KINGSTREE — The “Mouth of the South” had plenty of people speaking his praises as he received South Carolina’s highest honor for volunteer and community service.
Broadcaster and newspaper columnist Charlie Walker, 82, received the Order of the Silver Crescent on Thursday for his decades of work to benefit Williamsburg County.
Walker’s son, Chuck Walker of Lake City, spoke on his father’s behalf.
“He could have come here 60 years ago and you could have run him out,” Chuck Walker said as laughter broke out in the audience. “But you didn’t — you embraced him, and for that I can’t thank you enough.”
Walker has held fundraisers for the Williamsburg County CrimeStoppers and March of Dimes and sponsored an annual fishing contest for underprivileged children. He is a founding member of the Williamsburg County CrimeStoppers and serves on Clemson’s Board of Visitors.
“It has been a real honor, and I think he’s very deserving of it. People have really rallied around him,” said Walker’s wife, Peggy Walker, affectionately called “Ole Scrap Iron” in Walker’s columns.
His first column, “Bark off the King’s Tree,” ran in May 1972, and his newspaper work has since won him S.C. Press Association awards, as well.
His contributions have also brought him honors such as Williamsburg County’s 1989 Citizen of the Year award.
Walker, a Columbia native, arrived 60 years ago in Kingstree via Greyhound bus for a $35-a-week job as radio station WDKD-AM’s first disc jockey, said Chuck Walker and The (Kingstree) News publisher Tami Rodgers.
Attorney Sam Floyd, Walker’s nephew, read from a transcript of the court case “The United States of America v. Charles Thomas Walker,” which included the joke that in 1963 cost him his broadcasting license for a few years.
It began, “Those people who don’t like the way I’m broadcasting may come on down and kiss my ass.”
Walker then paused for about five seconds, and said, “It’s tied up out back.”
The court, however, also wrote that Walker was “the first one to go all out” to help people including a poor family who needed crutches for their boy and a man who needed a wheelchair.
Walker also broadcasted “The Oriental Cow Pasture Jamboree” with Armed Forces Radio in Korea during parts of 1953 and 1954, Rodgers said.
Rodgers said that if she were to describe Walker in one word, that word would be “authentic.”
“He is as real as it gets, as true as they come, and most certainly one of a kind,” she said.
Walker also has served as a member of the Williamsburg Regional Hospital Foundation.
“No matter what the cause, if he believes in it, you can’t have a better person on your side,” said Tammy Erwin, the foundation’s director.
Chuck Walker thanked the people of Williamsburg County and the Pee Dee on his father’s behalf.
“Everyone knows Charlie Walker likes to run his mouth, and until now he has never run out of ammunition,” Chuck Walker joked.
After a lengthy, tearful pause, he continued talking about the things that make his father happy.
“He can still watch the sun rise and set at Sandy Bay,” he said. “He’s surrounded by people who care about him. He has an artesian well of friends. Christmas time is coming, and Clemson beat Carolina.”
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