Ed Walker

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Ed Walker (born April 23, 1932, in Forrest, Illinois, is a Washington, D.C. radio personality. Since 1990, he has hosted a weekly four-hour Sunday night program, The Big Broadcast, on WAMU-FM, featuring vintage radio programs from the 1930s – 1950s, such as Gunsmoke, The Jack Benny Show, The Lone Ranger, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Superman. .

Ed Walker (l) and Willard Scott, The Joy Boys (1965)

From 1955 to 1972, he teamed with Willard Scott as co-host of the nightly Joy Boys program, an improvised comedy radio show on WRC-AM, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Washington. In a 1999 article recalling the Joy Boys at the height of their popularity in the mid-1960s, the Washington Post said they "dominated Washington, providing entertainment, companionship, and community to a city on the verge of powerful change".^[1]

Walker, who has been blind since birth, said that growing up with radio "was my comic books, my books, my movies". He was a student at American University in Washington where, in 1950, he helped launch the campus radio station, WAMU-AM – the predecessor of WAMU-FM. Willard Scott also joined the radio station the following year, forming a professional and personal bond which continues to this day. Scott said in his book, The Joy of Living, that they are "closer than most brothers".^[2] On the Joy Boys program, Scott would sketch a list of characters and a few lead lines setting up the situation, which Walker would commit to memory or make notes on his Braille typewriter.

Walker has also worked at other Washington-area radio and television stations, including WJLA-TV, from 1975 until 1980.

American University has recently released some of the old Joy Boys radio broadcasts of the 1960s on CD's.

[edit] References

^ Marc Fisher, "Washington Comes of Age", Washington Post, September 13, 1999
^ Willard Scott, The Joy of Living. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982 (ISBN 0-6981-1130-3).