John Philpot: Naturally, they said, well, John, why don't you get on the bull? Well, now, a lot of times people make the mistake of confusing just being a loudmouth with being absolutely crazy. That I'm not.
Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. Randy Dixon with the Pryor Center, how are you?
Dixon: I'm good. This is going to be a fun one.
Kellams: It is.
Dixon: Well, it already has been.
Kellams: What did we just hear?
Dixon: Well, that was John Philpot from a 1974 TV report on a new thing called a mechanical bull. Now, understand that was '74, which means we're still six years away from "Urban Cowboy." That's right, out in 1980. And that's what made them popular.
Before that, they were only used for training of actual cowboys. But I just thought that was kind of interesting. And that sort of summed up John Philpot. He's been on the air. He was telling me that he did a farm segment on AETN, KETS, at the time when they signed on. So he's been on the air for decades.
Kellams: If he's not already, he needs to be in the Arkansas Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
Dixon: I believe he is. But this week, we're mainly going to talk about John Philpot's time at KATV during the '70s and '80s. The reason we're doing this is John Davis and I, the executive director of the Pryor Center, we do a podcast, and we had John in yesterday and did a podcast. We've also done a Pryor Center interview with him that's in our Arkansas Memories section. So we got John Philpot all over the place, and now he's going to be on KUAF.
Kellams: John Philpot is boiling over. So he's a Mena native?
Dixon: Yes. Born and raised. Fayetteville grad, went to U of A, graduated in '57. So we just talked to John a few minutes ago, and he confirmed he's about to turn 90 right in November. He's just a funny, funny guy. I mean, just a good fella that he's fun to hang out with. You know, I wanted to ask him, he got this degree in agriculture. He got a master's degree in public relations, and worked in agriculture. But I wanted to know how he got into broadcasting. And this is what he told us for our podcast.
John Philpot: My first job out of college was assistant county agent with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service in Clark County, with headquarters at Arkadelphia. After two years, they moved me to Texarkana, Miller County, in the same job. And Texarkana had a little TV station there at that time. They had several radio stations and a little TV station, KCMC TV. And over on the Texas side, we, in the Arkansas Extension office, we had responsibilities for doing radio programs and a weekly television program. And by golly, that was kind of fun, and I enjoyed doing that, and apparently I wasn't too bad at it.
Dixon: But he eventually moved to Central Arkansas and started doing reports. Part of his duty was to go to these events that were agriculture-related, or that the Cooperative Extension Service was putting on, and offer to do interviews for the radio stations or TV stations, and they would just give that material. Well, Channel 7, KATV, liked him on the air, so they said, would you just do some on-camera stuff for us? And he didn't actually work for Channel 7, but he would do these reports. Here's an example of one from 1974 where he talks about the rice harvest.
John Philpot: One nice, pretty day with lots of sunshine, and the combines start to roll in the rice harvest. We talked with Jim Cassiere south of Carlisle. Jim, is this the first rice cut in this area?
Jim Cassiere: As far as I know, it is, John. We just started in this field yesterday. It cut about a trailer load, enough to get the combine set. As far as I know, this is the first rice that's cut, at least in this part of the county.
John Philpot: Are you hoping you can get to the dryer with this rice before everybody else gets there?
Jim Cassiere: Certainly, we do. There's already beginning to be a little bit of a line, and there's only a few people cutting. So when you add about another 100 farmers to the line, it's going to be real serious.
Kellams: So he was not a Channel 7 employee.
Dixon: No, no. He was — these were freebies.
Kellams: I like those. Yeah. Oh, God, I like those talented people that do stuff for you for free.
Dixon: Well, it — yeah, yeah. you have any, like —
Kellams: I got a few.
Dixon: Okay, good. Here's another clip I found. This is from 1976, but it includes the namesake of the Pryor Center, Senator David Pryor. And he was governor at the time.
John Philpot: The eighth annual Arkansas Mechanized Farm Equipment Show kicked off this morning at the fairgrounds in Little Rock, and the ribbon was cut by Governor David Pryor. Governor, what does mechanization of agriculture mean to the state of Arkansas?
