‘Garth Please’ Buttons Uncovered 20 Years After Garth-a-Thon

Chad, Steve Horn, our chief engineer Mike Hutchens, and myself spent a great portion of Tuesday cleaning out the storage building in the back of the WBKR studios and offices. Good Lord, there was a lot of junk! AND, as you can see, relics from two decades past.

It didn't occur to me until we pulled a large piece of particle board away from the window and saw these "Garth Please" buttons that this is the 20th anniversary of the Garth-a-Thon and the campaign--conceived by then-promotions director Toni Mason--to get Garth Brooks to come to Evansville and play at Roberts Stadium.

We got two great big semis to park in front of the stadium on a warm Saturday in 1992. Enormous "Garth Please" banners were draped over them.

For hours, we only played Garth Brooks songs on the radio that day. We washed cars. We got petitions signed. We had a blast.

And that wasn't all. I can't remember, now, who the client was, but they let us use one of their motorhomes so that we could camp out in front of Roberts Stadium for a week and broadcast.

Zack & Nick did their morning show from the RV every single morning. Then, the rest of us--Karen Willoughby in middays, Chuck Urban in the afternoon, and me in the evenings--would go over periodically and broadcast live throughout the week. It was just a lot of fun!

Garth eventually did come to Roberts Stadium in February of 1994. To be honest, I'm not 100 percent sure if we had anything to do with that.

But we've always liked to think so.