Media
Radio Central
Part history, part gossip, part stream of consciousness, Mattie Dellinger’s talk show speaks to the heart of Center, Texas.
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Some children are as devoted to Party Line as their elders are. “I have people I call my ‘connections’ from the towns around here,” Mattie says. “There’s a little boy who calls in from the Dreka community; I call him the Dreka Connection. And then there’s a little boy in the Short community—he calls himself the Short Circuit. They get out of school at three-thirty, and so they can listen for the last half hour, and they’re wantin’ me to pop ’em a question they can answer. The little boy in Short, I challenged him to find out where his community got its name. He didn’t know, and he said the schoolteacher didn’t know, either. And so I finally had to tell him it was named after a pioneer lawyer here in Center, Judge Dan Short. I used to write columns about all those places. I’m real happy to keep these kids interested in local history. They can’t wait to call in with their answers.”
Mattie’s late-in-life career as a radio personality is not as farfetched as it might seem. “I’ve always liked dabbling around news,” she says, “even though I don’t have a college education—just high school.” When Mattie McLendon graduated in 1929, during the Depression, her parents couldn’t afford to send her to college, so she went to work at Perry’s dime store, earning $1.50 a day. “We were proud to get it,” she says. “I was such an active little clerk that the drugstore heard about me and hired me. That’s when I met my husband, L. L. Dellinger. He was known as Pete. He was the pharmacist.”
Later Mattie and Pete ran a grocery store, and Mattie started her own news bureau on the side. She covered local stories for the Houston Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Shreveport Times, and the Beaumont Enterprise. With no formal journalistic training, she wrote by instinct: “I’ve always tried to write on a certain level. You know what that is? I knew my mother would read my columns and stories, so I tried to write on a level that my mother would enjoy. The editors said that was a good idea. Don’t use two-bit words when nickel words would do.”
She was widowed in 1966, but her two children live nearby. Her son, Dan Dellinger, is the general manager of KDET-KLCR. “But, now, I got the job here before he was the manager,” Mattie points out. “Jack Bell was the manager back in ’87. He told me, ‘Let’s have us a program and let you utilize your history knowledge, and just talk about old times in Center.’ I never had mike fright or anything.”
Her daughter, Dixie Lee, has come home, semi-retired from a career as a microbiologist at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, to run a Christmas tree farm with her brother out on Texas Highway 7. “Baylor still calls her in from time to time,” says Mattie. “She’s real smart.”
Mattie doesn’t have many guidelines for the show’s contents. “We shy away from serious politics, but Ann Richards came on during the campaign and played ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ on one of my friends’ ukuleles,” she says. “We’ve got other shows that handle the abortion issue and that stuff,” Mattie notes. “We’ll discuss religion sometimes but not doctrine.
“I was raised a Southern Baptist, and my folks wouldn’t let us associate with anybody who danced or played cards, but I’ve got two big vices, horse racing and Las Vegas. I love those nickel and quarter slot machines. I’m going out again next October first for my eighty-first birthday. You really need to supplement your income these days. Did you know they take Social Security out of my Social Security?”
For two years, Mattie’s sidekick, engineer, board operator, and bucolic straight man was Jerry Welch, a 27-year-old Illinois native who had been a broadcaster in the Army and came to Center to meet the pen pal who would become his wife. “I proposed to my wife on this show,” Jerry says.
Engineering Mattie’s show wasn’t always easy. On a fine day in January, Welch flails for the switches to connect a call when Mattie halts in midsentence to pick up the phone. “We have two women on the show who are real smart,” she was saying. “They have encyclopedias. One of them is Lena Ellington and the other is Peg … Hello, you’re on Party Line!” A man’s voice comes on air with “Go ahead and finish tellin’ about the two women.”
“Oh, okay,” Mattie continues. “The other one is Peggy Hutcherson, our counter. One day she was waiting in the doctor’s office, so she counted all the tiles in the ceiling. So then we gave her something really big. We told her to go up there and count all the bricks in the courthouse. And she did! She worked out there for over a month, and people would drive by and watch her counting bricks. She stopped traffic. And she came up with a pretty good number—two million and something.”
That patiently waiting male caller is attorney John R. Smith, the one who rushes down to the studio whenever he is really ready to talk. He says, “I wanted to tell you a problem I’m having with my mother-in-law. It’s a long story, but you’re five minutes away from sign-off, so I’ll tell you another time.”
Another regular, Clara Garrett, makes a Mattie-endorsed potion called Clara’s Liniment. “It’ll fix everything from bone spurs to potholes on the square,” Mattie proclaims, then breaks off to take a call from 89-year-old Wincie, who announces that she doesn’t have her teeth in but still wants to take a crack at today’s spelling challenge, “Episcopalian.”
“Eee pee eye eth thee oh pee ay ell eye oh em-muh?”
“I think that’s right,” Mattie says. The prize is one of Mattie’s twenty cats.
Once they’ve experienced Mattie’s show, people from bigger places have been known to time a trip through Mattie’s listening area when Party Line is on. Some of those traveling on Interstate 20 stop at roadside pay phones to dial her number just to say they are listening, happy to hear something shamelessly human on the radio instead of the glossy dross created by broadcast consultants. In an era of atrophied traditions and expendable landmarks, Mattie Dellinger’s twangy voice from Center speaks to their hearts. Her show—hokey, honest, wandering, and determinedly rural—breaks all the programming rules of big-time broadcasting in places like Dallas and Houston. But when you’re at the center of the universe, who cares?
Former Dallas Times Herald columnist Dick Hitt now lives in Tyler.
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