Ed Walker

Who is Ed Walker?

Ed Walker is a Washington, D.C., radio personality. He hosts a weekly four-hour Sunday night program, The Big Broadcast, on WAMU-FM, featuring vintage radio programs from the 1930s to 1950s, such as Gunsmoke, The Jack Benny Show, The Lone Ranger, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Superman. Walker began hosting The Big Broadcast in 1990 when his friend John Hickman discontinued hosting due to illness; the show, which started in 1964 as Recollections, is the longest running program on WAMU.

Walker, who has been totally blind since birth, said that growing up "radio was my comic books, movies, everything". After graduating from Maryland School for the Blind, he was the first blind student at American University in Washington where, in 1950, he helped launch the campus radio station, WAMU-AM — the predecessor of WAMU-FM. Willard Scott joined the radio station the following year, forming a professional and personal bond with Walker that continues to this day. Scott said in his book, The Joy of Living, that they are "closer than most brothers".

From 1955 to 1974, Walker teamed with Scott as co-hosts of the nightly Joy Boys program, an improvised comedy radio show in Washington. On Joy Boys, Scott sketched a list of characters and a few lead lines setting up the situation, which Walker would commit to memory or note on his Braille typewriter. The program began on WRC-AM, an NBC owned-and-operated station, moving in 1972 to WWDC-AM. In a 1999 article recalling the Joy Boys at the height of their popularity in the mid-1960s, the Washington Post said they "dominated Washington, providing entertainment, companionship, and community to a city on the verge of powerful change".