Ed Walker spent 65 years on the radio. His last program was unlike any other.

Washington Post ^ | October 22, 1015 | Paul Farhi

[TroutStalker]

Ed Walker didn’t really want to do it. He was tired and sick, he said, and not really up to it. Besides, his voice — the instrument of his preposterously long radio career — was no longer what it had been.

Just once more, pleaded Lettie Holman, Walker’s boss. For the audience, she said. For posterity. His daughter, Susan Walker Scola, agreed, urging her father on.

Walker re-considered. Okay, he said. One more.

So they assembled last week to record one more, the last of the untold thousands of radio programs Walker has done since he broke into radio as a college student 65 years ago, when Harry Truman was president. Holman was there for the final show, as was audio engineer Tobey Schreiner and a couple of Walker’s radio associates, Rob Bamberger and Bob Bybee. The vehicle was “The Big Broadcast,” the weekly radio-nostalgia program that Walker has hosted for the past 25 years on Washington public station WAMU-FM.

The setting was room 623 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. Walker, 83 and battling cancer, had been there a week. He did the show in a hospital gown, connected to a bank of hospital monitors. He insisted on getting out of bed to sit upright. An old pro knows you sound better that way.

“Good evening, everybody, and welcome to another edition of ‘The Big Broadcast,’ ” he began one last time. “My name is Ed Walker.”

*

Walker’s usually lively timbre is slower and less assertive on the last recording (which will be broadcast on WAMU on Sunday at 7 p.m.). It’s the same friendly Walker voice, familiar to a few generations of listeners in Washington, but he sounds increasingly weary as he goes on. And maybe a little sadder, too.

[rabidralph]

I remember him from WMAL radio during the Harden and Weaver era.

[Vision]

There's a link in the weekly thread.

[TBP]

Ed died this morning.