1st
Saturday Night Live
Athens Magazine, September-October 2008 issue
In my dimly-lit living room on a Saturday night, the blue glow of the television flickers in the corner. While the world outside celebrates the weekend in crowded restaurants and bars, Saturday night programming is largely a no-man’s land: those staying in find even the airwaves seem deserted, as if the station manager put in a forgotten movie, hit the play button, and headed out to join her friends elsewhere.
Surfing between stations, I am transfixed by a talk show on Channel 32: An older man sits behind a desk, his glasses perched on his nose. Something about his clothes and hair suggests the show was filmed many years ago, and the set reinforces the notion. Hung on the blue wall behind him is a hand-cut wooden sign: The Billy Dilworth Show. The font is retro, to be sure—the sign looks like it could be 20, maybe 30 years old. The host takes a phone call from a viewer. He asks her name and where she’s from; recognizing her, he inquires about her family’s health. It’s another rerun, I suppose, a charming, bygone public access TV show from an earlier era. But then the host says something that pricks up my ears—he mentions some bit of news; something that happened this week. Could this anachronistic show be live? Could the caller be someone nearby, right now, talking to this man behind the wooden desk?
As it happens, she is. A viewer from Athens, just a few miles from my own home, is talking to Billy Dilworth, the host—and she’s not the only one. Each week, Dilworth appears live on his long-running show. It turns out there is life on Saturday night television.
In his 56-year career as a newsman, Dilworth has interviewed five presidents, innumerable musicians and politicians, and even Elvis. But as the host of the eponymous TV show on WNEG, the veteran journalist’s most well-known and popular coverage is this, with viewers who call in to chat live about current events, their families, or even the weather.
Broadcast from a small studio in Toccoa, the format of Dilworth’s show could be regarded as quaint, even old-fashioned. In an era of corporate news conglomerates, which provide the same stories to nearly every outlet in the nation, headlines are homogenous across the country, and often global in scope. War, crime, and the economy tend to lead the run of news in every medium. In comparison, community journalism, especially of the brand of The Billy Dilworth Show, seems startlingly mundane. But keep watching, and you may be surprised: ordinary matters and ordinary people are fascinating.
With the recent announcement that the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is purchasing Channel 32, the future of Dilworth’s brand of community journalism is unclear: UGA has plans to move the studios of WNEG to campus in autumn of 2009. When that happens, it seems unlikely Dilworth’s show will make the migration—an ending that would no doubt disappoint the show’s fans.
“People are so devoted to calling in. They want to hear their names,” says Dilworth. “Dean Drewry [of the Grady College] used to tell us that your name is the most precious name to you…that was in Journalism 101. I never forgot that.”
Dilworth has been vocal about his disapproval of the decision of the Anderson Independent-Mail, a daily newspaper in Anderson, S.C., where he worked for many years, to charge money to run obituaries. “Drewry said the average person gets his name in the paper three times: when he’s born, when he’s married, and when he dies.”
Keeping coverage of ordinary folks open and free has become a cause dear to Dilworth, who grew up “in a cotton patch,” in the small community of Red Hill in Franklin County. During telephone conversations on the air, Dilworth is quick to ask about callers’ families, drawing easy connections by way of common friends and acquaintances. The effect is comforting, intimate: maybe the world isn’t such a big place, after all.
It’s apparent that viewers love Dilworth’s familiar manner. Returning to the air after commercial break, he greets audiences with a warm, “Welcome back, old friend.” And the show claims many friends—viewers from more than 30 counties tune in to watch it every week, from towns around northeast Georgia, up into South Carolina, and North Carolina, and down into Athens.
Dilworth’s cohost, Michelle Austin, vouches for the devotion of their audience. During their hour on the air, Austin will go off set to answer the phone lines and talk to viewers who want to send a message out over the airwaves.
“I have four lines that are constantly ringing and I try to answer as many as I can,” Austin says. “We do have a lot of repeat callers…Every time we [she and husband David Austin] go out in [Toccoa], we always run into somebody who watches the show.”
But it isn’t just the TV show that has made Dilworth a household name in Northeast Georgia. Though the current incarnation of his show has been running seven years, Dilworth has worked in just about every mass medium, starting as a reporter for the Lavonia Times at age 14 before moving to larger papers and into radio. Now, at age 73, he shows few signs of slowing down, save for going to bed a bit earlier.
“We started this show in ’85 [to ’95]; it ran three hours a night,” he says. These days, Dilworth keeps it to an hour, but his presence is remarkably consistent: despite open-heart surgery several years ago, and ill health in his family, not to mention the sale of the station, the calm, focused host is taking it one day at a time. For now, Dilworth plans to just keep doing what he’s been doing so well for the past 50 years.
“I can go to any cemetery within 75 miles of Toccoa and point out 10 or 15 graves of people who called in [to the show],” he says. It’s a grim example, but also an impressive testament to just how many people Dilworth has made acquaintance with through his work.
“I haven’t made a lot of money,” he says, “but I think I’ve made a lot of friends in the process. I really do.”
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Talking with Dilworth, it’s clear that nearly 60 years in journalism has given him great skill in interviewing; in fact, the role is automatic, with every question posed to him followed by one of his own. But while journalism gave him a keen ability to steer conversation, it was also an unexpected curative for an embarrassing problem.
“I stuttered through college, believe it or not,” he says. “I couldn’t even give an oral report.” As a sophomore at the University of Georgia, Dilworth felt resigned to his speech problem. Then, at the suggestion of a beloved sociology professor, Imogene Dean, he tried speaking into a radio microphone. Whether the audio feedback or the pressure of being on the air fixed the problem, Dilworth doesn’t know, but the result was immediate. “I haven’t stuttered since,” he says.
A job as a newsman didn’t come without costs, however.
“I didn’t get to live a normal life in my 20s, no,” says Dilworth, who was single until late in his life, when he married Joyce Shirley at age 53. His long bachelorhood was due in part to Dilworth’s devotion to his parents, B.Q. and Pearl Dilworth,whom he cared for until they died in the late 1980s. But more demanding was his schedule as a reporter; in many ways, an on-call position. He recalls many instances of getting up in the middle of the night to cover breaking news.
Dilworth takes credit for breaking the story that Jimmy Carter was planning to run for president, information he got off a tip from an acquaintance who had dined with Carter at the Governor’s Mansion. Though Carter expressed some consternation at the leak, Dilworth explains, he “made it up to me” on a visit to Washington when the President introduced Dilworth “of Red Hill” to a room of capitol reporters as “the first newsman to report he was running for president.”
These days, Dilworth’s interviews are less attention-grabbing, but still satisfy his desire to tell stories.
“I think everybody living is worth a news story; everybody is newsworthy,” he says. “I think there’s something interesting and good in everybody.”
Catch The Billy Dilworth Show on Channel 32 each Saturday at 7 p.m. Visit www.wneg32.com/index.php/features/billy_dilworth_show.
