DEL RIO TO HONOR WOLFMAN JACK

DEL RIO - Nearly four decades later, lawyer Arturo Gonzalez can
still clearly picture the polite, dark-haired East Coast disc jockey
who showed up without notice at his Pecan Street office back in late
1963.

"He introduced himself as Bob Smith, and he wanted to know who was the
owner of radio station XERF," recalls Gonzalez, 94, who at the time sold
advertising contracts in the United States for the super-powered station in
nearby Ciudad Acuna, Mexico.

"I said 'What can you do?' and he said 'I'm a radio announcer and I can
sell whatever you have to sell.' And I think he was on the radio station
that same night, selling baby chicks - 100 for $2.98," Gonzalez said,
chuckling.

Once on the air, the mild-mannered, clean-cut Smith became howling,
growling Wolfman Jack, and the rest, as they say, is rock 'n' roll history.

Now, nearly 40 years after he left XERF for another super-powered station
in Tijuana, Mexico, and seven years after his death from a heart attack,
the Wolfman is coming back to Del Rio.

If all goes well, at this time next year, a larger-than-life bronze statute
of the great caped howler will loom over a downtown intersection. A Wolfman
Jack museum and a music festival will be in the works.

During his six months in Del Rio, the late-night XERF DJ mesmerized
teenagers across America and beyond with his radio antics, ultra-hip
delivery and anything-goes playlist. His border broadcasts were powered by
a 250,000-watt transmitter five times the juice allowed on the U.S. side.

"Wherever ya are, and whatever ya doin', I wancha ta lay ya hands on da
raydeeoo, lay back wid me, and squeeze ma knobs. We gonna feel it ta-night.
... OOOOOO WWWWOOOOOoooo. This is Wolfman Jack down here with da donkeys.
Gonna get you some soul," he would howl.

"Get naked, blow da evil weed, kiss your teachers. Wolfman play the best
records in the business and then he eat 'em," growled the lupine mystery
man, according to the book "Border Radio," by Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford.

The Wolfman was an instant sensation. Gonzalez recalls that soon after he
hit the airwaves, hawking everything from chickens to virility pills,
advertising sales boomed, and he had to hire another dozen young women to
handle the flood of orders.

"He was bringing in a lot of money, and when he left, sales went way down,"
he said.

But in the grand visions that Del Rio mover and shaker Jay Johnson has for
this dusty border city, the Wolfman can still make cash registers ring.

"Del Rio deserves to be a hotshot town, and it will be, and Wolfman Jack
will seal the deal," he said.

"This thing is going to be flat-out explosive. Wolfman Jack was really the
catalyst who pulled together the world of rock 'n' roll. He was heard in
Australia, in Asia, in Europe and Canada," said Johnson, who owns a bed and
breakfast and several restored buildings here.

So far, all systems are go. A nonprofit foundation is being formed, and Del
Rio officials have signed on to the project, as has the Wolfman's widow,
Lou Smith of North Carolina.

"I'm just tickled pink that they want to do that. Del Rio is the place
where Robert W. Smith became Wolfman Jack," she said.

Michael Maiden, a nationally known sculptor, is already at work on a model,
and former Wolfman publicist Mike Venema is looking up old buddies from
James Brown to Alice Cooper to help out.

Three weeks ago, Venema and Maiden, who is based in Oregon, came to Del Rio
and met with Johnson and other local boosters. Both came away sold on the
project.

"We're committed to Del Rio. It's the perfect place, and Acuna was
fantastic as well. It was very reminiscent of an earlier time," Venema said.

Maiden, appropriately best known for his wildlife sculptures, grew up on a
ranch near Walla Walla, in eastern Washington, and had his first encounter
with the Wolfman when he was 13 or 14.

"I'd listen to him late at night on my little Montgomery Ward transistor
radio. He would fade in and out," recalled Maiden, 52.

"And I thought he was a black man. Most people did, and he kind of
perpetuated that. He was one of the DJs who made black music popular," he
said.

"Until late in his career, no one knew what he looked like. I most
certainly didn't until 'American Graffiti,'" the 1973 hit movie by George
Lucas in which the Wolfman played himself.

The sculptor is coy about exactly what the bronze Wolfman will look like.

"My job is to try and make this icon recognizable. He was a wild and crazy
guy, and kind of a whimsical character, and he's not going to be standing
straight up and down like Jefferson Davis," he said.

Both Maiden and Venema say they are confident the $130,000 needed for the
sculpture will be easily raised once the word gets out.

