Pictured above: Arkansas broadcasting legend B.J. Sams started out in radio — B.J. the DJ.
Meeting Hall-of-Fame television anchor B.J. Sams is an experience exactly like most people might imagine. Genteel and friendly, his shock of white hair and trademark well-bottom baritone trip the memory immediately to decades of broadcasts into thousands of homes.
If meeting Sams for the first time feels easily familiar, hearing his story for the first time is anything but. A tale of almost unimaginable heartbreak, loss and, at last, redemption, it is a story he tells easily, even as its deeply personal notes strike chords that are sometimes hard to hear.
Sams’ story begins in 1935 in Elizabethton, Tenn., in the eastern part of the state. Born the second eldest of four boys, his upbringing might have been typical of many of his neighbors but seems spartan by today’s standards.
“My father was a State Farm agent. My mother worked at a plant there that made rayon,” he said. “We had a normal upbringing — no TV, no air conditioner, not any of the good stuff. As boys, we played outside until it got dark, sometimes past dark. Had a good time growing up.”
A multi-talented high schooler, Sams was first-team all-conference in basketball and a trumpet player in the school band that won the state marching competition. This earned the group a trip to New York City, where it marched down Fifth Avenue, competing against 65 bands from around the world and placing third.
For all of his accomplishments, Sams grew up lacking the approval and attention of his father, a slight the sting of which he smarted under for years.
“I carried a grudge against my father for the way he treated us boys growing up,” he said. “Showed no love. Never said he was proud of us. Never said I love you. Never hugged us. Didn’t take us fishing, hunting — nothing. I had a hard time with that for a long time.”
The disconnect may have contributed to his entering the world of mass media. His father wanted him to be a doctor, and had father and son had a stronger bond, Sams’ career may have been different. Instead, he did what a lot of kids in their teens were doing in the 1950s — turning to a whole new beat.
“My older brother worked as a disc jockey at the local radio station during his senior year in high school,” Sams said. “I graduated from high school in 1953 and went down to the radio station, thinking I was going to get me a big DJ job. I got the janitor’s job making 75 cents an hour, which was the minimum wage back then.
“Two or three weeks later, one of the disc jockeys quit, and I went into the general manager’s office. I said, ‘I’d like to apply for that disc jockey’s job.’ I had a pretty good voice then. He said, ‘I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks. I’ll listen to you when I get back.’ My older brother and I sat down for a couple of weeks, and he had me read anything. I’d read billboards when I was driving. I’d read newspapers. The manager came back, and I auditioned and got the job as a disc jockey — making 75 cents an hour.”
“B.J. the DJ,” as he was known, spun records ranging from gospel to big band to the newly emerging rock ‘n’ roll. The on-air time was thrilling but dealt serious body blows to his academic career. After an unremarkable freshman year at East Tennessee State University, he transferred to the University of Tennessee, where he balanced schoolwork, working at local radio stations and fraternity life, although not in equal measure or in that order.
“I worked for three different radio stations in Knoxville while I was in school. One year, I worked with Archie Campbell, the old barber of Hee Haw fame. That was a lot of fun. He kept me laughing all the time,” Sams said. “I graduated. Had about a 2.0 average, but I graduated.”
In 1958, Sams was drafted into the U.S. Army. He arrived at Fort Hood, Texas, where, he said proudly, he served in the same outfit with royalty.
“I was in tanks, and my claim to fame is Elvis was in our outfit, in the barracks right across the street. We saw it through knowing that Elvis was doing the same thing we were,” he said. “Meanwhile, they decided I was going to go to Germany as a combat engineer. I didn’t particularly like that, so I got in touch with my senator, Estes Kefauver, and told him about my dilemma, that I had four years of broadcast experience, and could he help me get in the information office as a broadcast specialist?
“Orders came down immediately from Washington from the adjutant general to put me somewhere in an information office, so they jerked me out of the second eight weeks, and I was sent to Fort Sill, Okla., where I spent two years as a broadcast specialist in the information office. My job was recording military newscasts, and a runner would take them to the local radio stations, and they would play them during the day. I did a 15-minute TV show once a week.”
Sams’ life following the service was an amalgam of professional opportunity and personal heartache. His discharge papers were not even dry when he married a woman he met at the radio station, and the couple soon welcomed a son, Billy Jack. Over the next few years, Sams found ample career opportunities in radio from Oklahoma to Tennessee, but his home life entered an ever-darkening spiral due to his wife’s mental illness.
