NOTE: This piece was sent to me years ago and I have always liked it. However, I do think it is important to point out that, according to those who were there, "WGTO was never in a trailer at Cypress Gardens! Dick Pope (the owner of Cypress Gardens) constructed the WGTO studio building when the station moved there from Haines City in 1958." Just thought you should know - but I like this piece anyhow. (the webmaster)

Exerpt from a longer piece located at: www.keepitclassical.com

By Richard Raleigh

I moved to Florida the month that "Baby, I Need Your Loving" made it into the Top Forty (1964), settling first in an area of hills and citrus in the center of the state. One of the few possessions of my trek was an AM radio that was tuned to the one station with a decent signal, WGTO out of Winter Haven. I remember the call letters because I was driving a GTO at the time. The station was one of those licensed for daytime only, so that it signed off at sunset. How precious those last few songs every night that summer as I drank my third or fourth Regal beer and watched the sun prepare to set behind the orange groves that circled the little lake I was on. Then the sign-off and I was left until dawn to the sounds of frogs and insects and a gruff barking from the center of the lake--some rough beast his time come round at last.

Later, driving south to Miami, I made a side pilgrimage to the WGTO station and found it was just a trailer parked on the outskirts of the grounds of Cypress Gardens. I think had it been a real building I would have entered in and, too awed to ask to talk to the DJ, told the receptionist how much I'd enjoyed listening to her station over the past months, that it had been a good companion during a solitary time. But it seemed undignified to step up to the trailer and rap on the metal door. And surely the Great Oz would not appreciate my finding him in such a state, probably sweating and in his undershorts, the Great Voice of the Orange Groves unmasked, the drape partition suddenly pulled aside. Let him retain his magic as he speaks to his multitudes, to the teenaged girl oiling her boyfriend lovingly at Clearwater Beach, the father driving from work on I-4 to his home outside of Lakeland, the mother on her way to the Win-Dixie in Dade City, the young man in his cabin on the lake in the orange groves.

See, they smile as one at the DJ's remark; for a hundred miles in all directions they smile as one.

In 1988, some twenty three years later, I finally got the courage to knock on the trailer door.