The information below is the actual nomination language used by the person who submitted the nomination. All submissions had to answer three questions: one about the nominee's career, one about their contribution to the communist they served, and finally, about their contribution to the broadcasting industry in Arkansas.

Career and accomplishments as an Arkansas Broadcaster

Broadway Joe Booker is an endangered species.

Easily grouped into the most recognized names in Arkansas radio, and arguably all Arkansas broadcasting, he has spent more than half his life on the airwaves, including nearly four decades in Little Rock alone. An elder statesman of the airwaves, he is one of only a few remaining personalities who can legitimately call himself a former disc jockey from the era before mandated corporate playlists and preprogrammed digital feeds.

Booker cuts a contrasting figure at the Cumulus Media studios in west Little Rock, where he wears the title director of programming alongside that of broadcasting legend. A lifetime in radio has invested in him a curator’s log of history about the local market, which he displays during a tour of the building. Poking his head into a half-dozen studios, he offers a lived piece of trivia about each station that calls the place home.

At the same time, he is no relic who shakes a fist as the industry parade marches by. Physically, a love of athletics stretching back to high school, particularly basketball, has kept him trim and provides an energy that more than matches that of his considerably younger co-hosts. Throughout the morning show, he is surrounded by blinking apparatuses on all sides, from a space-age console to various hand-held devices, which he juggles effortlessly as he talks about the news of the day.

Booker’s approach to his craft has also stood the test of time, despite a line of past management types trying to change him at various points in his career. He resisted on the strength of his conviction that connection to the audience transcends changing fashion and taste. Possessed of a lacquered conversational baritone that moves up half an octave on the air, Booker is anything the audience needs him to be, most of what they want him to be and always uniquely himself.

“In the ’90s, early 2000s, I remember being told, ‘You’re talking too much. You’re saying too much. People don’t want to hear this. They don’t want to hear that’,” he said. “It always amazed me how they would say that all the urban audience wants you to do is play good music. Basically, just keep good music on.

“I remember going to a convention and meeting a gentleman by the name of Al Bell who was a radio guy before he owned Stax Records in Memphis, [Tenn.] In fact, he used to work at KOKY [in Little Rock]. He said at the convention, ‘Every good radio station has to have three elements, especially if you’re an urban station: You have to have good information, education and entertainment. If you have those three things, you can be successful.’”

Listening to Booker work, as thousands do every day, is to hear a vocal performance that morphs easily to match the subject matter, his delivery deepened and nuanced by time. During the course of each show, the audience savors notes of newscaster gravitas and Sunday preaching, of barber shop debate and community coach, critic and cheerleader, all of which are finished with enthusiasm. The station’s nickname is the “People’s Station,” and he is the people’s voice, the person his audience knows and the message his audience trusts.

“We have one of the youngest engineers in all of our Cumulus stations. He’s probably in his early 30s,” Booker said. “He said to me one time, ‘Man, every time I go someplace, if I mention Power 92, everybody knows you. Y’all are just like Facebook.’ I thought about it, and I’m like, well, you know, before Facebook, it was us. That’s where people came for their information, and I think a lot of people still do. I think that’s important.

“As African Americans, we expect to get all our information, education and entertainment from our radio station, and that goes back to the ?50, ?60s and ?70s. That’s the history of us as African Americans. We expect to get it there, so you can give information. You can talk; you just have to be talking about relevant information and educating people. The entertainment is the music that we play, the little jokes on the side and things like that that we do, but if you’re giving people substance, information and education, you can always win, especially in the urban format, because people will listen.”In five years with the U.S. Air Force, Booker would get to see the world, specifically at duty stations in Germany, Korea, Japan and Thailand. During that period, he also got his first taste of broadcasting, getting on the air in Korea in 1976. Following the service, he began his civilian broadcasting career at tiny KWTB in Lonoke, followed by Little Rock’s KOKY (then AM 1250) in 1978.

