected Santa and J.D. Wininger, drew a crowd of 6,044, according to the TEC News, which didn’t offer a breakdown of kids to adults. Assuming every kid had a couple of parents and a younger sibling, that would mean some 3,022 sat on Santa’s knee that day. That’s a lot of wear and tear on Santa’s knee.

“He was always really tired after the party,” says Peggy.

“But happy,” notes Glenda, who has decided that this column will be the place to reveal one of Santa’s secrets. “Want to know how he knew every child’s name and what the child wanted before he ever got up on Santa’s knee? He had an earpiece in his ear and the person that was the elf would talk to the child so that when he got to Santa, Dad knew his name and what he wanted. It was high tech before high tech.”

Not to be outdone, Peggy is ready to spill the beans - jelly beans, of course - on another Santa secret. “At some parties, Santa would bring Rudolph, which was my brother Ty and one of his friends. Ty would be either the front end or the rear depending on what kind of mood he was in. Santa would ask Rudolph how old the child was. And he would pat Rudolph’s rear so Ty would know how many times to stamp his hoof.”

On Christmas Eve, Wininger would visit every room in the hospital, every patient, to bring them some holiday cheer. “It took several hours to do this,” recalls Glenda. “In later years my husband Charlie would be his reindeer. Charlie said Dad tried to explain what it was like being inside the suit and seeing the joy on people’s faces.”

The Santa who sounded like J.D. Wininger so inspired his daughter’s husband that year that he later bought a Santa suit of his own. “Now Charlie visits preschools and elderly friends and he understands the magic inside the suit.”

Others have filled Kingsport’s Santa suit over the years. Joe Higgins was the first Santa Train Santa, succeeded by John Dudney, then Frank Brogden and now Don Royston.

Constable John D. Parker was Santa for kids in underprivileged homes in Kingsport in the fifties and sixties. 

Even J.D. Wininger couldn’t be Santa to all kids. “He and another man would alternate, an hour each, at the Eastman party,” recalls Glenda.

Glenda says it was exciting being Santa’s daughter. “We always asked what was the most frequently asked for toy and he could tell us.”

Glenda added, “I’ve always believed in Santa Claus because I lived with him forever. When people talk about you shouldn’t lie about Santa, that was never ever a thought to me. I thought my dad was Santa. I still believe it.”

Bruce Haney in 1955

J.D. Wininger, Civitan Midget League coach - back row, left

A Chill in the Air - Forecasting Winter Weather the Old Timey Way

The weather team got together on the local news the other day and did an exhaustive (and exhausting to watch) winter forecast, the gist of which was that it’s going to get cold.

A few days later the Washington Post published an entire section devoted to winter weather. Again, cold.

If you want to know what it’s going to be like this winter, it’s too late to do your own forecasting. You should have started months ago by checking the wooly worms.

That’s how Helen Lane, the Weather Lady of Crab Orchard, did it.

46 years ago, when I was the editor of Knoxville magazine, I assigned a writer to drive down to Crab Orchard, an hour west, to interview Helen, who was already world famous. Even Life magazine had written about her uncannily accurate weather forecasts based on the thickness of the corn’s husk and the color of the wooly worm’s coat.

The writer that I assigned was me, since the magazine was on the precipice of folding (we did a month after publishing Helen’s story) and we had no money to pay a freelancer.

Helen told me her secrets, not that I could replicate them.

She died in 2000 but she passed on her abilities to her youngest daughter, Melinda Lane Hedgecoth,

Here’s how she explained her weather wizardry to me in 1973:

It’s gonna be “rough” this winter. Oh, it won’t be a "humdinger.” Like the winter of ’59 was a “humdinger.” That was the winter with 6 feet of snow. But there were five fogs in August this summer. And the crickets have been hollering in the chimney corner. The fat hornet’s nests have been low to the ground. And the squirrel’s tail has been fluffy. And according to Helen Lane, the Weather Woman of Crab Orchard, those are the signals for a rough winter.