David Pryor: Well, John, I've just been handed some facts that were pretty astounding, and that is, if we went back and mechanized, or removed all the machinery from our farming operations, the first thing we would need is 61 million mules and horses. The second thing we would need is 31 million farm workers in America. But the real astounding fact is that we would be working for those mules and horses, because we would be taking out 180 million acres of farm production land just to feed them. So we would be in a chaotic situation. These ladies and gentlemen who have come from, I think, 12 states to display their equipment — this is the eighth annual show — and I was just amazed walking by a few moments ago at what we're doing in agriculture, and especially what agriculture means to the state of Arkansas.
John Philpot: John Philpot, Cooperative Extension Service, reporting for News Scene Seven.
Kellams: All right, that was from 1976 with then-Governor David Pryor.
Dixon: Yes. And he eventually did come to work for the channel.
Kellams: Okay, I thought so.
Dixon: Yeah, he was doing these reports for KAAY radio and then KATV television. They sort of split the cost of him, and then eventually he just went to the TV side, and by about 1980, '81, he was full time.
Kellams: Gotcha.
Dixon: He was the farm service director for KATV. But what does that mean? He just covered a variety of topics. It just wasn't limited to farming. Here's an example of, after John joined Channel 7, and he reports in 1982 from the Fordyce on the Cotton Belt Festival.
John Philpot: One of the favorite pastimes on World War I troop trains coming through this area was shooting dice. There was a whole lot of chatter, and the soldiers had a name for every number they rolled. Twelve was always boxcars. Seven and 11 were a natural. Ten was Tennessee Tidy. Eight was eighter from Decatur. Five was fever, of course. Two was snake eyes. But when they rolled a four, it was always "four dice on the cotton belt." Thus the name of a big doings in South Arkansas, the Fordyce on the Cotton Belt Festival. Many of the things you see are familiar to Arkansas festival-goers — an outstanding quilt display, crafts of various kinds — but the festival's focal point is railroading. Actually, Fordyce is located on two railroads, the Cotton Belt and Rock Island, a portion of which has been bought by Georgia-Pacific and is now called the Fordyce and Princeton.
Elementary school children and many adults are given the opportunity for what well may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience — a passenger car train ride with a genuine hobo for a tour guide. He's Steam Train Maury, king of the hobos. Saturday's big event is a concert by perhaps the best-known railroader in America, Johnny Cash, who spent a number of his younger years at Kingsland, Arkansas, just a little northeast of Fordyce on the Cotton Belt. John Philpot, News Scene Seven.
Dixon: So did you know that story about Fordyce?
Kellams: No, I did not.
Dixon: I didn't know it was a roll of the dice. But — snake eyes, Fordyce on the Cotton Belt.
Kellams: Yeah, makes sense.
Dixon: Well, that was one thing about his stories. They always had useful information, and you would leave from watching just a minute-and-a-half story of his thinking, "Wow, I didn't know that." You know, the number of mules that David Pryor talked about — to say John's reporting style was unorthodox would be an understatement. And he covered so many things. It was like, all right, if you have a police beat for a reporter, or the courts, city hall — well, he had, like, everything else.
Kellams: The best beat there is.
Dixon: Oh, my God, there is, and he would come up with some of the coolest stories that you just didn't see on the news. And I wanted to put together a little example.
John Philpot: Arkansas lost a lot of poultry this summer due to the heat, but we still have enough for a chicken show at the Arkansas State Fair.
I suspect some of the people who have not planted at this time may be some of the first-time gardeners and might be able to use a little instruction. Anyone with a lawn that looks like this after the summer we've had, you can bet he's put out a lot of effort and a whole lot of water. Harvest doesn't begin until the dew and frost dry off in the morning. Warm sunshine is most important, but a little light breeze can really help. Gardeners should avoid the temptation to water every day. This causes the roots to spread out along the soil surface. A better system would be a good, deep soaking every week to 10 days.
Shotgun toters in sizable numbers hit the fields yesterday for the opening of dove season. A new crop hatches out every year, and no one pays much attention to katydids until along comes a year with ideal moisture, temperature and other conditions. Where last year there were hundreds, this year there are millions of katydids.
