WAMU - Radio Hall of Fame host Ed Walker announced this week that he is retiring. His last show — a compilation of his favorite music and programs — will air Sunday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. At 83, Ed has been host of WAMU’s longest-running program since 1990. About 70,000 fans tune in every Sunday night to hear the tales of Johnny Dollar, the witticisms of Our Miss Brooks, the Wild West stories of Gunsmoke and a variety of other shows.
Progressive Review, 2009 - Since he and [Willard] Scott signed on as a DJ duo at WOL in 1952, Walker's voice has been heard on Washington radio more than just about any sound short of the emergency broadcast test signal. He's been a big band jock, talk show host and, most famously, half of the "Joy Boys" tandem through which he and Scott dominated Washington airwaves for nearly two decades. Each day on the old WRC, the two buddies sang their theme song ("We are the Joy Boys of radio, we chase electrons to and fro!"), voiced a multitude of silly characters, ad-libbed clunky sound effects and riffed seamlessly about everyday absurdities, a pair of Siamese jesters joined at the mike. . .
He became American Unniversity's first blind student, helped launch WAMU, then a tiny AM campus station, and hit it off with Scott, a fellow student broadcaster. "We were doing satire from the first words we ever spoke to each other," says Scott, who once let Walker take the wheel of his car on Whitehurst Freeway to satisfy his friend's curiosity about driving.
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