Free Willie Nelson by Joe Nick Patoski

posters printed up by Johnny’s father. Willie had played long enough to know that if he was going to make money playing music, he needed a piece of the action, like managers and booking agents got. But there was precious little action to get a piece of, which made it hard to keep food on the table and Martha off his back.
    Willie didn’t give a shit. He was playing music and having a good time honky-tonking, and San Antonio was made for drinking, drinking songs, and drinking songwriters like himself. The city was sprinkled with icehouses, informal open-air social centers where beer drinking was a year-round pastime. The Lone Star and Pearl breweries, the biggest regional brands in the Southwest, were based in San Antone. Both breweries sponsored large Western Swing bands—Adolph Hofner’s Pearl Wranglers, which featured a jazz fiddler named J. R. “Chat the Cat” Chatwell, and Lone Star’s Texas Tophands, the first band Willie tried to sit in with in San Antonio, which featured fiddler Easy Adams and Big Bill Lister, at six foot seven the tallest guitar player in Texas. The Pearl Wranglers performed on 50,000-watt KABC radio every weekday at 1:15 p.m. and regularly appeared on KABC’s
Parade of Stars
live show. Each band was considered the best dance band in South Texas, depending on what brand you drank, and frequently engaged in battle dances that concluded with an inebriated audience.
    Adolph Hofner was San Antonio’s Bob Wills, a singer and bandleader well versed in swing and blues who also played to the local Czech, German, and Mexican communities by working in popular ethnic dance numbers such as the “Paul Jones,” “Herr Schmidt,” “Put Your Little Foot,” “Julida Polka,” “El Rancho Grande,” and “Jalisco.”
    Willie was good enough and bold enough to ask to sit in with the Wranglers and to continue to do so in case Hofner needed another musician. But before Adolph had the need, Willie found a better home thirty-five miles southeast of the Alamo in a rolling pasture between Poteet and Pleasanton, at the base of the transmitter for KBOP radio 1380. The station was licensed to broadcast during daylight hours and serve the small farming community of Pleasanton, but its 50-watt signal reached into parts of San Antonio.
    Aaron Allan had just left KBOP to take a job at WOAI in San Antonio, and word reached Dave Isbell. “My sister wanted me to take that job,” Dave said. “I told her I wasn’t interested, so Willie stepped up and proposed he interview for the position. He lied like a dog and said he’d been a DJ before.”
    Willie drove to the door of Dr. Ben O. Parker, who owned the station. Dr. Parker was the dean of the Texas Chiropractic College in San Antonio, pastor of Harriman Place Christian Church, and a community leader in Pleasanton. The station had gone on the air in 1950 and was one of three owned by Dr. Parker and his wife, Mona. He was operations manager, doing the hiring and firing. Mona was the station’s business manager and chief engineer—the first woman in the United States to receive her First Class Radio Operator/Engineer’s license from the Federal Communications Commission.
    KBOP looked like KHBR in Hillsboro, where Willie had performed with Bud Fletcher’s Texans. The red-haired, brown-eyed man with the winning personality proceeded to sell himself to the Parkers—selling being a fundamental element of radio, of making music, and of going through life.
    Doc Parker had Willie go into the broadcast booth and read the tongue-tangling copy he gave him. “Pleasanton pharmacy, where your pharmaceutical needs are filled precisely and accurately...” He flubbed some of the lines but acted like he’d read the copy perfectly, flashing a confident smile at the end of the reading. Parker hired him for $40 a week, and Willie moved Martha and Lana into the Palm Courts, a small apartment complex in Pleasanton.
    He proceeded to learn the ins and outs of radio by performing any