Jason:
Sorryu, I mispalced your personal e-mail address. Have you ever heard of Chester "String Bean" Smith? If so, or if not, you might find an article written by Robert Price in yesterday's (Sunday) edition in the Bakersfield Californian informing for what you're doing. If you're interested,try their website [url=http://www.BakersfieldCalifornian.com,]www.BakersfieldCalifornian.com,[/url] or I can mail it to you.
Gary
Jason Odd.. Possible Info for your book
Moderator: Dave Mudgett
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GaryHoetker
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Smiley Roberts
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Gary,
I tried clicking on the site,w/ no results.
Come to find out,you've included a comma, after "com" in the link. You need to go back,
& "erase" it. BTW,looked for the article on Chester,& couldn't find it. What's it under?
------------------
<font face="monospace" size="3"><pre> ~ ~
©¿© ars longa,
mm vita brevis
www.ntsga.com </pre></font>
I tried clicking on the site,w/ no results.
Come to find out,you've included a comma, after "com" in the link. You need to go back,
& "erase" it. BTW,looked for the article on Chester,& couldn't find it. What's it under?
------------------
<font face="monospace" size="3"><pre> ~ ~
©¿© ars longa,
mm vita brevis
www.ntsga.com </pre></font>
-
GaryHoetker
- Posts: 485
- Joined: 16 Jan 1999 1:01 am
- Location: Bakersfield, CA, USA
- State/Province: -
- Country: United States
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Jason Odd
- Posts: 3140
- Joined: 17 Feb 1999 1:01 am
- Location: Stawell, Victoria, Australia
- State/Province: -
- Country: United States
Gary, my email is: kingbuzzo@optusnet.com.au
And when the Bakersfield Californian's address is online, it's:www.bakersfield.com/
--------------
State media mogul returns to Bakersfield
Saturday August 24, 2002, 10:49:30 PM
You've heard this story before.
The country-music star, having dabbled a little in radio and television, decides to give the business a full-fledged try. Over time, he builds a fortune on the management side of the entertainment business. By the time he gets into his 70s, he's known as much for his business savvy as for anything he ever sang into a microphone.
The name that leaps to mind, however, is probably not Chester Smith. Not if you live in the town where Buck Owens is king.
Fact is, though, Smith is as much of a media mogul as Owens. Much more so, in fact, if the game is television.
Get ready, because Mr. Smith is coming to Bakersfield, and he'sbringing the weight of a considerable media empire with him.
Chester "String Bean" Smith, once mentioned alongside Elvis Presley as one of the country's most promising new singers, is getting ready to start up a new TV station in Buck Country.
Smith, 72, is the top executive of Modesto-based Sainte Partners II LP, which runs seven television stations in Northern and Central California. When Smith flips the "on" switch for Channel 11, Bakersfield's new Spanish-language Telemundo affiliate, sometime in the next six to eight months, Sainte Partners will have an eighth TV station, and Bakersfield will have its sixth.
Smith is a millionaire many times over, having swapped some property with Univision for a substantial amount of network stock in 1996. (The value of the stock was initially a reported $45 million, and Smith said it later peaked at about $70 million, though it's worth substantially less now.)
He still owns three stations in the Chico-Redding market (Fox, Univision and UPN); two in Eureka (Fox and Univision); and Telemundo stations in three other markets: Fresno-Visalia, Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto and Monterey-Salinas. That means he's in every TV market north of Visalia except San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
So why haven't you heard of Chester Smith the recording artist? Probably because Smith stepped away from the music business way back in 1963, having decided his wife and three daughters deserved him more than the record-buying public did. He'd made his mark in 1955 with "Wait a Little Longer, Please Jesus," a song that pushed him to the top of a new-talent poll by country-music disc jockeys at the time (and was later ranked by the Country Music Hall of Fame as one of the best country-gospel songs ever recorded). But after he bought himself that first radio station, the singing career was history.
He remembers sitting in a car outside a rowdy dance hall the night he broke the news to Owens, then a fast-rising star in the music business.
