Leaders come, leaders go. The economy goes boom, then bust. Peace breaks out, briefly.
But Ludlow? In the world of radio, where motormouth yakkers are here one drive-time and gone the next, this guy is a pyramid — ancient, constant.
That would be Ludlow Porch, who left Atlanta's WSB-AM (750) radio more than a decade ago — but did not give up broadcasting.
(For this article, we will suspend the rules and call him by his first name. Everyone else does. His real name is Bobby Hanson. So we got that out of the way, too.)
These days, Ludlow airs weekdays, 9 a.m.-noon, and is heard in eight states. Working from his home atop a Dawson County mountain, he's a regular on a dozen Georgia stations. In these parts, try listening to WHIE-AM (1320) in Griffin, or WIMO-AM (1300) in Winder.
"I'm still around," said Ludlow. "I've been on the radio 35 years. If somebody lost me, it's their fault, not mine."
It would be easy to call Ludlow an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier time. Let's do that. Lud is an anachronism. He is a throwback. "I have a talk show," said Ludlow, who refuses to be Rushed: "It's not the angry white-man show."
His path to the microphone was an unlikely one. Young Ludlow had a flair for useless facts. The polite term is "trivia." In 1971, Sports Illustrated magazine was looking for five masters of the arcane to profile. Enter Lewis Grizzard. The famed Atlanta Constitution humorist, Ludlow's stepbrother, had been a stringer for the magazine and told its editors about Lud. The magazine dispatched a writer to visit Ludlow. The writer came away convinced that Lud's head was full of worthless information, and wrote about it.
The 1972 article got the attention of WSB, which asked the local celebrity to come on the air. Station officials at WRNG "Ring Radio" were listening, and invited Ludlow to visit for a week. "I came for a week and never left."
Those were Ludlow's Atlanta days. He worked at WRNG for a decade, sharing air time with a guy named Neal Boortz, before jumping to WSB when Ring Radio switched to an all-news format. Lud was a regular at WSB for more than a decade. Today, his show is a production of the FunSeekers Radio Network, incorporated in 1994.
His on-air formula, Lud said, was — is — simple: "People like to express their opinions about things that don't matter."
"I think it's good, down-home humor," said David Malcom, operations manager for WMOQ-FM and WKUN-AM of Monroe. The AM station airs Ludlow every morning. "Clean humor is hard to find. I think people relate to that."
They must. In 2007, the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame inducted Ludlow.
His career has not been a steady succession of laughs. Consider the black Santa tempest. Years ago, a discount retail chain hired black men to be Santa in some areas where the clientele was heavily African-American, Ludlow said. A caller asked his opinion about those dark-skinned bell-ringers. "I said, 'Everybody knows that Santa is white,' " Lud said. "The phones rang hard."
Some topics are off-limits. Gun control? Ludlow won't take aim at that. Abortion? Not in his three hours.
Ludlow is 59. He has made a good living talking with people, and has no intention of stopping. "Retire?" he asked. "A man who works three hours a day, what does he have to retire from?"
"What ever happened to ..." is a weekly feature catching up with people and issues in the news. Are you wondering about the fate or fortune of former newsmakers? Tell us who and e-mail dgibson@ajc.com. Please put "what ever happened to" in the reference line.
