Probably one of the most well-respected and low-key sports anchors in local broadcasting (with apologies to WHBF's Don Sharp and KWQC's Thom Cornelis) was Wally Boller. His radio play-by-play brought the action to the listener in a clear, concise manner that made a one feel as though he (the listener) was actually at the game. His television reports always included the stories that everyone wanted to hear about. In the days before mass coverage of local high school games, Wally himself always managed to film the key games on both sides of the river. His popularity was such that pep clubs would have a welcoming cheer for him when he would circle the football field or basketball court to get just the right angle. Wally would have to be one of the legends of sports broadcasting in the Quad Cities. - Dave Coopman, WOC Alumni

The picture in the control room is of me at WDLB back in 1955. In those days, our commercials were on reel to reel tape machines. We had to thread them while one was running, and you had to move really fast to do that.

Earlier that year, I was working as a machinist for Harley Davidson in Milwaukee. During my stint there I made just about every precision part on a Harley motorcycle. It wasn't what I wanted do, so I quit, and gave myself two weeks to find a job in radio. I had absolutley no experience or training, and it was on a Friday night of the second week that I ran into Hartley Samuels, who owned WDLB. I met him in a parking lot at a radio station in Wausau. He gave me a chance and the rest as they say, is history. He helped me get rid of a German accent worse than Schulz from Hogan's Heros.

In 1958, Hartley wanted to build a radio station in Black River Falls Wisconsin, and he told me I could manage it if I got my FCC (First Phone Commercial) license, which I did. I left there after a while and got a job at Channel 5, WFRV in Green Bay. Vince Lombardi and I used to get our hair cut at the same barber shop. Hartley came and coaxed me to come back when the station in Black River Falls ran into trouble, and I stayed until 1961 when a job opened at WOC Radio.

We all worked radio in those days, and TV was sort of an extra job. By the way, the first thing I did at WDLB was interview Minnie Pearl during the Marshfield Fair. The worst experience of my life at that point was all those people staring at me.

Old BJ Palmer died either two weeks before or two weeks after I started at WOC, can't remember which. I actually got the job in a round about way. I was in Black River Falls, and one of my announcers read about the opening in broadcasting. So, he auditioned for it and I thought it was for a weekend job. When he got turned down he told me they were replacing their top announcer, so I called and asked if it was too late to send a tape. They got it, called me, my wife at the time, Kay, and I went down, and I got hired on the spot.

When I arrived at WOC I worked in the old Palmer Mansion which predated the current WOC Broadcast Centre. The newsroom was on the third floor, and the radio news booth was on the ground floor. When news time came around, you could hear the newsmen thundering their way down the stairs. TV news was done in a small studio across the hall from radio. We had a news photographer names Justis Smith. He would shoot the film, then pull into the parking lot, and the guys would lower a coffee can on a rope, haul the film up, and process it in an old hand cranked processer. It was negative in those days which made for interesting editing.

The news and weather shows were done from the small studio on the north side of the mansion on the ground floor. All commercials were done in the garage, as well as Especially For You. I remember one time Pat Sundine had an alligator on the show and it didnt like the lights. When the handler turned its back, the alligator headed for the dark, right in the direction of the camera crew and they fled for the control room.

I used to do commercials for "Cheerful Charlies Peoples Furniture and Appliance", three room of furniture for two hundred bucks. We used lighter fluid to set a small fire on the table top, these were done live as were all commercials during that time, there was no video tape. One time I used too much lighter fluid, and had this four foot tall wall of flame, which I was trying to put out.

In the summer, they used to open both garage doors. One time during a commercial, the guy holding the cue cards had a moth crawl up the back of his shirt. He held the cards perfectly steady, but all the while he was doing the funniest dance with his feet and knees. It took all I could do not to go. The commercial ended, and he ripped off the shirt and stomped the moth to death.

Another time, Bob Neal used to bring in used cars.. they would drive in, stop, he would talk about them, and they would drive off. One time the driver lost attention and crashed the car into a vertical support pillar by the door. Live TV, fast talk to cover it. Another time he had a junker that smoked so bad a bunch of guys gave it a running shove, it rolled thru the studio with its engine off and Neal talked about it as it went by.

