Tom Cotton was at work. At sixty-four, he had enough life savings to last him about eleven months, so he figured he’d be working till the day he died. He didn’t mind work. He rather liked it. If he died working, he wouldn’t mind. He just wished that being a DJ was as good a job today as it was thirty years ago. He thought a lot about the fact that, in a couple of years, he’d be heading into a new century, having dedicated his life to a job nobody really cared much about anymore.
Everybody thought Tom used a made-up name for the radio, but Cotton was the name of his ancestors. The only thing Tom made up for the radio was Wonder Boy, the imaginary dog that was the butt of most of his jokes. Tom was the top morning man in central Mississippi for twenty years until a young fella named Mateer took over that spot in the eighties. Mateer played Top Forty at a time when MTV on cable television had reignited young people’s interest in top-forty music.
Tom preferred to pick his own music. Some country, some top forty, with a focus on singers familiar to Mississippi, Bobby Gentry especially. He’d been in radio long enough to know how playlist services worked; he just preferred to use his own. In his current job, he gave out the station ID and the time before playing the news over the wire. When he got to work, he played the day’s recording of the Rush Limbaugh show. His station played Limbaugh twice a day, once live during the day and once recorded during his shift. Nearly every day, he received a call from somebody who thought they were talking to Rush. Sometimes, Tom would talk to them. He’d done talk radio before, and it was nice having somebody to talk to. After Rush, he played Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell until four in the morning, when he’d play the recorded playlist until his replacement came at 6:00 a.m. Sometimes, he’d record commercials and voice-overs, which gave him a little extra money.
As the night wore on, Tom’s job got quieter and quieter. When he first started working in radio, the studio was on the first floor of the Lamar Life Building. A glass window let passers-by look into the studio and see Tom at work and try to catch a glimpse of Boy Wonder, who Tom always said was outside doing his business and would be back soon. There was some discussion in Jackson about whether Boy Wonder was a real dog or imaginary. Tom never let on what he knew. His current studio is in rented office space on the west side of Interstate 55, across from Devilla Plaza on the east. He sat between the car dealerships and the Chinese restaurants. When he broadcast from the Lamar Life Building, everybody knew where he was. Now, nobody cares.
Sometimes, when it got very slow at work, Tom would answer fan mail sent to Count Ohno Notagain. When Tom worked for one of the top media companies in Mississippi, they had offices and radio studios in the Lamar Life Building and an independent television station a few blocks away on Commerce Street.
There were two television stations in that part of town. One was the fabled WLBT, one of Mississippi’s oldest television stations and the only one in the country ever to lose its license for associating with too many racists. WLBT was an NBC affiliate, but WLFB was independent. Like most independent television stations, they survived by broadcasting syndicated programs, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, etc, and packages of old movies.
Starting in 1964, WLFB signed a contract to offer “Shock Theater.” on Saturday nights. ScreenGems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, assembled a package of fifty-two horror films made before 1942. Most were by Universal, but it also included King Kong, Son of Kong, The Body Snatchers, and I Walked With A Zombie from RKO.
Most of the stations that carried the Shock Theater package put together a program where a host, sometimes given a creepy costume like a character in one of the movies, would introduce The Mummy’s Hand, Monster on Campus, or House of Frankenstein, and then again lead either into or out of commercial breaks.
The station manager asked Tom if he wanted to do a voice-over to introduce the movies, but Tom decided he loved the idea and wanted to do more. He asked if he could use the studio space where they shot commercials and do a program like they had in the bigger cities with Zacherly, Sir Graves Ghoulie, and others. Tom still owned his father’s 130-acre farm near Learned, Mississippi, and there he had some woodworking tools he was pretty good with. He made a coffin out of pine boards and stood it upright on a base with locking casters. He could stand inside and open the coffin lid like a door to start the show. He built a “mad scientist table,” also on casters, which he decorated with test tubes and beakers from Mississippi School Supply and blinking light bulbs he got from Irby Electric. He built a throne with locking casters on the feet and decorated it with plastic Halloween skulls. These three props would be stored in a corner until Saturday nights when Tom would roll them into place with a clip-on mic that dragged the chord behind, and he mostly adlibbed his lines, although he spent most of the week trying to figure out what he would say. Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, was replaced by Bubbles The Blob, played by his wife, crouching down and covering herself with several layers of plastic sheeting.
Mississippi Monster Matinee was the surprise hit of the sixties and seventies. WLFB even managed to license it to stations in the Delta and the Golden Triangle. School children wrote letters to Count Ohno Notagain and drew pictures of him and bubbles. For a costume, Tom found an old Tuxcedo at the Goodwill Store. It had some dry rot at some of the seams, but he was going to dirty it up anyway. By thirty-five, he still had a full head of hair, but it was already dead white. On a trip to New Orleans, he visited a magic shop and costume shop, where he bought a white handlebar mustache, a white goatee beard, and white mutton chop sideburns. A little greasepaint gave him circles under the eyes and thin black lips, and that became Count Ohno. Tom joked that he looked like Colonel Sanders in a Dracula costume, but the look was memorable, and his young fans loved it.