“She was threatening my life and Billy Jack’s life and her life,” Sams said. “She’d call me on the telephone and say, ‘Billy Jack and I will be dead when you get home tonight.’ Stuff like that. Had her going to a psychiatrist, and he wasn’t helping any at all. After we moved to Johnson City, [Tenn.], I was working, and she told me one day that I was going to wake up one night with a knife sticking in my back, so I took Billy Jack and left the home and filed for divorce.”
Despite the toxic nature of the relationship, it took years for Sams to wrest custody of his son, after which time he headed to Louisiana and a first gig in television. Fifteen months later, he landed at KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock.
“I was just a staff announcer for a while, then the anchorman quit, so I moved into the anchor slot just like that,” he said. “I was working with Bud Campbell, the sports guy, the voice of the Razorbacks. We moved to No. 1 with our team and stayed there for seven years.”
Sensing the competitive winds were shifting, Sams felt the need to make a change and accepted a job with the NBC affiliate in Honolulu. Balmy breezes and TV celebrity made for a sweet assignment, even as Sams struggled to break through his son’s mental trauma suffered during his time living with his mother. A fresh start, Sams reasoned, would do everybody good.
Two months after arriving on the Big Island, the station’s traffic reporter invited the duo to accompany him on an airplane ride around the islands. They agreed, hardly imagining how when the plane lifted off, it would leave any semblance of life as Sams knew it irretrievably behind. It was Easter weekend.
“I got in the backseat, Billy Jack and the pilot in the front seat,” Sams said. “He went through all the steps pilots go through, explaining them all to Billy Jack, and then we took off. We were headed toward the mountains, and we lost power. He tried to start it. It would not. He turned the plane around and tried to make it back to the airport.
“We could see the runway out there, but we kept going down. Finally, the pilot yelled out, ‘Hang on! We’re going to ditch!’ We hit the top of a warehouse, bounced down into a street, cartwheeled up against some cars and a building and burst into flames immediately.”
Sams’ voice maintains a leaden evenness as he recounts the accident, a result of years on air reciting stories of similar disasters and the rote repetition of having shared the ordeal with countless audiences since — how the flames were leaping from the engine into the front seat, how his seatbelt buckle snapped free and how his son’s screams of, “Daddy, help me!” filled his ears. He tried to reach to unbuckle his son, catching himself on fire in the process, only to be hammered back one staggering step after another by the heat of the inferno.
“Screams continued and continued and continued, and finally,” he said, “no more screams.”
En route, emergency personnel were under the impression all had perished in the accident, and their first glance at the incinerated aircraft did nothing to change that. Disbelievingly, they saw Sams nearby, and an ambulance delivered him to Queen Hospital suffering from second- and third-degree burns on the outside and an eviscerated spirit on the inside.
“After everyone had cleared out of my room that night, I was lying there, thinking about what had happened,” he said. “Here I’d gone through a bad marriage, and here I lost the only good thing that’d come out of that marriage. Cried out to God. I said, ‘My God, my God, why hath thou forsaken me?’ Voice in my spirit said, ‘I haven’t forsaken you. I gave my son for you,’ so I made it through the night.
“Next morning, I woke up, looked out the window, and the first sight I saw was a cross that had been erected on Punch Bowl Crater. Lots of comfort in that cross that morning.”
After burying Billy Jack in Tennessee and some physical healing, Sams returned to Hawaii and the TV news. For months, he broadcasted with his gauze-covered arms hidden from view, but it was the spiritual wounds that took the longest to mend, not that he didn’t try — by questionable means maybe, but try nonetheless.
“At night at 10:30 p.m. when I got off the air, I couldn’t go home and think about what had happened. I had to be around people,” he said. “I was in bars and lounges every night. Did this for probably three years. Got to know all the entertainers in Honolulu — Don Ho, Jack Lord, Jim Nabors. It was just like we were family there, and after about three years of this, I was shaving one morning, and I looked in the mirror, and I said, ‘I don’t like you anymore.’
Sams recalled his breaking point of standing on a lanai 26 floors up and feeling the strongest urge to fling himself over the railing. He willed himself back into his condo, sank to his knees, and cried out his own version of, “Daddy, help me.”