I got in on sports broadcasting when I subbed for popular WOC Sportscaster Ed Zack one time when Ed was at an Iowa Banquet held at the Blackhawk. I mentioned a couple of times on the air that the "second team" was doing the play by play, because Zack was off on company business. Next day I got a memo from Ray Guth who said "That was definetly not a "second team" job. First Rate all the way." We did high school games for a while, and then got a new program director for radio named Don Hanley. Don wanted to do college as well, so he checked with the University and found all it took was a $250.00 fee for rights. In those days any station that paid the rights could broadcast as long as they had space available. We got the second to last booth.

Regarding other sponsors, I do remember "Trissel Graham and Hinton", and the Pepsi distributer. I did the first radio show out of the new building. That was before it was completely finished. One day I took the elevator from the second floor to the basement cafeteria. It kept running, and when the door opened, it was in the elevator well. I was looking at a cement wall. Just pushed the button and it went up. Since I was doing mornings at the time, it was dark when I got there. One morning, I stepped on a nail sticking up out of a piece of plywood. It went right thru my foot, and I did the show with my shoe soaked in blood.

Eventually I replaced Ed Zack as sports announcer when Ed was promoted to Program Director. This photo of me and Arnie Palmer was taken sometime in the early 60's at Emeis golf course in Davenport, Iowa. Arnie and Gary Player would come to Davenport to play exhibition golf. I remember the time Arnie flew in to the Quad City airport and we had a press conference. As we were leaving, a guy came up to Arnie, said his son was autistic or something like it, and although he could speak he knew all about Arnie Palmer. He asked Arnie if he would just wave at his son. Arnie went up to the car, stuck his head in the window, and just talked to the boy for what seemed like ten minutes. It was perhaps the greatest moment in the kid's life, and my stock of Palmer went sky high and has stayed that way all these years.

The broadcast booth picture is of me on the right doing play by play in the press box in Iowa City, my dad in the middle, and Ed Van Quathem on the far left. Russ Wingo took the picture outside the booth on a shelf they had for the microphone. It was at an Iowa-Wisconsin game. I know this because the years we did Big Ten football, I invited my Dad, who lived in Wisconsin, to the games. That picture was taken in the early 70's. On a side note, the worst day of his life came at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. Wisconsin had a LOOONNNNGGG losing streak. We played typical Iowa football, gave up 28 points in the fourth quarter and Wisconsin won. My poor Dad wanted to yell his head off, but couldn't because we were broadcasting the game. The whole press box rocked so bad I really thought the thing was going down.

As far as competition goes, on Channel 8, when they went on the air in 1963, they hired a newscaster fron Indianapolis who announced he was going to bury us. We buried him. Later, WQAD's Don Raymond also announced he was going to "kick my ***". We had a healthy competition and today remain very good friends.

I worked with WOC Newsman Max Lindberg in the early days. Max's dad was a former mayor of Galesburg. We carried Dave Garroway on WOC during the week, and had local news cut-ins at 7:25 and 8:25. Bob Frank usually did them. However, one day Bob wasn't there, and Max got in about five minutes before cut-in, dressed in a lumberjack shirt and boots and overalls. (They call them jeans now) Somebody told Max he had to do the news. So, he borrowed a dress shirt and tie, just put them on, and got a jacket, sat down at the news set, said "Good Morning", and realized he forgot to put his mike on. So, he got up, walked off the set with shirt-tail hanging out overalls, boots and all, and of course the camera followed him all the way as he put his mike on, went back sat down and read the news. During the cast, Ed Zack ran in with a crudely letter sign that said "Wardrobe by Bob Frank" that finished Lindberg's segment. We had a lot of fun in those days.

Bob Brown was already out of the Shell Weather Tower when I got to WOC. We had a weather board you would write on with grease pencil, and the forecast was a series of boards, one in back of the other, that we penned paper to that had the forecast written on. Of course, from time to time, the guys would forget to put the paper in, and as each board was pulled away to reveal the next, none of them had anything on.