During the sixties and seventies, Count Ohno made appearances at the Arts Festival in Jackson and the State Fair. For people of a certain age, Count Ohno was a bigger star than Doc Severson, George Jones, or any of the other acts the grownups brought in. Eventually, Tom cleared it with his station manager to start a Count Ohno Notagain Fan Club. The station always figured the show was six months from failing, so they let him do it as long as he paid the expenses. He rented out a PO box at the downtown post office in the Federal Court House and started telling kids an address where they could write to him. For five dollars, they could join the Count Ohno Fan Club and receive an official Membership Card, a signed 8 x 10 photograph of the Count, and a personal letter written by the count and slobbered on by bubbles, the blob.
As the seventies wore on, Screen Gems quit offering the Shock Theater, but there were other packages, including one that had early Ray Harryhausen films, The Giant Claw, some Hammer Horror, and Tom’s favorite, giant monster movies from Japan. One night, Tom put on a lab coat, some thick glasses, and a heavy accent to become Professor Tojo Ohno, who talked about how horrible Godzilla and Ghidora were for Japan. He thought it was incredibly funny, and so did his wife, but an irate German woman called the station to complain about the horribly racist portrayal of our Japanese Allies Tojo Ohno was, so Tom decided not to ever play him again. It was just the one person who complained, but Tom was like that. He never wanted to offend anybody.
When he started playing Count Ohno, Tom had to draw on the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles on his forehead. He has all these naturally now, but he still draws them in as part of the ritual of getting into character. Of all the things Tom had been, of all the parts he played in live, being Count Ohno was the most fun.
The station canceled the Mississippi Monster Movie Matinee by 1985, but Count Ohno Notagain still made convention appearances and command performances at Halloween parties at local nightclubs, like Hal and Mals. He was always surprised at how many kids listened to his morning show and then watched him on television but never realized he was both people. Tom never admitted to fans that Count Ohno was actually Tom Cotton, the radio DJ. It was well into the twenty-first century before the secret made its way to his many fans.
For the Monster Movie project and other programs Tom came up with, he was often left to sell advertising himself if he wanted the show to go on. Tom had a few places he could always count on for an ad. BeBop Record Shop, The Little Big Store, and JL Jones Furniture were all regulars. He sold ads to Mac Bailey Fine Cars in Pearl, where your job was your credit. Bailey had a pretty active racket selling late-model used cars in crappy condition to desperate people on a weekly payment plan they couldn’t afford; then, after several weeks of struggling to keep up with the weekly payments, he would repossess the car and sell it again. Some of his better cars were sold six or seven times this way before they quit working.
Tom could always count on Clarance Wong of Wong’s Authentic Chinese Kitchen and Lounge. Wong was authentically Korean, but nobody cared. His name wasn't Clarance or Wong either, but that’s what they put on his immigration papers, and he always got a kick out of the fact that he tricked the government. Wong had a menu with almost thirty choices on it, nearly all made with the same ten ingredients, but your choice of protein. Wong built up quite a reputation and quite a business over the years. He wanted very much to leave it to the daughter he loved so much, but she decided to get her MD at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and now she’s an anesthesiologist and not a very good cook.
Tom’s wife died about six years ago. He fell in love with her in Junior High School and never thought about another woman. His father left him a little farm up around Learned with a house on it. He and his wife lived there. She had a garden and taught third grade in Raymond. Tom always fancied himself a farmer. His father was, and he grew up on that little farm helping his father with the beans and corn. Farming didn’t pay what it used to, and small farms never paid much. Once Tom got into the radio business, he eventually gave up on agriculture. He still lives in the house now, but he rents most of the land out to a guy who grows Christmas trees.
For a while, Tom served in the Mississippi House of Representatives. His wife taught school, and he still worked in radio to pay the bills, but when the house was in session, he’d go from his desk in the radio studio to his desk on the House floor and do the people’s business. As white people moved out of rural Hinds County, districts were redrawn to preserve white majorities for a while, but ultimately, Tom’s district began looking for black candidates, so he retired from the house. He still paid close attention to every bill that passed through the Mississippi House Of Representatives, even though he couldn’t do much about it.
As Mississippi raced toward the twenty-first century, Tom felt like his best days were behind him. Most people remembered him for things he didn’t really do anymore, at least not professionally. At least two generations of Mississippians grew up listening to him on the radio and watching him on television, but they were becoming parents themselves now, and fond memories of Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, and Count Ohno doesn’t pay the bills. What people do because they love it and what people do so they can feed their progeny are usually two different things.
When six o’clock comes along, Tom will drive back to Learned. He’ll make a cup of coffee and sit on his porch and watch the sun rise over the horizon where Jackson, the State Capitol, the Lamar Life Building, and his wife’s grave lay. If you can measure a man by his memories, Tom Cotton is one of the richest men in Hinds County. For tens of thousands of Mississippians, Boy Wonder sits curled up at Tom’s feet. They can see him, even if Tom can’t. Count Ohno’s throne sits in the barn, under a tarp, ready for the next show. Until next time, my ghoulies. Sleep tight! If you dare! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha!
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