Now here's how to run a grocery store: Cas Walker lives

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This will be an extremely obscure reference if you don't have any East Tennessee ties. But it is worth going to the page wherever you are from to hear the audio, a nearly five-minute rant from back in the day on the old man's radio show.

For those not in the know, Cas Walker owned a chain of grocery stores and managed to make himself a huge local celebrity back in the day. In no particular order, he became mayor of Knoxville, got in a fistfight with a city council member, had a wildly popular radio show that morphed into television and gave Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers their starts, and threw live chickens off the roof of his store for the publicity.

 

omg that made my day...talk about a name (and voice!) from my earliest childhood!

 

When I was a kid, I was on the Cas Walker Variety Hour for a week with my church's youth choir.

Sure, the youth choir got to go to Anaheim for a week back in 1980, but that didn't hold a candle to meeting Cas, singing on the show and getting canned applause at the end.

Cas also gave me a tie clip that was a mini-version of the famous shears. And if that wasn't enough, I left a note on Margie Ison's weather board and three days later, she gave me a wink.

The following week, 8th grade started and it was all pretty much downhill from there.