If you recall the blaring trumpet clearing the morning cobwebs nearly 40 years ago or followed the exploits of “Chickennnmannn” or Hollywood reporter Harry Horni only one irrepressible turbocharged radio personality could possibly have pulled such madness off: Johnny Walker.
Five mornings a week from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., there was no target, the powerful, political or pompous, that escaped Walker’s high-pitched staccato delivery and trenchant observations.
He only paused to spin a record and then he was back at it.
“I met an awful lot of lawyers while Walker was working for me,” said Harry R. Shriver, for Walker’s 2004 Sun obit. “However, most folks took what he said in stride.”
Shriver, the station’s president and general manager, had hired Walker in 1974 after morning disc jockey Pete Berry, known as the Flying Dutchman, left.
Hiring Walker was a decision he didn’t regret.
“I wanted someone crazier than him and found Walker working on a station in Chattanooga,” he said. “He certainly brightened up a lot of Baltimore mornings.”
“The Johnny Walker Show” was likely the most popular morning drive-time show of area baby boomers.
What Walker said on the air was being repeated an hour later at office water coolers all over the city.
The Louisville native born James Lewis Embry Jr. learned magic as a youngster, performed in plays and briefly attended college. He began his radio career in Tennessee.
Shriver said he knew he had made the right decision when one morning on the way to WFBR’s North Avenue studios, he observed drivers sitting at the JFX and Mount Royal Avenue traffic light, howling and pounding their steering wheels.
Walker had just played an Elvis record and after it finished said: “We’ve just been listening to Elvis the Pelvis. Good thing he wasn’t named Enos.”
It was said that Walker stretched the Federal Communication Commission’s requirements for on-air decency.
He was the master of the double-entendre.
Walker had created a stable of daily features in addition to “Chickennnmannn” —“The Most Fabulous Crime fighter the World Has Ever Known” or “The Little News of the Morning From Around the World, Across the Nation and Up Your Alley.”
“Harry Horni,” a gay Hollywood gossip reporter who regularly phoned in from Marina del Rey, was created with legendary Baltimore radio and TV personality Ron Matz, who also was voiced.
He masterminded other hijinks such as his broadcast treasure-hunt that sent listeners scurrying across the city and he jammed city streets around the station’s North Avenue studios by calling for bikini-clad women to show up. They did in droves, hoping to win a free record album.
When the Orioles were in a slide, Walker flew to Kenya in search of Dr. Agunga who was to put a hex on the team’s opponents.
When Walker married the former April Clawson in 1977, he did it with great fanfare at Charles Center Plaza as city comptroller Hyman Pressman escorted the bride to the altar.
While his broadcasts seemed ad-libbed, they were the result of hours of careful scripting carried out in his Paddington Road home in Homeland.
Walker was an avid reader of newspapers and books which he mined for inspiration.
Walker wore a Beatles-style haircut and his narrow face was highlighted by wire frame glasses. Any on-air nervousness was offset by two packs of cigarettes per show, a habit that eventually caught up to him.
While his audience thought of him as a high-performance extrovert, once his show concluded and the on-air sign was switched off, Walker retreated to the solitude of his basement where he spent hours smoking and watching movies in a home studio.
He made his final broadcast in 1987 when WFBR ended its top-40 format for an all-talk one.
Walker packed up and vanished to a mountaintop home in Cacapon, West Virginia, where he pursued a solitary existence.
His former wife said he spent his days watching TV and wanted no visitors.
He was lured back to Baltimore in 1989 for a reunion of legendary Baltimore radio veterans.
He reflected on his years at WFBR and told The Sun: “Actually, I remember giving blood on the air one time and thinking, ‘This is a metaphor for my whole career.'”
He was 56 when he died in 2004 at University Specialty Hospital in Baltimore as a result of pulmonary disease.
As he pursued solitude in life, he also did in death.
Walker was cremated and the location of his ashes are unknown, according to Find a Grave.
Thanks for filling in some details from my late childhood, where he and Charley Eckman left an indelible impression. Howard Stern had nothing on them.