It’s been a year and a half since the passing of Mahlon Nickence, the best-known voice of WOJB-FM 88.9 in Reserve, WI. Since then, former program manager Dave Kellar has resumed hosting the Saturday honky-tonk show that brought Mahlon his notoriety.
On Saturday nights, the station’s switchboard still lights up an hour before the show goes on the air, with old-timers requesting songs by Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Wilma Lee, children asking for novelty tunes like “Funny Face,” and young lovers asking for the off-color John Prine-Iris DeMent duet “In Spite of Ourselves.”
Nine years ago Mahlon, a Korean War veteran and a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwes, began bringing suitcases full of his personal record collection into WOJB’s modest studio. He was trained in as a volunteer DJ by Kellar, but his popularity was due in part to the fact that the training never quite stuck. He missed needle drops, talked over the records, and he was sometimes hard to understand. If you didn’t know Mahlon was a lifelong teetotaler, you might have thought he’d had a nip or two. According to those who knew him well, his somewhat garbled speech was due to his refusal to wear his partial dentures on the air. “You’d hear him on the air and he’d make these mistakes and people loved it, because they said it was real,” said station manager Camille Lacapa recently. “They could relate to him because he was just like them. He made mistakes, and he laughed at his mistakes.”
Before taking over the honky-tonk show, Mahlon was well known on the reservation for his community work, including serving as its first fire chief. According to Bob Albee, a Minneapolis media professional who helped found WOJB 20 years ago, Mahlon’s broadcasts also helped “turn the hearts” of his fellow elders on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. They were skeptical and suspicious of the reservation’s radio station until they heard one of their own on the air, playing the old country songs they’d grown up with. By the time of his death, Mahlon had amassed a large and dedicated listenership among locals, both Indian and non-Indian, and among the thousands of hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, and cross-county skiers who flock to northwest Wisconsin throughout the year. Evelyn Nickence, who served as call-screener for the honky-tonk, said she and Mahlon would often get calls from Twin Cities residents who had driven north and east until they could pick up WOJB’s signal, then they’d pulled off the road, parked, and listened to the show.
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