Bart Prater

Bart Prater’s first job in radio was shoveling ashes after a fire.

He was a high school kid in Marion VA when the town’s radio station - WOLD-AM - went up in flames. The station owner hired teenagers to clean up, but Prater told the man: “I could do more than that.”

Prater, 15 years old at the time, already had his amateur radio license. He rebuilt the station’s transmitter and control board. Soon, he was working as an engineer and a disc jockey.

From those studio ashes, Prater rose to become one the most prominent voices and personalities in Roanoke radio history, a disc jockey who brought national recognition to both Roanoke and himself. He worked at WROV-AM during the wild and crazy 1970s when rock ‘n’ roll was king and the station’s studios were located in a Quonset hut in an industrial section of Roanoke.

Up from Marion, Virginia, the new guy started out as the nighttime DJ, “young Bart” the upstart, the one with the long hair. As a joke, the other WROV DJs trapped him one afternoon, dragged him into the studio, and cut his hair, live on the air. Well, that’s what they said they did.

WROV Roanoke, Virginia
July 10, 1972

Within a few years, Bart’s career popularity exploded. He moved to afternoon drive, and later became program director, responsible for hiring, firing, and managing all the on-air talent. In 1974, he helped break the Doobie Brothers’ immortal “Black Water.” By 1975 he had fully arrived when Billboard named him DJ-of-the-year for markets of under 1,000,000 population. He had become the “Wizard of Rock.”

Bart’s voice was an utterly compelling blend of deep baritone resonance and crisp, cutting consonants. He spoke with the same cadence and timbre as Rod Serling. Bart didn’t seem to have to work at producing the sound. He just spoke, and every syllable was imbued with his intense, witty, sometimes loopy, sometimes nearly surreal on-air personality.

Later, as AM faded in popularity, Prater jumped to K92 in the 80s when it dominated the airwaves like no Roanoke station before or since.

And he ended his career away from the microphone, behind the scenes at public radio station WVTF, where he programmed satellite feeds and wrote computer codes. He retired in 2012 from doing what he always loved, working and tinkering in radio.

Bart Prater was part of two of the most successful rock and pop music stations in Roanoke broadcasting history. He came to Roanoke in 1968 as the overnight DJ at WROV-AM, which was the valley’s first rock ‘n’ roll station. Under the guidance of station owner Burt Levine, WROV dominated radio ratings from the 1950s through the ’70s and amassed a lineup of DJs who became local celebrities — Fred Frelantz, Jack Fisher, Larry Bly, Rob O’Brady and Prater.

“It was a different era,” said Jay Prater, himself a veteran of Roanoke radio and television broadcasting, as well as a former employee at The Roanoke Times.

“Radio was king. Local personalities were the stars. We had to change our phone number a lot because people would call the house, just wanting to talk to my dad.”

Bart Prater spoke with a deep voice, singed with a bit of a smoker’s rasp. He was so good on-air, he could keep listeners riveted to funny sketches with just his voice — whether it was showing family vacation slides (on the radio, remember) or giving a tour of an imaginary WROV studio complete with DJ lounges and a chapel where the owner “could pray for money.”

He sang and played guitar on the radio, writing his own novelty songs, which included the ridiculous “Pickle Jar Lid” song, which was a local hit in 1969 (the song’s full name, according to an online history of WROV-AM, was “I Got a Pickle Jar Lid and I Carry it in My Pocket, Baby”).

Prater was on air when up to one-third of Roanoke’s radio listeners dialed in to 1240. Those were the Wild West days of AM radio, when the station was housed in a cramped military-style building at Cleveland Avenue and 15th Street near the Roanoke River. Rock stars and celebrities dropped by the studio when they were in town, such as the time Wolfman Jack broadcast a show at WROV in 1975.

DJs pushed the envelope with on-air stunts and promotions (which included the time O’Brady demonstrated the dangers of alcohol abuse by getting intoxicated on the air). That kind of irreverent behavior was magnified when WXLK-FM debuted on Jan. 1, 1980, with a much larger footprint than WROV had.

Prater remained at WROV, but soon realized that AM’s days as a rock music behemoth were over. He moved to K92 in 1981, where he worked afternoons until 1988. During that time, K92 became one of the top-rated stations in the country, as owner Aylett Coleman and manager Russ Brown put together a dream team of DJs that included Larry Dowdy, Vince Miller, Bill Jordan, David Lee Michaels, Prater and others.

He left K92 because he believed radio was becoming more corporate and less fun. He ran an advertising agency for a while, and launched an unsuccessful effort to buy a radio station before settling into the engineering job at WVTF.

For a man who had made his living with his voice, Prater could be a reticent subject when interviewed. He preferred his privacy and seemed to enjoy his later career away from the microphone.

Bart ended every one of his air shifts with, “never whittle toward yourself, or spit into the wind.” After a few years of declining health, Bart Prater passed away in January of 2017 at age 69.

Some materials found on this page were originally published by the following: The Roanoke Times, Garder Campbell Blog.