His arrival coincided perfectly with the rising popularity of Black radio, which would soon evolve into the urban genre, and was on the cusp of the new musical art form of rap, which would widen the audience considerably.

Contributions to their community during their time as an Arkansas Broadcaster

Booker lit a path back to Arkansas, bearing the lessons he had learned in South Carolina about how not to manage people, and doubled down on his belief in the importance of a servant attitude when it came to the community. Even today, it is a creed he lives by authentically. In addition to everything he promotes on air or in personal appearances on behalf of the station, there are two or three passion projects to which he devotes his own time, talent and treasure, especially as it pertains to youth, from sports programs to education and mentoring.

“Community service has been, for me, what has made the station and my career, and it’s an honor to see some of my younger people continue to do the same thing. We have people who are doing scholarship fundraising and other things to give back to the community,” he said. “We do a lot of paid things, of course, but things like being in the [Martin Luther King Jr. Day] parade was community service that we didn’t get paid to do. People expect us to be there and do things like that.

“I think that’s the key to winning: Yeah, you have a platform, but what are you saying? Are you saying something positive? Are you saying something negative? For us as a radio station, we’ve been here a long time, but what have you really done for the people and the community? I would think, if I look back on it, our work has not been in vain. I think that we’ve helped a lot of people.”

For evidence, Booker need look no farther than his own trophy case, jammed as it is with tokens of esteem from his many charitable and nonprofit works. Among them are the Power 92 Jammers Charity Basketball Team, which has raised millions through benefit games; Jacksonville Mighty Vikings youth football; the Watershed; the Little Rock Crisis Team and Gang Task Force; and the OK Program, a national mentoring model for Black men and boys, to provide just a sample.

In fact, helping people is about all the constancy that Booker gets to enjoy anymore, given how radio continues to struggle to adapt to a new and expensive marketplace, the changing nature of the music business, and transitioning from outmoded business models to those trying to capture an increasingly fractured audience mix to keep the lights on.

Contributions to our industry

“I think right now radio is trying to find itself,” Booker said. “Things have changed. Social media platforms have taken a lot of it over. The difference between radio, to me, and social media is credible information from the source. Social media provides information, but you definitely have to check the credibility of it. I wish I had the answer to where radio will be 10 years from now, but I have no idea.”

For the time being, Booker will continue with his proven formula of entertainment, information and education presented in a positive, optimistic tone.

“If you ever listen to the newscasts that we do, the first two stories are always going to be information and education,” he said. “The first two stories today, the first was about the weather. The second was about trash pickup. We got to the guy that got killed at the airport in a plane crash, but it’s never going to be the first thing that you hear about. We try and give information, but we try to give it in a decent way.”

Booker gives no hint as to how long he intends to continue to work, but his place in Arkansas history is assured. One look at his office walls, bowed under the weight of plaques and awards, photos of grinning players from his youth football league, and various mementos that fill every square inch of space speak to the influence he has had on the community. Leaning against the front of his desk is a large illustration of the Mt. Rushmore of Arkansas radio personalities that displays his face on the cliff alongside stalwarts Tommy Smith, the late Bob Robbins and Craig O’Neill, among whom Booker is the only one still full time on the air. When pressed about it, he is deferential and quick to share the praise with others at Cumulus Media.

“People ask me sometimes, and I’ll say I don’t know any other station, in the urban format for sure, that has a morning show that’s been around for 35-plus years, to have a midday person that’s been on the station for over 25 years and an afternoon drive person that’s been on for close to 30 years,” he said. “I know there’s no other station in the market that has that kind of talent that’s been on for so long. People know these guys. It’s not like, ‘I wonder what he’s like.’ In the last 30 years, you’ve probably met all of us somewhere.”

“I believe in the art form,” he added. “Over the years, when people told me not to do something I knew was right, I just kept giving people information and education as I could find it. Over the years, I just never stopped talking.”