What it will take to get me to return to Reidsville

Ten years ago this summer I packed up my car with the bare essentials and my dog Tammy and I left our hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina.  I didn’t know where we were going.  We were headed toward literally only God knew where.

We spent the better part of an entire year crossing America, looking for a new place to call home.  When we got to California I decided that we had gone as far from our old home as we could, so I spent a few months looking for work there.  That didn’t happen.

I didn’t want to go back to Reidsville a failure, but that’s pretty much what happened.  And I was there for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what my next course of action should be. That didn’t go so well.  Concerned friends came up with a plan: to let Tammy and me stay with them in South Carolina for awhile, long enough to figure some things out.  They were going to give me time to straighten myself.

That turned into a year and a half long stay in the Greenville, South Carolina area.  And it was time that I truly did use to heal and grow from.  I wouldn’t be the person I am today, of stronger mind, had it not been for those friends coming together to give me the assistance.

In November of 2018 I relocated to the Spartanburg area to be close to a job that I had taken.  A few months after that I changed jobs and became a mental health professional: by far the most reward career that I have ever had during the course of my life so far.  There wasn’t a day that went by that I wasn’t helping people.  And then the economy turned rotten and I had to leave that.  Since then I’ve had a string of jobs that haven’t had anything of that kind of stability or sense of personal fulfillment.

It’s been growing for awhile now: the encouragement from many friends to return to Reidsville, North Carolina.  To “come home,” to a place that God had told me to take up stakes and leave.  Now, that really would have made me feel like a glorious failure.  I was supposed to have left for good, shaking the dust from my boots and apart from a few rare occasions, to never return.

Circumstances lately have led my friends in North Carolina to tell me even more that “it’s time to come back, we need you here.”

I’ve thought long and hard about it.  And I’ve come to a conclusion: there IS something that would bring me back to Reidsville, North Carolina.  This time to stay.

I still maintain a great interest in what happens in Reidsville and the rest of Rockingham County.  The politics there is something I keep abreast of.  I stay informed about new businesses that come to the area.  I’m glad that it seems that Reidsville is making a terrific comeback, after decades of economic downturn going back over thirty years (the day it was announce that American Tobacco was being sold was truly a dark day for the city).

Where am I going with all of this?

Okay, here it is: what it will take to entice me to come back to Reidsville…

Television station WGSR would have to find new owners and they would have to make me its general manager.

I cannot begin to convey how many people have been telling me about how WGSR, the television station located on Gilmer Street in downtown Reidsville, is an embarrassment.  But then, they don’t really have to tell me anything.  I saw what was coming to WGSR a long time ago and knew it was headed toward a bad end.

WGSR used to be a very good company.  For its size and broadcasting footprint, it served the market well.  I was there as an employee twenty years ago and was truly amazed about the operation.  It had a healthy variety of locally produced programs, along with some syndicated content.  It was a thriving television station.  It seemed bigger than it was in actuality.  I was impressed.

But those days are long gone.  There is no locally-made programming anymore.  In fact, very few people seem to be going into the Gilmer Street location at all.  It’s being primarily used as a transmitter site, getting its feed from sister station WMDV located across the state line in Virginia.  For all intents and purposes Reidsville has no television station to call its own anymore.

What happened to WGSR?  How did such a thriving company come to such an inglorious fate?

It happened because of Charles Roark: the general manager of the entire operation.

WGSR came to be bought by Azile Roark, who also owned WMDV in Martinsville, Virginia.  Azile Roark put her son Charles in charge of both stations.  Sort of giving the Reidsville/Danville/Martinsville area a “super station” with coverage of a tidy little bit of real estate across the region.

And for awhile, it was good.  The two stations were under the same corporate umbrella but they retained their own respective identities.  WGSR served Reidsville, Eden and the rest of Rockingham County while WMDV was focused on Martinsville and Danville.  They each had their own unique personality.

