Our Arklahoma Heritage: "Big Ed" Wilkes went from Magazine to ruling the Texas airways for over three decades
T
t
The voice that reached across the cotton fields and feedlots of the South Plains carried the cadence of a man who had never quite left the Arkansas hills behind, even after decades of Texas mornings.
Big Ed Wilkes, born Charles Edwin on June 18, 1931, in the small Logan County town of Blue Mountain, grew up where the land rose toward Magazine Mountain and the Rock Island tracks ran past modest farms
. His parents, C. E. Wilkes and Ruby G. Morris Wilkes, raised him there until Christmas Eve of 1942, when the family loaded what they owned and headed west to Lubbock. He was eleven. The move set him among the open skies and irrigation canals that would shape everything that followed.
He finished at Lubbock High School and took a degree in agricultural economics from Texas Tech, where a Phi Gamma Delta brother pinned the nickname Big Ed on him and it stuck for life. After college he taught vocational agriculture down in Graham, then spent years on the road as sales manager for the National Peat Moss Company, covering ground from one end of the country to the other.
That life ended when he met Marsha Ann Dowdy, the brown-eyed visual artist from Norman who had grown up in Lubbock. They married on February 17, 1962. He later said she flung such a craving on him that he told himself he could not keep traveling; he had to stay with her.
He walked into KFYO that same year as farm broadcaster and stayed seventeen years, delivering commodity prices and weather with a humor that never quite followed the rules of grammar. Listeners came to trust the sound of him more than the numbers. People called him the Dizzy Dean of radio talk shows for the way he mixed hard news with the plain talk of a man who said on the air exactly what he would say across a kitchen table.
In 1979, he bought the station that would become KRFE, 580 AM, and built his own morning show around interviews, local affairs, and the same unvarnished style. His brother George Morris Wilkes worked beside him, along with nephew Morris E. Wilkes.
Health troubles forced him to step back around 1987, but he returned, leased time when he needed it, and bought the station outright again in May 1994. He co-produced Jerry Clower’s first five comedy albums after spotting the salesman telling stories that belonged on a stage.
He pushed for the Texas Boys Ranch in the Panhandle and helped stage gospel concerts at the Cactus Theater. Texas Tech named him Outstanding Agriculturalist in 1985 and the Ex-Students Association gave him its Distinguished Service Award two years later.
He sat in the pews at Oakwood Baptist, turned up for Southwest Rotary, and kept ties to the National Association of Farm Broadcasters and the Ranching Heritage Association.
Marsha stayed at the center of it, raising their three children while she taught watercolor and later shared ownership of the station. Kari Ann, Wade, and Wes grew up with a father who opened the phone lines to anyone and treated every caller as if the conversation mattered.
Sisters Wanda Carter and Charlene Pearce remained part of the wider circle.
Colleagues remembered a man without pretenses who identified with people one at a time and would do anything needed for someone in trouble. When he died on December 21, 1998, at sixty-seven, services were held at Oakwood Baptist with the Rev. Cleve Haley officiating
He was buried in Section T at Resthaven Memorial Park. The Texas Legislature passed a resolution the following spring that recalled how hearing Big Ed made people feel the decent parts of the world would hold
. Marsha lived until 2019 and rests in the same cemetery. Wade still owns and hosts on KRFE, and Texas Tech maintains a scholarship in his father’s name for students in agricultural education and communications.
The boy who left Blue Mountain on Christmas Eve never lost the sound of those hills in his voice, and Lubbock kept that voice on the air long enough for it to become part of the place itself.