"You'll be back," Owens told him.
Owens was right, if a little imprecise about the timing of it.
One night six years ago, at a hotel in San Francisco, Smith got sick and lapsed into a three-day coma. When he snapped out of it, he said, he asked God if there was anything in his life he hadn't satisfactorily completed.
It dawned on him right away: He hadn't played things out as a performer.
So, in 1999, Smith resumed his singing career, teaming up with Merle Haggard on an album of country gospel songs. The album, "California Blend," was released in August 2001, and it produced "Wreck on the Highway," which hit No. 1 on the country-gospel charts.
"It's very unusual for somebody to come back like I did," Smith said. "It's an act of God, really. How can a guy hop off the bus, stay off for 40 years, and then climb back on? It's been incredible."
Bakersfield connections criss-cross Smith's professional life almost from the beginning.
He knew Cousin Herb Henson before the legendary TV host ever set foot in the southern valley. Henson, who played six nights a week at Modesto's Wagon Wheel saloon, often visited the studios of KTRB, where Smith was a teen-age celebrity. Henson hoped to get a piece of the action, but there wasn't room.
"One day he told me, 'I've got a chance to get on the radio down in Bakersfield on KPMC,'" Smith said. "So he went down there, and lo and behold, he came up with a local TV show, too."
"Cousin Herb's Trading Post" was on the air in Bakersfield from mid-1953 until November 1963, when Henson died of a heart attack at age 38.
Smith, in a sense, became the Northern California version of Cousin Herb. When television came to Sacramento, he signed on with the local CBS affiliate, Channel 10, and hosted a show every Friday at 7 p.m., from 1955 through 1958. He had a show on Fresno's CBS affiliate, Channel 12, for much of that same time. It was on Monday nights at 7 from 1956 through 1957.
"It was a haul, but I had a driver and a new Cadillac," Smith said. "I didn't do the pink, though. Didn't put any signs in windows, either."
The two TV commitments left Smith's schedule open for travel during the middle of the week, and he sometimes visited Bakersfield. "Somebody would book me for a weeknight at the Blackboard -- a Tuesday or Wednesday, or whatever it was," Smith said. "The Blackboard was very colorful."
To put it mildly.
Smith says the Bakersfield station will be the last one he adds -- and the last one Bakersfield gets under the present station-distribution structure. "The frequencies are all full," he noted.
Smith said he bought the permit for Channel 11 "eight or nine years ago, and it's taken this long to come to fruition." Smith said he's had no discussions with Kern County cable companies, but he expect that the Telemundo feed will come through his station.
He can't say if the new station will offer local news ("Premature," he said) and he won't say if the station will be new construction, or where it might be located. "But we've got a plan," he said.
In any case, Chester Smith is returning to Bakersfield. Like a couple other things in his life, it's been a long time coming.
And when the Bakersfield Californian's address is online, it's:www.bakersfield.com/
--------------
State media mogul returns to Bakersfield
Saturday August 24, 2002, 10:49:30 PM
You've heard this story before.
The country-music star, having dabbled a little in radio and television, decides to give the business a full-fledged try. Over time, he builds a fortune on the management side of the entertainment business. By the time he gets into his 70s, he's known as much for his business savvy as for anything he ever sang into a microphone.
The name that leaps to mind, however, is probably not Chester Smith. Not if you live in the town where Buck Owens is king.
Fact is, though, Smith is as much of a media mogul as Owens. Much more so, in fact, if the game is television.
Get ready, because Mr. Smith is coming to Bakersfield, and he'sbringing the weight of a considerable media empire with him.
Chester "String Bean" Smith, once mentioned alongside Elvis Presley as one of the country's most promising new singers, is getting ready to start up a new TV station in Buck Country.
Smith, 72, is the top executive of Modesto-based Sainte Partners II LP, which runs seven television stations in Northern and Central California. When Smith flips the "on" switch for Channel 11, Bakersfield's new Spanish-language Telemundo affiliate, sometime in the next six to eight months, Sainte Partners will have an eighth TV station, and Bakersfield will have its sixth.