I worked with Ran Jensen but never had the pleasure of working with both Jensen and Warren Vasen. Jensen would do the weather, and write on the board with a particular type of lipstick. He would have a great time when he had to go buy it, telling the clerk he had to have a particular style. One time, he was on the air, and writing on the map with the lipstick, when he dropped it. He turned to the camera and said "excuse me, I dropped my lipstick". As he was bending over he realized what he said, and you could see his back rise and fall as he laughed in the bent over position. Those two guys did some of the funniest commercials I have ever heard, especially for Lujack Sherbrock Chevrolet. They had one of a salesman telling a customer about the features of a used car. The guy would interrupt with "I just want to kick the tire" Toward the end the salesman gave the ok, the tire kick was followed by a PPPPSSSSSHHHHH .

When WOC moved into the new building, News Director Jack Thomsen had hired our first female news reporter, we guys took all of the furniture out of his office, paper the windows over with brown paper, left only a couch, no desk, and changed the light bulbs to red bulbs. He came into work, never gave any indication of anything amiss, went into the office, closed the door, and stayed there all day. Once and a while he would slide a note under the door that said "Would one of you chaps go for coffee???" One time when I got mouthy like I sometimes did, I went down to the cafeteria for coffee, and when I got upstairs, they had moved all my stuff, desk and all, into the hall. There are a million stories like that that all the guys who worked there then have.

I left WOC in September of 1975 for a brief stint in the radio communications business in Denver. Came back to Wisconsin in 1976, moved to Warner Robbins, Georgia, to manage a couple of stations in 1981. Left after six months (Yankees don't go over very well in the south) and went to Twin Falls, Idaho, on a sight unseen job at what one of the employees described as the worst radio station in America. I then left and went to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I stayed for eight years. Worked up to station manager of KUUY and KKAZ, and was also named Corporate Chief Engineer, with stations in Billings, Montana, and Grand Junction, Colorado. The stations were sold and next I did a brief stint in Ogalalla, Nebraska.

By this time, my wife had been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and needed to live at lower altitude to get enough air to breathe. Because of this, we moved to Olalla, Washington, and I worked in Radio in Tacoma. My wife went back to Iowa to get a heart-lung transplant and I followed her back to Davenport. I got a job as engineer at WGIL here in Galesburg, and she died while they were prepping her for the transplant. That was in 1989.

In 1991 I married a local gal, retired in 1996 have been married now for 18 years, and love both Galesburg and retirement. I quit all connections with radio completely in 1998 and still serve as resident engineer for a Trinity Broadcasting Low power religious TV station here in Galesburg.

For us who were lucky enough to be part of it, those early years were the golden years of radio and TV. Our owners lived across the street, or down the block, there were strict limits on the number of radio or TV stations that one could own, it was the reason WOC radio split from WOC tv. Altho I never stopped to count them, in 1961, I was told we had 55 engineers at WOC. As years went by, they figured out ways to do with fewer and fewer people. The FCC changed the station ownership rules, and suddenly, corporations owned as many as six hundred radio stations or more. Control shifted to more central program directors far away, and the local flavor was lost. Today, people refer to radio formats as "cookie cutters". TV stations were losing local ownership, and today, in some stations, the programming is controlled from hundreds of miles away.

We had the best of times. They will never be back. I feel a great deal of sadness for those still working in radio and TV. They will never know how much fun it really was. If I had to do it all over again today, I would stay at Harley Davidson.

Wally Boller

Above - WOC's A-Team

Back Row - Wally Boller and Bill Bailey - Front Row - Don Rhyne and John Bauman

On the news team, I cannot explain why we clicked like we did. All that stuff at the end of the cast was off the top of our heads. We never planned anything. I don't think there are four other people in the world who were on the same page like we were. When someone started something, all of us knew where it was going. - Wally Boller

Below - Wally Boller Sports on WOC's 6 O'Clock Edition

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