“I had reached the point where I was really hurting,” he said. “I fell to my knees and said, ‘God, I need you.’ A voice in my spirit said, ‘I’m right here.’ I straightened up my act that day, and I got back to where I needed to be with God and with myself. Things started getting better.”
Sams returned to Arkansas in 1982 and joined THV Channel 11, where his legend in television would be solidified. Generations of Arkansans got their news from Sams, co-anchor Anne Jansen and later, on the morning show with Robyn Richardson (eventually replaced by Alyson Courtney) and Tom Brannon. The result was TV magic, and the morning show held a stranglehold on the top rating spot for years.
“It was a fun time in the mornings,” Sams said. “We could do anything we wanted to as long as we were No. 1. We did our show live in Branson, Mo., Graceland in Memphis, Tenn., people’s homes. We’d cook on air. That was a lot of fun.”
By the time he retired in 2009 after more than a half-century in broadcasting, Sams had amassed a truckload of accolades, including Gold Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 2000 Broadcaster of the Year by the Associated Press and United Press International, and induction into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame, where he joined the likes of Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. THV’s broadcast studio is named in his honor.
“I’m proud I was able to be in the homes of people, that they would like me enough to turn me on, rather than my competitor,” he said. “I’m very thankful for that. I’m thankful that I was able to stick around in this business for 56 years and proud of the awards that I’ve received. Just been blessed to have been a small part of people’s lives.”
Today, Sams lives a quiet life in Little Rock, immersed in his church and still recognized in public. His arms bear the scars of the crash still — in a certain light, they look like lashes from a whip — and in the retelling, the long-ago incident still gouges fresh grooves on his soul, but tell it he does, in the hopes of reaching someone else floundering in their own fiery wreckage.
“I can’t have you printing I would want everybody to do what I did,” he said. “I strayed some, which I’m not proud of. Went through several relationships right after my plane crash when I was healing.
“It’s been my faith in Jesus Christ that has helped me get through all this adversity that I had. I have been all over the state of Arkansas, giving my testimony from one corner to the other. When I was working, I was giving my testimony 20, 30 times a year, and I’d speak to thousands. I told them about my life and how after the plane crash, I was blaming God and wanting to know why, why, why. I had to work my way through that, but today I’m good.”
B.J. SAMS ON HARD WORK
If somebody’s looking at me, thinking that broadcasting is a glamorous job, I’m here to tell you it’s not. When I first came to Channel 7 in Little Rock, I was working six nights a week and resting on the seventh to go back to work on Monday. You have to work hard. You work holidays. You work nights. You work mornings. You work when you don’t want to work, but if you want to keep your job, you do it.
B.J. SAMS ON FINDING A VOICE
If you want to be an on-air person, you need to train your voice. I would read newspapers out loud, magazines, billboards — anything I could get my hands on. You have to develop that voice. That will get your foot in the door. Once you get your foot in the door, you keep developing that voice the same way because what you read on the air is not nearly enough.
B.J. SAMS ON AUTHENTICITY
Early on, we had Walter Cronkite, who gave the news straight. He didn’t slant it one way or the other. Today, all of them are slanting the news. We’ve also got people on the air that do not sound authoritative, do not believe in what they’re saying; they’re just reading. You’ve got to believe in what you’re saying, and you have to forcefully, powerfully give that information to the people and let them know that you know what you’re talking about without personal bias.
B.J. SAMS ON INFLUENCE
I always treated my coworkers as equals. Alyson Courtney has told me many times that I treated her as an equal and she’ll never forget it. I didn’t lord myself over them. I didn’t curse them out or say anything derogatory to them. I tried to help them. Sometimes they don’t want my help. Sometimes they do and are appreciative of it. That’s the big success for me, treating everyone as an equal, including the janitor.
With that and time comes some influence. Some of these young people now are using four-letter words in the newsroom, and when I was in the newsroom, they were not. They had a respect for me that I didn’t want to hear that kind of language. They backed off. I didn’t have to ask them to.
B.J. SAMS ON INTEGRITY
It’s hard to detach yourself from the news sometimes. For example, after my plane crash, there were about 15 light plane crashes in Honolulu that year, my son’s in that number. I had to just go right past that. I went to cover a story one time where this couple in a Cadillac had asphyxiated. It made me sick. I almost threw up, but I went back and reported it. You’re kind of acting is what you’re doing; it’s in your mind, but you can’t let it come out on the air.
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