Smith is a millionaire many times over, having swapped some property with Univision for a substantial amount of network stock in 1996. (The value of the stock was initially a reported $45 million, and Smith said it later peaked at about $70 million, though it's worth substantially less now.)
He still owns three stations in the Chico-Redding market (Fox, Univision and UPN); two in Eureka (Fox and Univision); and Telemundo stations in three other markets: Fresno-Visalia, Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto and Monterey-Salinas. That means he's in every TV market north of Visalia except San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
So why haven't you heard of Chester Smith the recording artist? Probably because Smith stepped away from the music business way back in 1963, having decided his wife and three daughters deserved him more than the record-buying public did. He'd made his mark in 1955 with "Wait a Little Longer, Please Jesus," a song that pushed him to the top of a new-talent poll by country-music disc jockeys at the time (and was later ranked by the Country Music Hall of Fame as one of the best country-gospel songs ever recorded). But after he bought himself that first radio station, the singing career was history.
He remembers sitting in a car outside a rowdy dance hall the night he broke the news to Owens, then a fast-rising star in the music business.
"You'll be back," Owens told him.
Owens was right, if a little imprecise about the timing of it.
One night six years ago, at a hotel in San Francisco, Smith got sick and lapsed into a three-day coma. When he snapped out of it, he said, he asked God if there was anything in his life he hadn't satisfactorily completed.
It dawned on him right away: He hadn't played things out as a performer.
So, in 1999, Smith resumed his singing career, teaming up with Merle Haggard on an album of country gospel songs. The album, "California Blend," was released in August 2001, and it produced "Wreck on the Highway," which hit No. 1 on the country-gospel charts.
"It's very unusual for somebody to come back like I did," Smith said. "It's an act of God, really. How can a guy hop off the bus, stay off for 40 years, and then climb back on? It's been incredible."
Bakersfield connections criss-cross Smith's professional life almost from the beginning.
He knew Cousin Herb Henson before the legendary TV host ever set foot in the southern valley. Henson, who played six nights a week at Modesto's Wagon Wheel saloon, often visited the studios of KTRB, where Smith was a teen-age celebrity. Henson hoped to get a piece of the action, but there wasn't room.
"One day he told me, 'I've got a chance to get on the radio down in Bakersfield on KPMC,'" Smith said. "So he went down there, and lo and behold, he came up with a local TV show, too."
"Cousin Herb's Trading Post" was on the air in Bakersfield from mid-1953 until November 1963, when Henson died of a heart attack at age 38.
Smith, in a sense, became the Northern California version of Cousin Herb. When television came to Sacramento, he signed on with the local CBS affiliate, Channel 10, and hosted a show every Friday at 7 p.m., from 1955 through 1958. He had a show on Fresno's CBS affiliate, Channel 12, for much of that same time. It was on Monday nights at 7 from 1956 through 1957.
"It was a haul, but I had a driver and a new Cadillac," Smith said. "I didn't do the pink, though. Didn't put any signs in windows, either."
The two TV commitments left Smith's schedule open for travel during the middle of the week, and he sometimes visited Bakersfield. "Somebody would book me for a weeknight at the Blackboard -- a Tuesday or Wednesday, or whatever it was," Smith said. "The Blackboard was very colorful."
To put it mildly.
Smith says the Bakersfield station will be the last one he adds -- and the last one Bakersfield gets under the present station-distribution structure. "The frequencies are all full," he noted.
Smith said he bought the permit for Channel 11 "eight or nine years ago, and it's taken this long to come to fruition." Smith said he's had no discussions with Kern County cable companies, but he expect that the Telemundo feed will come through his station.
He can't say if the new station will offer local news ("Premature," he said) and he won't say if the station will be new construction, or where it might be located. "But we've got a plan," he said.
In any case, Chester Smith is returning to Bakersfield. Like a couple other things in his life, it's been a long time coming.