Well, if you're going to have a diamond festival, you really should have a diamond mine. So Murfreesboro, Arkansas, is the only place on the North American continent where a diamond festival can be held.
The one question I have been asked more times than any other question, particularly at this time of year, is how big is a cord of wood? These billets are two feet long. There are two rows of them, and the whole cord is four feet high, four feet wide and eight feet long.
Right on schedule, the blackbird showed up again. Actually, most of them are in Arkansas year-round, but in fall and winter they gang up in tremendous numbers to feast on grain fields before and after harvest. Blackbirds can be either friend or foe to farmers, depending on when they descend upon the fields. Before harvest, they've been known to virtually strip a field of ripe grain. After harvest, when they pick up grain that's fallen to the ground, they're actually beneficial, if the field is to be rotated to another crop next year. Every seed from this year's crop that germinates will become an undesirable weed. Total up all the good and bad characteristics of blackbirds, and you'll find they're still a nuisance. John Philpot, farm service director, News Scene Seven.
Kellams: Do you remember when CNN first started and got rolling? They had a reporter, Jeanne Most. And she was a great feature reporter, and she would do these sorts of —
Dixon: I guess you'd call them human interest.
Kellams: Yeah, yeah. But do them well, right?
Dixon: Because there's nothing worse than a bad feature.
Kellams: And put just enough — not too much — just enough of your own personality into it, right?
Dixon: Yeah. And John did that. Just Arkansas humor. Well, he was approached at that time to do the weather, on "Live at Five." So here's an example of John's weathercasting skills, and he'll throw in a little funny story here that I pulled from the podcast.
John Philpot: Quite warm around Arkansas. The temperature is now, over Hot Springs way, up to about 62 degrees. Pine Bluff reporting 56. In Little Rock, we have, I guess, a partly cloudy sky, temperature is 59 degrees, barometric pressure 29.91, the winds out of the south-southwest at 12 miles an hour, relative humidity 90%. And the forecast for today calls for cloudy and breezy and warm. We'll have more weather this afternoon.
Back in those days, we used a pointer instead of — You know, they did. We didn't have anything like the technology they have now to do the weather.
Dixon: You'd point —
I'd point on the map. And so people started sending me pointers, and it was amazing. I mean, they'd have one made out of a willow switch, and one made out of a palmetto, and one made out of everything you can imagine.
Dixon: Cane.
Cane of all kinds. Canes of all kinds. I had a big basket full of walking canes there. And so opening day of dove season came on, and I decided to use a shotgun barrel. That was not my most stellar moment.
Dixon: Well, you were dressed for it, too.
I was dressed — oh, yeah. I was dressed up in camo. It was opening day of dove season. I figured everybody knew what that was.
Dixon: I thought it was hilarious.
Yeah, you know what, most everybody else did, too. But there was actually one person called in and said, I don't think that's appropriate. And that one telephone call got expanded to hundreds by the time it went through ears and mouths. And the very next day, [Jim] Pitcock called me — Jim Pitcock, news director — and he said, "You're not planning to do the shotgun thing again, are you?" No, Jim. It was just a one-time shot, one opening day of the dove season. He said, "Good, we got phone calls."
Dixon: Apparently it was overblown. You know, he says one call, Jim Pitcock says a bunch of calls. I don't think it was a bunch of calls, but you know, it was 1982. He's in full camo, and he's got a shotgun, he's using his pointer.
I thought it was hilarious. But he left KATV in the mid-'80s and started his own ad agency. He still did commercials, and he started doing public speaking, and was really popular — motivational speaking as a humorist. As a matter of fact, I think we're going to have him at the Pryor Center.
Kellams: Oh, fantastic.
Dixon: Do a live thing, probably coming up this fall. But he has a little — you know, I guess you'd call it a bit — that he does, that's about 45 minutes to an hour, which is perfect for us. And so, be listening for that. So we'll have an evening of Arkansas humor with John Philpot.
Kellams: Excellent.