But Charles Roark didn't know how to be responsible with a television station.  He was fixated on generating controversy.  He was, and still is, about riling people up to make a big deal out of it so that he could broadcast it.  Something that was best symbolized by what was for quite a long time the two stations’ biggest client: the “Church of Christ” cult headed by a very evil man named Johnny Robertson.  It could be said that Robertson was the real owner of WGSR and WMDV.  When he told Charles Roark to jump, Roark asked “how high?”.  It was a pretty slick system: Robertson was being funded by “the mysterious East Texans”, who provided Lord only knows how much money.  Robertson paid Roark for something around four or five hours of live broadcast time on the two stations each week.  Robertson and his cronies would go on their shows, which were invariably used to attack other churches and Christians because they weren’t “good enough” and “not real Christians”.  It was a surefire controversy generator and that’s something that Roark specialized in.

It went on like this for years.  Meanwhile legitimate local shows began ending production.  Fewer and fewer people wanted to be affiliated with a station that was on such a decline.  The station began filling the time up with reruns of the news and call-in shows.

The decline was dramatic enough already.  And then a year ago Johnny Robertson died by suicide.  The money train ended for WGSR/WMDV.  The two stations no longer had reliable income.

I’ve heard a lot of stories over the past several months about what is being done to keep both stations on the air.  It’s not my place to share the details of that.  But I honestly have to shake my head in sad disbelief.  The situation is on the air for all to witness however.  There is NO local news coverage for Reidsville.  WGSR is only mirroring the feed from WMDV, without dedicated programming of its own.  The few exceptions are for things like the Reidsville Christmas parade.

Speaking of THAT, Charles Roark almost single-handedly destroyed this past year’s parade.  Maybe he was possessed by the dark powers and “the Devil made him do it” but for whatever reason he jumped into the midst of a routine by one of the area's dance studios and threw the entire performance into chaos.  But then, this is a man who has made himself out to be the focus of the station’s broadcasts.  It doesn’t strike him that most people DON’T want to see him shirtless at a water park, or being on vacation in Key West, or many other places.  The man is a full-tilt narcissist and that’s something that a television station can’t be fixated upon.

So let me summarize: WGSR is a television station in name only.  It’s Reidsville location is not producing content.  The programming that it is sending out is from the sister station in Martinsville, across the state line.  That programming, well… it’s not good, if we are to be honest.

Meanwhile Reidsville is coming to turn things around as a community.  New businesses are coming to the area.  The shopping mall is being dramatically renovated.  People are moving northward from Greensboro.  Industries are looking at expanding to Rockingham County.  The place is starting to make a very significant comeback away from the stagnancy it’s been in for more than three full decades…

But the television station, to be very frank, sucks.  It does not reflect at all the community that’s coming to be bustling around it.  In fact, WGSR has become a black eye on the face of Reidsville.  “Star News” is a bad joke.  One that stopped being funny a long time ago.

The town, all of Rockingham County actually, deserves better than that.

So, this is what it will take to bring me back to Reidsville to stay for good.  WGSR has to find new owners.  RESPONSIBLE owners.  It has to come under the control of people who sincerely care about making a great impression and are committed to honesty and integrity.  They have to be people who appreciate the Reidsville community and want to serve it to the very best of their ability.  And then they have to hire me to be its general manager.

I don’t particularly care about what happens with WMDV.  The focus has to be on Reidsville, Eden, and the rest of Rockingham County.  That means locally produced programming, local advertisers, local news coverage (including sports).  Local talk shows.  Fill the rest of the airtime with syndicated content that is reliable and trustworthy.  When I was at WGSR we had a few religious shows and classics like The Lone Ranger on weekday afternoons.  As well as a syndicated “horror host” show on Saturdays.  Those seemed to have their viewers and there is no reason why they couldn’t again.

The station is there.  It’s not being used to its fullest potential but the studios and equipment and transmitter are sitting on Gilmer Street, waiting.  There is talent to be found in the area that can provide the heart and soul of programs.  The number of businesses looking to get the word out is growing by the month.

And people are hungry. They want and NEED a broadcast outlet that serves them and reflects their community.

I know these things, better than most.  Even though I’ve been an expatriate of Reidsville for a decade, I’ve stayed very informed.  And what has happened to the town’s only television station is an absolute travesty.

There it is.  If new people come in and take over WGSR, rebrand it, move it as far away from the current operation as it needs to be, and bring me aboard to be its general manager, then I will gladly come back to Reidsville.

Those are my terms.

 

Categories: charles roark, communication, north carolina, reidsville, television, wgsr