Miss. Public Service Comm.

[Henry McClurg]

I'm writing a book. Most of the characters are dead and gone. It's from the early 1970s. And it's RADIO. I could use some help.

I've been in contact with J. Alex Bowab, who posts here, and Roger Ownby, son of the original ower of WJXN. I'm looking for Jim Bevers and Wayne Edwards. And Jack Carpenter, ad salesman at WJXN in the 1970s.

My book will be posted, chapter by chapter, here on radio-info and printed in Jackson Free Press and in my newspaper here in Houston (the Texas one), Montrose Star.

Perhaps there are those of you (that's you) reading this, who have some knowledge of the original Mississipppi Radio Network, the Dallas people who bought it and we became IBC-Mississippi, and then reincarnated as Mississippi Radio News Network. And then, I was "asked to leave the state" because I knew too much.

Yes, it's going to be spicey. But we're Mississippi. Thank you.

 

[J Alex Bowab]

Best wishes for successful execution of your new project! For those who don't know, MRN (Miss Radio News) was for a time aired on the subcarrier (aka SCA) and main carrier of our WKXI 94.7 when it premiered Aug 11, 1971 (hmm, our 39th anniversary is this week). Other stations like WQMV Vicksburg carried the newscasts by picking it up from our SCA. Wayne Edwards was one of the original newscasters on MRN.

Should stop here, lest I end up writing the book for you ... but one final thought about Wayne:

He would finish up the last newscast in the evening, perhaps the 10:30 one, and then did two hours (11 pm to 1 am) on WKXI ... a white boy from Canton spinning soul records on an otherwise all-black station. That may have been the first time that happened in the state. He was occasionally referred to as The Mississippi Hippie.