For Del Rio, a quiet border city on U.S. 90 known to most travelers as no
more than a gas stop on the way to West Texas and the Big Bend National
Park, a hip tourist attraction is sorely needed.

With mild sarcasm, some locals refer to Del Rio as "the gateway to Ciudad
Acuna," the much larger Mexican city across the river that offers a more
glamorous nightlife.

The Wolfman project has surfaced just as Del Rio is launching a
revitalization of Main Street, a dowdy thoroughfare of retail shops and
fading classical buildings.

The city recently won backing for the Main Street project from the Texas
Historical Commission, and coordinator Ginger Lyons said Wolfman Jack fits
right in.

"Including him in our Main Street plan is vital. We could use any tourist
attraction we can get. Everyone here knows the story of Wolfman Jack, and
we're very proud of him," she said.

If Wolfman Jack does for Del Rio what another rock icon has done for
Lubbock, the project could prove a real magnet. Each year, 35,000 to 40,000
people visit the Buddy Holly museum, which opened in 1999.

"Many people come here because Buddy Holly was from here. They make
pilgrimages to Lubbock, Texas, for that reason alone. We get people from
Britain, Australia and all over Europe," said Connie Gibbons, museum director.

The official launch of the Wolfman Jack project in Del Rio is set for March
15, and at that time a model of the statue of rock 'n' roll's most famous
DJ may be unveiled.

The museum would feature Wolfman artifacts and photos to tell his life
story. But given the Wolfman's love of invention and hyperbole, exactly
what happened here 40 years ago may never be known.

In his autobiography, "Have Mercy," the Wolfman gives a lurid,
action-packed account of his arrival at Del Rio and his armed takeover of
XERF, later known as "The Wolfman Jack Radio Shootout Saga."

According to this somewhat apocryphal account, the Wolfman and a buddy
arrived in Ciudad Acuna to find XERF in receivership, and quickly
engineered a coup to reclaim it from hostile hands.

With guns and bribes, lawsuits and hustle, according to the Wolfman's tale,
he took over XERF. He then remade its programming from a loony collection
of huckster preachers and hillbilly music (the original Carter family,
"Johnny Cash's future in-laws," had broadcast to the nation from Ciudad
Acuna's high-powered towers) to become the hottest rock station in the
world led by the most notorious underground DJ.

"I was truly glowing in those days on XERF, because I was a young buck
doing my thing right where I always wanted to be, hitting the airwaves with
gale-force blues, rhythm and blues, and the most soulful rock 'n' roll, all
sent your way through the treetop tall platinum-coated driver tubes of the
most powerful commercial station on the planet," Wolfman wrote.

According to the book, the final battles for XERF were won in a shootout in
a cheap Del Rio hotel between the Wolfman and "Montez," the evil Mexican
who wanted to reclaim the station, and a follow-up ambush in the Coahuilan
desert.

"I've still got a little crease on the end of my nose from that first
bullet. The second one dug into the back side of the van's door frame, six
inches behind where my head had been," wrote the Wolfman about the late
night ambush.

Lou Smith also has vivid memories of Del Rio as a cowboy town with a
Spanish flavor. She said the men who met her husband on the Mexican side of
the bridge wore guns and cartridge belts crisscrossed on their chests.

And much of what the Wolfman wrote about actually happened, including
problems with rival factions and the federales, and a late night on-the-air
cry for help from XERF, Smith said.

"We were staying in the Del Rio Hotel, and as we were falling to sleep,
listening to the radio, they broke right into the show and started yelling
'pistoleros, pistoleros.' They were calling for the police and for help,"
she recalled.

"Wolf jumped up and went over there to help those guys, and I don't know
exactly what he did."

Arturo Gonzalez only chuckles when told of such accounts.

Forty years later, he remembers no lawsuits, no shootouts and no armed
takeovers, only a polite and reliable guy named Bob Smith who, when seated
behind the microphone, became a jive-talking crazy man.

"If you met him, you probably wouldn't think that much of him, but on the
radio he brought out a lot of excitement, and a lot of people were happy to
listen to him," he said.

"He was very impressive, very dedicated and very reliable. We believed
everything he would tell us. That's the kind of relationship it was," he said.

And, said Gonzalez, a Del Rio memorial to the Wolfman is long overdue.

"He was my friend, and I think he deserves it. He put Del Rio on the map.
And he was a good man. If he could help someone he would. That's the kind
of man I remember," he said.