Across from the main studio is the station's "museum," housing some of the equipment used to produce a radio show over the decades.None of the disc jockeys gathered inside the WFLI-AM 1070 studios nine days ago could remember the young lion's name, but the ones who were at the station in the mid-'60s all remembered having to clean up after the station mascot.
"What a mess," says Tommy Jett.
Station owner William Benns thought it would be a good idea to keep the animal in a cage inside the lobby of the station, and it fell to DJs to clean the cage. The station also at one time had a myna bird that learned a few choice words from the staff. Such mascots were popular with radio stations, apparently.
"I don't know why [Benns] thought it was a good idea at the time," says Ben Cagle of the story he's heard many times.
"He fed it hamburger, and [on car trips] he would put the lion in the back seat and he'd put the hamburger meat in the seat in front of his passenger and the lion would reach around to get the hamburger meat."
Bill Miller was an 18-year-old college student when he was hired by the station in 1968. He never met the big cat.
"The lion preceded me, so I didn't have to clean up after it, but I did clean up after a few DJs," he says to big laughter.
Jett, Miller, Cagle, former station manager Johnny Eagle, David Carroll, Max O'Brien, Rick Govan, aka "Ringo Van The Music Man," and a host of other former employees and fans of the station had all gathered at the station for a reunion and to be there when the station signed off for the last time on March 31 after years of declining listenership and revenue.
Most, if not all, of the folks were there to remember the station in its Jet-Fli rock 'n' roll glory days between 1961 and 1981. Since then, it has been a country station and, for the last 30 years, a gospel music station. Gospel fans will note it as the favorite station of the late Vestal Goodman of the Happy Goodman Family. She would visit often throughout her career.
But in the '60s and '70s, it was the No. 1 station for bringing new rock to the young fans in the area who would tune in on their small transistor or car radios. It is how they learned about acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits and Paul Revere & the Raiders.
They got to see many of their favorite acts in person, thanks to the twice annual Jet-Fli Spectaculars the station promoted at Memorial Auditorium. For under $5, fans could enjoy as many as nine acts in one evening.
"Back in the '60s and early '70s, all of the biggest acts came here," says Carroll, who was on the air there in 1975 and '76. "That is the impact of this station.
"Growing up, this was the station that I idolized. What could be better than being on Jet-Fli? I would be at home, like lots of other kids, playing records, pretending I was on the radio."
Very often, the acts traveled from town to town and station to station dropping in on the DJs hoping to get some air time and to convince them to play their records. Listeners would tune in to see who might drop in to hear the songs. It made stars of the men who spun the stax of wax.
If you are too young to remember what that era was like, O'Brien says "WKRP in Cincinnati," though it was set in the '70s, comes close. "American Graffiti" comes closer and "Animal House" even closer, all agree with a big laugh.
"It was wild," Jett says, "but it was great. We were all like a family. And we still are."
Cagle says he has had former listeners call him in tears this week upon hearing of the station signing off. One fan told him, "I felt that WFLI was a part of my being. We shared our youth. WFLI was family. It was our station."
The station going dark is a "reminder of their own mortality," he says.
Many of the WFLI jocks worked at several other stations over their careers. Carroll is now an anchor with WRCB-TV 3. Also in attendance were Earl Freudenberg, who has been a fixture for years at other stations before retiring this year, and WDEF-TV 12 anchor Chip Chapman.
Bill "Dex" Poindexter is a multi-award-winning personality at WUSY-FM 100.7 whose second job was at WFLI.
Cagle, who started his career at WFLI in 1968, dreamed of one day owning his own station. He was originally hired as an engineer who had his first-class engineering license. The FCC required at the time that a licensed engineer be in the building whenever the station was on the air.
That made him a DJ with a license - "like gold to Mr. Benns," Cagle says. "Otherwise, he'd have to pay two people to be there."
Cagle says he had an ulterior motive for working at WFLI.
"The on-air thing is fun because it's an ego thing," he says. "I got a charge out of it, but my goal was to own my own radio station and I figured I needed to know everything about it from sales to programming, and because of the FCC I darn well needed to know about engineering."
He did eventually own and subsequently sell radio stations in the Knoxville/Johnson City areas.
Though Benns wasn't an engineer, Cagle and Eagle say he had a remarkable understanding of radio technology. He built the station in a hollow on O'Grady Drive in Tiftonia. Even before he'd gotten approval for a 10,000-watt station, he'd filed his application for 50,000 watts, which he got in 1967.
Eagle says he also started laying the foundation for the building before the first application was approved.
People from smaller, 1,000-watt competing stations "would drive by and shake their heads. 'It'll never work,' they'd say."
They'd even hired engineers with fancy equipment and degrees to test the area, and they said it would never work in that location. Benns somehow knew it would, and the station signed on the air on Feb. 20, 1961.
The station is owned by WFLI Inc., and Cagle says it is hoped, and possible, that someone buys it so that WFLI will return to the airwaves, but no buyer has come forward.
"I'm kind of melancholy today," says O'Brien. "Because it was so much of my youth.
"It's a lifetime of memories for us, and it's not the fact that I worked here. It's the fact that I grew up with this radio station."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.