Helen Lane has been predicting the weather for as long as she can remember. Her father Charlie Sherrill taught her how. And his father before him had taught him. The art has been passed down from an early Sherrill ancestor who crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway on a German freighter, landed in Virginia, and was taken in by the Indians who taught him the ways of the weather.

All total Helen’s family has been watching the thickness of the corn husks and the fogs in August and all the other secret signals Mother Nature provides the careful observer for over 300 years. And while other farmers around Crab Orchard have had their bean crops destroyed by frost, the Sherrill’s have always managed to harvest their crops at just the right time.

The youngest of seven children, Helen was the only one who learned her nature lessons. While her brothers and sisters were busy dating and partying, Helen was listening closely as her father told her “Thunder in December means its gonna be a good fruit year, thunder in January wakes the snakes, and thunder in February gives you the frost dates for May.” Not that Helen didn’t enjoy life. She found time to marry James Lane and have four children, now ranging in age from 26 to 9, and even got herself a job at Stuckey’s to help bring in a little extra money. But all the while she was comparing the realities of nature with the lessons her father had taught her. And it always matched.

It was in 1959 when Helen made her first prediction in the Crossville Chronicle. She had observed 12 fogs in August, an unusually thick shell on the walnuts and low hornet’s nests. She warned everyone that it was gonna be a “humdinger.” And when the season ended and all her predictions, including six feet of snow, had been borne out, the Chronicle reran her predictions of six months before on the front page. Ever since then her annual predictions have become a standard around east Tennessee.

How accurate is she? “Nature’s always 100 per cent accurate,” she says. A number of years ago WSM-TV in Nashville invited her down to compare her forecasts against their own weatherman. “I was so nervous, but when I got there, I found out he was more nervous than I was. He kept making mistakes and finally they had to do the show all over again because he was so nervous. In the end he was 80 per cent right and they said I was 100 per cent right.”

But things aren’t like they were when she first began predicting. “Pollution has changed things. It’s a lot harder to predict now.”

Helen has eight main indicators of winter weather:

1) The Fogs in August. “For every fog in the early morning when the dew is still on the ground, there will be a big snow in winter. Small fogs indicate ‘blue darters’ or small, wind-driven snows.”

2) The Thickness of the Corn Husks. “The thicker the husk, the rougher the winter.”

3) The Appearance of Ground Spiders in the Fall. The more numerous, the harder the winter.

4) The Crickets in the Chimney Corner. “When a rough winter is coming on, the crickets holler long and loud.”

5) The Squirrel’s Tail. The fluffier the tail, the harder the impending winter.

6) Bumps on the Treebark. When the trees have little bumps with what looks like sawdust coming out of them, it will be a hard winter.

7) The Fat Hornet’s Nest. “When the nests are high, it will be a mild winter, but when the nests are built low, look out.”

8) The Hulls of the Walnuts and Hickory Nuts. “The thicker, the worse the winter.”

Mrs. Lane does more than just predict the winters, she can also forecast other weather phenomenon The first katydid in July forecasts the first frost in October. And thunder in February signals the frost dates for May. She tells the story about a few years ago when a tremendous thunder storm frightened everyone on the 27th of February. She marked it on her calendar, but never did get around to including it in her newspaper stories. Sure enough on May 27th the frost came and a man down the road lost his whole bean crop valued at $3,000.

In the 14 years since she went public with her predictions, Helen Lane has become world famous. Life magazine did a story on her. So did the National Enquirer. And every year as winter nears, her front room becomes an interview room as the reporters and writers gather round to hear what’s in store for the coming season. She no longer has a phone, so the reporters have to come in person to hear her forecasts. But several years ago when she did have a phone, a San Francisco radio talk show called and put her on the air live. Little did they know that her phone was part of a nine-party line. Every time Helen got going good, talking about her predictions, a baby somewhere on the line would pick up the phone and say “Hello Mama.” And some people have confused her with Jeanne Dixon. Recently two women drove down from Knoxville and offered her money to tell their fortune. “Maybe I ought to get a bandanna and a crystal ball and make some money,” she says. But she says she has no supernatural powers, she only “observes nature.”

