"Ralph A. "Pat" Walsh, 73, the larger-than-life, plain-spoken media consultant who managed radio station KAAY, Little Rock's "Mighty 1090," in its glory days, died Jan. 21 after a year-long hospital stay related to an infection in his knee. Walsh entered the advertising business in 1957, moved into radio sales in 1959 and managed KAAY-AM from 1964-76, during which time it was the market's No. 1 radio station and a nighttime fixture from Cuba to the Hudson Bay."
I'll bet he's debating politics and sports to this day!
"Plain-spoken?" NO KIDDING! You quickly learned never to ask Pat what he thought unless you were willing to hear it. Rumor is, he never pulled a punch in his life. Fact is, he was one of the kindest, gentlest humans ever to walk this Earth.
ReplyDelete"There ain't but one set of ratings that matters a d*mn, and that's how much money did you make."
Thank you, Pat, for raising me from a pup!
David B. Treadway
Doc Holiday VII
Even afterward, Pat retained an interest in KAAY. In 1983 he was running KLRA-1010 and suspected that KAAY might soon be for sale. Pat invited me for lunch downtown and picked my brain about Multimedia's intentions. I knew that KAAY would be far better off under Pat so I told him everything that I knew.
ReplyDeleteI later learned that Multimedia declined to consider an offer from former KARN-920 Exec Larry Duke and I always wondered if they ignored an offer from Pat as well.
The last time I saw Pat, he was hobbling through the Little Rock Airport on a cane. I suggested that he would have to start kicking people in the ass with the other leg. He didn't laugh.
I never had the opportunity to work for Pat Walsh, so I can't offer that perspective, like David B. Treadway and others. But I first met him in 1994, when I began conducting research on KAAY. Mr. Walsh was always kind, gracious, and an incredible resource. When I wrote my thesis project on the use of KAAY by the government to air Voice of America programs to Cuba in Spanish during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I gave him a copy of the journal it appeared in. The next time I spoke with him, he said "I read EVERY work, and thoroughly enjoyed it!" If it weren't for him, I probably never would have made it through graduate school (twice!) When he and his wife Bobbie moved from their home to an apartment in Little Rock, he gave me two file drawers of records, objects and memorabilia about KAAY. All of this information proved invaluable to me during my doctoral studies. My Ph.D. dissertation on "Beaker Street" is dedicated in part to him. In October 2010, I took Dale Seidenschwarz (Clyde Clifford), his wife Trish, Bobbie Walsh and her daughter Amy, along with Eddie and Carolyn Graham to dinner. At that time I presented a signed, bound copy of the work to each one of them. I said that one regret I have is that Mr. Walsh didn't live to be able to read it. I believe that he would have enjoyed doing so. He was quite a man, quite a manager, and had an encyclopedic mind. It was a pleasure to know him. Even today, I still miss him terribly, both from a personal and professional perspective. When I get to heaven, I have many questions to ask, that I never got the opportunity to ask him. All of us who contribute and/or read this KAAY blog own Pat Walsh a great deal.
ReplyDeleteRichard Robinson