Midnight In The Southland
By Todd Keisling
“From the grim Ohio Valley to the mists of the Appalachian Plateau, this is Midnight in the Southland with your host Gus Guthrie. Now, here’s Gus…”
That’s how Midnight in the Southland always started. Back in the ‘90s and early aughts, if you were anywhere in Kentucky, Ohio, or either of the Virginias, you probably heard ole Gus. Ghosts, demons, aliens, government conspiracies—you name it, Gus talked about it. He played it straight, took every caller seriously and treated them with respect, and over the years, he built a reputation for being the “Fox Mulder” of radio. Gus wanted to believe, and the odds were good he’d believe you, too.
I grew up listening to him, usually on those late nights while camping with my dad. My old man would be conked out in his sleeping bag, and I’d still be awake, listening to the whispering trees, crackling fire, and the static-tinged yarns spun by guests on Gus’s show. “We’re all lonely travelers,” he used to say, “wandering empty roads under a weight of cosmic indifference.” I didn’t understand what he meant back then; I just knew I wanted to be a lonely traveler, a mysterious caller in the night, someone who saw or heard or felt something. That never happened. Not while I was a kid, and not while Gus was still alive and on the air.
He died sometime in 2002, just after I’d started college. The Lexington Herald gave him front page real estate. REMEMBERING GUS GUTHRIE, the headline read, and the online comments were filled with everyone’s favorite stories from his tenure at the microphone. They all expressed a similar feeling, one I had often felt while growing up, about Gus being a kind of beacon in the dark forest of the weird.
“What brings you out tonight, Lonely Traveler?” (Continue Reading…)
