For a howling good time, teens tuned to Wolfman Jack

Who knew that the legendary radio disc jockey Wolfman Jack spent his final years tucked away in rural eastern North Carolina howling “at the moon over Belvidere?”

Wolfman’s wife, Lucy Elizabeth “Lou” Lamb, grew up in a big family in this small unincorporated village in Perquimans County. When the grand, old Lamb family manor came on the market in 1977, Lou convinced her Wolfman husband, Robert Weston Smith, that they should buy it. 

This real estate transaction was big news for The Perquimans Weekly, and reporter Kathy M. Newbern interviewed the new owners. Wolfman said the family was looking forward to “a little privacy,” a pleasant change of pace from their life in Beverly Hills, Calif.

 “We’ve been able to escape down here pretty much,” he added. “We didn’t buy this house to put a security guard outside. We’re here because we choose to be here to get away from the world.” 

Bob Smith was born in 1938 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up listening to music on a large Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. He became a huge fan of rhythm and blues music and idolized the disc jockeys who played those records. 

Smith studied radio broadcasting by going to night school, while working as a door-to-door salesman during the day – peddling encyclopedias and Fuller Brushes. 

He got his first radio DJ job in 1960 at WYOU in Newport News, Va., where he went by the name of “Daddy Jules.” It was here that Smith met Lou, “the love of his life.” They were married in 1961. 

Later that year, he took a new job at KCIJ in Shreveport, La. By 1963, Bob Smith had “transformed himself” into that howling creature that became known as “Wolfman Jack.”

 

That was the ticket that took the Wolfman to XERF in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, a station across the U.S. border from Del Rio, Texas. Its “high-powered border blaster signal” was five times the U.S. limit. XERF’s signal could be picked up all over North America, and at night as far away as Europe and Russia. 

Listeners loved hearing his soulful, sandpapery voice blurt out: “Wolfman plays the best records in the business, and then he eats ‘em!” 

In 1973, Wolfman Jack appeared as himself in George Lucas’ feature film “American Graffiti.”

 

In the movie, the Wolfman asks his male teenager caller from Middle Rock, Calif.: “What kind of entertainment you got in that town?” The fellow replied: “All we got is you!” 

“So true of so many places,” said Thelma Raker Coffone of Blue Ridge, Ga., a freelance writer. 

“In those days radio was like magic. And Wolfman Jack was part of that magic,” she said. “You could lie in bed at night listening to him on your transistor radio.” 

At his peak, Wolfman Jack was heard on more than 2,000 radio stations in fifty-three countries.

 

In 1995, Wolfman Jack, 57, suffered a massive heart attack in Belvidere, and literally died in Lou’s arms. 

Lou’s words at a “celebration of life” service were: “All he tried to form was a circle of love. He has waited long enough in the green room of life to do his biggest performance, before the throne of the Almighty.” 

Paul South of The Virginian-Pilot, published in Norfolk, Va., wrote at the time: “His purpose was happiness. They came by the hundreds. Bikers and broadcast executives. Old folks and small children. Fans attired in Sunday best and cut-off shorts. All to remember Wolfman Jack.”