Dixon: At this time, he also started hosting programs on what was AETN, now Arkansas TV. He did an outdoor show, but he also did "Cooking in the Wild." They're still on the air, right? You can still see "Cooking in the Wild" with his main cook?
You can still see those. Let's play a clip right now. It has the introduction to the show, and a really interesting recipe.
John Philpot: Now, for the benefit of anyone who has not lived a full year in the state of Arkansas, I would like to tell you that in the month of August, it gets very warm. Warm, as a matter of fact — quite hot. But that doesn't stop people like Phyllis Spear, with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, from getting out in the Arkansas outdoors and cooking some fantastic stuff. I can see you're ready to go with it already.
Phyllis Spear: We are ready, and these things that we're going to fix are things that are not bad on you when you go to cook in the hot summertime.
John Philpot: Good.
Phyllis Spear: This is a marinade that you mix up, put on your meat, and put it in a plastic bag. And I just turn it over, you know, a lot. Just turn it over, and what you do — mix it up at home, put your meat in it, put it in your ice chest, and then every time you think about it, every time you get a cold drink or something out, turn it over the meat in there. This is chicken, but you can use turkey, like a turkey breast, and make, instead of beef fillets, these are chicken fillets or turkey fillets, and wrap them in bacon. Bacon wrap, and we're going to show how to do that. But first, we're going to mix up the marinade. It's real simple — probably, if you've got a favorite marinade recipe at home, you use that one. This one just works real well for taking out with you and mixing up at home, and then you don't have to cook in the hot kitchen. All you got to do is put them on the fire and grill them.
Dixon: Okay, so if you're interested in that recipe for the marinade — It's on your website.
Kellams: We'll have it up with this story.
Dixon: Yes. Okay, great. It's real simple, and according to her instructions, you can just pack it for the day and grill it when you're ready. Go. Yeah. So, for a program note, you can see "Cooking in the Wild" on Arkansas TV on Saturday afternoons at 2:30. So it still airs. They do plan to continue running it. Starting in July, it will air on Thursdays at 7:30. Okay, so I told you, we also have a Pryor Center interview with him. This was the part of the interview when I asked him what the most important lesson is when times get tough.
John Philpot: There is always a higher power I can call on, and that higher power, I'm not privileged to what's going to happen in the future, but he is, and he knows exactly how I'm going to walk through this thing. And all I have to do is have faith in that guy, and he'll get me out of this problem. Now, I haven't had very many problems in my life. I really haven't. I've had almost a perfect existence, in a very long, good health, and I'm still in good health, as far as I know. Of course, you're only in good health until your next scan. But that's as good as anybody can do. So that's about the way that goes.
Kellams: And now you've told me he also writes poetry.
Dixon: He's quite the poet. He would occasionally add poetry to his prose in his stories, and he used to do these hour-long specials. He'd do an agriculture special, or, in the case I'm thinking of, he would, at the beginning of duck hunting season, do a duck hunting special, but he closed with a poem about living in Arkansas. Can we end up with that.
Kellams: Sure. All right, so we're going to hear his poem first, to let people know — remind them that you are Randy Dixon, with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. Put the Pryor Center into a search engine and block out the rest of your day to just search. Go down rabbit holes.
Dixon: Just look at all kinds of Arkansas. 24,000 hours of video in there, just for your viewing pleasure.
Kellams: So if you watch all day, for a thousand days, you'll see it all.
John Philpot: I've been the country over, the old man said to me, from Mexico to Canada, from sea to shining sea. I've lived by rules of people, I've lived by nature's law. But if I had my druthers, I'd live in Arkansas. The natives don't see what they've got, the youngsters want to roam. They'll look for years and never find just what they had back home. Before truth becomes reality, there'll be old men like me. Nowhere will you find that much to see and do and be. The flat lands of the Delta, to the mountains in the west, the beauty is spectacular, the people are the best. Hunting down the road apiece, fishing that's first rate. Nature smiled, took wings of flight, and landed in this state. If I had my druthers, my cabin and my bed would be right there in Arkansas, with mallards overhead, whispering so softly as they made their southern flight, and fill my dreams with whistling wings, soaring through the night.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
