When he was a boy growing up in Ringgold, Ga., in the 1960s, John Wesley Smith would listen to country music on Chattanooga radio and then sequester himself in his room while pretending to be a DJ.
"I got the radio bug when I was about 10 years old," he said. "I'd go in my bedroom and set up pretend turntables."
Smith, 61, a career postal worker, believes he is one of the longest-serving, part-time on-air radio personalities in America.
These days, Smith does the 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday shift at Sunny 92.3 FM (WDEF), where he has been working weekends for 35 years. In all that time, he hasn't called in sick a single Sunday. That's 1,800 Sundays spanning 35 years. Forget "a month of Sundays," that's almost five years of Sundays.
"To this day, I still get excited about it [radio work]," said Smith, who works at the post office in Highland Park during the week. "It's more a passion than a job."
Smith said he has considered contacting the Guinness World Records to see if they can determine if his stint at WDEF is historic, but he has never gotten around to it.
WDEF was also the long-time home of the iconic Chattanooga radio personality, Luther Masingill, who spent more than seven decades at the radio station before he died in 2014.
"I looked up to him," Smith said. "He was a mentor."
Although not yet half of Masingill's stint, Smith's longevity as a part-time radio personality is nonetheless remarkable. Weekend radio gigs are notorious for high turnover.
Smith says he knows several instances in which people have quit a radio job after a single shift. Too, he estimates he has seen 100 people come and go at WDEF since he began working there in the early 1980s.
He actually got his start in radio even earlier. As a college student in 1975, he went to work at a gospel station based in Rossville.
Unlike today, when a radio personality on a soft-rock station like Sunny 92.3 has automated programming, in the old days disc jockeys had to operate turntables, manage patch chords on remotes and even deal with reel-to-reel tapes, Smith recalled.
During a brief exit from radio in the early 1980s, Smith turned to another of his passions: officiating sports. He went to a baseball umpiring school in Florida and later completed a season in Major League Baseball's rookie league, where he made $1,000 a month - $400 salary and $600 for expenses.
He recalls umpiring games in the Appalachian League involving the likes of future Hall of Fame slugger Kirby Puckett of the Minnesota Twins organization and St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder Vince Coleman.
After that year on the road, though, he came back to the Chattanooga area and settled into family life. He was drawn back to radio and began his weekend shifts at WDEF in September 1982. The next spring he took a job with the U.S. Postal Service.
"I've got an inner will and determination not many people have," he said of his long-running commitment to radio.
Even after he retires from postal service work, Smith said, he hopes to keep plugging at his radio job, serving up heaping helpings of Elton John and Taylor Swift music on the soft rock station.
So, lock in Sunny 92.3 around midday on Sunday, and enjoy a Chattanooga tradition.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.