By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Matt Shufflebarger said that when he was young and on the road with the family, they always knew when they were getting close to home because they could see the glow from “Poppie’s flashlight.”
The blinking light of the radio tower was always there for them – a beacon in the dark directing them back to where they belonged.
Shufflebarger is the third generation of his family to help run the station co-founded by his grandfather, and celebrating its 65th anniversary this year. He loves his work, and the role the radio station plays in the community.
It wasn’t always his dream to run a radio station, though. That was his grandfather’s passion, and had been since he was a very young man and his family brought home their first radio.
His parents told him they had a surprise waiting at home, Shufflebarger explained, and his grandpa had no idea what it might be.
“He was thinking a new cow. A new pig. Or something like that,” Shufflebarger said. “But he walked in, and just saw this big box that lit up and made noise, and he was enamored with it. Because back then, it felt like that brought the whole world into your living room.”
His grandfather was hooked immediately, and from that day forward, Shufflebarger noted, even “as a kid, he said, ‘I’m going to own a radio station when I grow up.’ Years later, it happened.”
“That’s when he got fascinated,” Deirdre Shufflebarger added. “Of course, his whole family loved to learn… and his mom and dad said, ‘Okay, Harold, you can do anything you want when you grow up.’”
So, in 1959, Harold “Shuff” Shufflebarger decided that’s what he was going to do and, with a group of partners, helped found the WGOH AM radio station.
The G, his family explained, came from Grayson, while the OH stood for Olive Hill. Later, when they added the FM band, they couldn’t hold onto the H, and the new signal’s call sign became WUGO, keeping the first initials of both towns as part of the name, and setting the stage for the branding we all know today – GO Radio.
That branding was intentional, of course. But the important thing for Shuff – as his friends and family called him – was keeping that local connection. He saw radio as a way to connect folks with the broader world, the same way it connected him to the world outside Floyd County when he was a young man. But also, as a way to focus on what was important locally.
“The important thing is that foundation,” Matt said. “I don’t feel like we’ve ever lost touch with that. I mean, you look at (other regional radio stations with corporate ownership). They do their thing; we do our thing. We try to always keep it community minded. Always, growing up, every morning when I woke up for school, TV 14 was on in our house… That’s how I always started my mornings. Back then, the moniker that they always threw around was ‘Your good neighbor of the air,’ and I’ve always loved that.”
It’s a philosophy he tries to keep going with his morning news broadcasts. And it’s just one of the many lessons he learned growing up listening to Jim Phillips, Francis Nash, and the other on air talent, he said.
Another was to listen to the callers.
“We want people to feel like they can grab the phone, dial us, and say, ‘There was a wreck down here on 60.’ Or ‘Hey, my church is having this event.’ Whatever it is. Because that’s the way we’ve always done things. That’s the way we love doing things.”
It was Phillips, the consummate journalist, who really impressed on him the immediacy of radio and the power it held as a tool to reach the public, Shufflebarger said.
“When I first started, I was mainly working night shifts, and I remember you could hear him. That door would fling open, and Jim would come running down this hallway, and he’d have something written up. Somebody had called him and let him know something, and he’d come back there and hand it to you. ‘Make sure you get this on.’ It didn’t matter if it was a Reds game. It didn’t matter what was going on. You found a time. You opened that mic and you got that on there. Because Jim, he was a different breed.”
But it isn’t just good journalists like Nash and Phillips that the station has been blessed with. The musical talent to come through the studio over the years has been outstanding as well.
“We’ve been very fortunate that we just have so many people, I guess in our backlog so to speak, that were dedicated to the station,” he said. “And integral to getting us to where we are today.”
Musicians who have passed through the station include, of course, Tom T. Hall. But also, Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs.
“They both worked here,” Shufflebarger said.
He said they’re both so young in their staff photo that one of the “fun little games” Mike Nelson likes to play with on air guests is to ask them to guess who is in the photo to see if they can figure it out.
He added that while they’ve always tried to “cling to that stuff, remember who we are, what we’ve done, and why we did it,” he had to acknowledge the push from Nelson to bring live music back into the station and to focus the programing on those classic country and bluegrass sounds as the Tradition.
“I can’t take credit for it at all,” he said. “It has been all him spearheading (it). Getting back to calling GOH the Tradition, and that kind of thing. That’s been all him.”
Nelson said it’s been rewarding for him to be at the station and to help keep those regional music traditions alive, whether that’s by playing bluegrass or bringing in the live artists on Thursdays.
“We’re just keeping the tradition of what we do, and have been doing since 1959; which is provide the public what radio is designed to be. To serve the public. That’s what we’re trying to do here, and to continue that. And I have fun coming to work every day. That’s a great thing. I love talking to our listeners when they call. I feel like they’re family,” Nelson said.
Nelson’s words, in many ways, echoed sentiments already expressed by Shufflebarger.
He said while he still considered himself a “young’un” compared to those like Phillips, Nash, and Jeff Roe who helped mentor him, he considered it a privilege “to be a part of something that has this kind of legacy.”
He said while some folks might dread getting up in the morning to go to work, for him, instead of it being a task he dreads but still has to do, “it’s almost like I get to be at work.”
“It’s not always easy, rolling out of bed at five o’clock in the morning, and getting up here and getting on the air and getting everything prepped,” he said. “But when you think about what that does for the people out there, it just turns your entire way of thinking upside down.”
You can tune into GO Radio on the AM dial at WGOH 1370 AM, on the FM dial at WUGO 99.7 FM, in Grayson on public access channel 14, or find them online from anywhere in the world at wgohwugo.com.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com