It is a sad fact that Helen Lane, despite her world-wide fame as the Weather Woman of Crab Orchard, has never made any money from her predictions. “Oh, the Crossville paper paid me twice in 14 years and they gave me envelopes and stationery. But they didn’t even give me stamps. And once a tire salesman gave me $25 for a tape recording he did of me to use to sell his snow tire commercials.” She is now working on a book about her history of weather forecasts and perhaps that will remedy the situation.

As for this coming winter, well, you’d be wise to carry in some extra firewood and maybe break out your long handles. It’s gonna be “rough.”

But not a “humdinger.”

Readers of KNOXVILLE Magazine will be pleased to learn that beginning in the January issue Helen Lane will be writing a monthly column about the weather and her observations of nature. She will be paid for her contributions.

Readers of this blog will be saddened to know that KNOXVILLE Magazine ceased publication before we could publish Helen’s first column. Or pay her.

Cover of the final issue of Knoxville Magazine:

What People Read in the Newspaper -

Or at Least What They Read 3 Days Before Pearl Harbor

When you’re sipping your cup of coffee and reading your morning paper (does anybody still do that?), do you ever wonder, “Why did they print that story? Who would read that?”

Newspapers wonder the same thing. And so do their advertisers, or at least the few advertisers they still have.

For many years a company called The Advertising Research Foundation would conduct reader surveys and publish the results in booklet-sized reports that showed how many people read each story and what percent were men and women. They would provide the reports to the sponsoring newspapers.

Three years ago I found a trio of these old newspaper advertising research reports at a flea market: one for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, one for the Hollywood Citizen-News and a third for the Knoxville News Sentinel. (None for the Kingsport Times News.)

Of course the one that interested me the most was the News Sentinel. I was a sports stringer for the paper when I was in high school. I read it daily when I was in grad school at UT. And I read it today.

The subject of the research report was the News Sentinel issue of Dec. 4, 1941 (78 years ago today), especially interesting since American history was about to be altered in three days.

The report was of interest to me for the old stories but also for the research numbers for each story and ad! Some ad readership was so small (one percent of total readers for several ads) that I suspect the News Sentinel’s ad sales department didn’t let the booklet out of the building.

Front Page

Circulation for the edition in the study was 60,788. More than 400 readers were interviewed for the study – 214 women and 211 men.

97 percent of readers read at least one story on the front page. I’m amazed it wasn’t 100 percent.

The top story was about a visit by the Air Force chief to the Alcoa Aluminum plant – 65 percent of readers looked at the story.

Readers were also interested in a story about appropriations for TVA dams, in particular Douglas and Fontana – 53 percent of men and 32 percent of women.

 A story about Turkey getting Lend-Lease aid was particularly uninteresting to female readers – only 7 percent. Only 4 percent of men read an item about the wedding of actress Ana Nagel.

(I am posting the research study page with readership numbers and also a clean and legible copy of the same page for curious readers who want to read about what was going on in Knoxville days before Pearl Harbor.)

Radio Page

The most popular item on the Radio Page was…a photo! 56 percent of men and 39 percent of woman looked at a photo of a steel bridge in Argentina. Next in popularity was a service comic panel – “Hold Everything” - with 48 percent male and 49 percent female readership.

The radio schedule was more popular with women than men – 44 percent to 29 percent.

Movie theater ads seemed to draw 13 percent of each gender.

An ad for Ballet Russe performance at UT drew only one percent of readers.

Sports Page

The top story was a Hot Stove League report on a roster shakeup of the minor league baseball team, the Knoxville Smokies, by new manager Bert Niehoff. 45 percent of male readers checked out the story; only 9 percent of the female audience read the report. In fact readership of the page was strongly skewed to men: 59 percent of men read at least one story while only 27 percent of women read any sports.

I’ve also posted two Comics pages.

You can analyze the numbers yourself.