What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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MAY 3-9, 2020 WHAT'S UP! 9 up there. It was my dream. I went to Henderson State, and it was great," Bones says. After graduating, he took a job at Little Rock's Q-100 (KDGE-FM). In 2003, a better offer came along in Austin, Texas, and Bones moved. There, he began putting together a team that would follow him to Nashville, Tenn. While in Austin, the awards started coming. Bones was named Austin Radio Personality of the Year from 2009 through 2011. In 2013, Bones and company moved the show to Nashville and transitioned from pop music to country. Today, Bones is a 40-year-old syndicated radio host of the nation's No. 1 country morning show. He champions up-and-coming country artists, is a mentor on TV's "American Idol," a best-selling author, a "Dancing With the Stars" champion, comedian, guitarist, singer, obsessive Arkansas Razorbacks fan, dog lover and a household name in many parts of the country. • He's host of "The Bobby Bones Show," heard on 150 stations across the country, reaching millions of listeners weekly. How popular is he? Well, Bones is the youngest person ever to be inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. • He has his own podcast, "BobbyCast," featuring interviews with artists and music industry figures. • His band, Bobby Bones & The Raging Idiots, plays a comedy-musical mashup and released a new album, "Live in Little Rock," on April 2, Bones' 40th birthday. • In 2019, Bones conquered the wilderness on an episode of "Running Wild With Bear Grylls," a sort of celebrity survival series on which President Barack Obama famously appeared. • He has written two No. 1 books on The New York Times best-seller list: "Bare Bones: I'm Not Lonely If You're Reading This Book" and "Fail Until You Don't: Fight. Grind. Repeat," his self-help book in which he shared how he overcame odds and insists that, by gosh, you can too. • As a newly minted millionaire, Bones is also a philanthropist who has raised millions for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Every school year, he buys shoes for kids in Mountain Pine who want to play on the school's basketball team because when he was there, he couldn't afford the shoes. "A lot of people don't know this about Bobby, but he's such a giver. He does so much for people just under the table that he doesn't even want to be recognized for," says Bones' former Mountain Pine coach, Vic Gandolph, now principal at St. Luke's Episcopal School in Hot Springs. He says buying shoes for the basketball team is only one of Bones' contributions to his old school. "That's besides the football uniforms that he bought for the football team years ago. And that's besides the scholarship that he gives to somebody every year," Gandolph says. Gandolph and Bones keep in touch after all these years. It was Gandolph whom Bones credits with helping him get through tough times, along with another former coach, Jerry McGrew, now deceased, and a church youth director named Robert Parker. "Bobby, I think, at that particular time needed a strong role model. Someone to tell him there's more out there, just keep reaching and keep digging and keep rolling up your sleeves, and he bought into that. Bobby was an extremely hard worker. He wasn't a great, great athlete. But he made up with it in his hard work and determination. He took some of those skills, life skills that we taught him along the way, and … I think that was a big help in him being successful right now," Gandolph says. McGrew, Bones says, took young Bobby on the only vacation he ever had as a child, a trip to Colorado with the McGrew family one summer. And Parker, Bones says, was a big help in another way. "Robert was really great because he was my youth director. I was a big part of church. He would always encourage me to come stay, me and some friends, at his and his wife's house on Saturday nights. And what I would think was, he just wanted people to come over and watch movies, but really what was happening was they wanted to make sure we had food and got to church. It wasn't until I got older and I started to actually see why they were doing it that I really started to be extremely appreciative of it because he knew the situation most of were going through. And especially me," Bones says. Growing up wasn't easy, but Bones often relied on the kindness of small- town Arkansas to get by. Nearby Hot Springs, he says, was the big city. "… and Little Rock, dear God! That My mom got pregnant at 15. I didn't have a dad around, and so everyone was trying to survive more than they were trying to learn how to invest in the future of anything. But then as I got older I started to actually be around people that taught me things and that's what I'm trying to do now. I'm not trying to survive anymore — I'm actually doing quite well —but my goal now is to take care of those that were me a few years ago." (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins) See Bobby Bones Page 10