Sterling Harkins, announcer and soloist at KWK, never sings alone!
His three-and-a-half-year-old daughter knows every program that he has on the air and plants her small self by the radio when it is time for them so she can sing with him, putting in variations all her own. Bettie Ann knows the words for all the currently popular melodies and shows promise of being a singer too.
Sterling Harkins came to KWK last July after successes as a singer at WODX in Mobile, Alabama. His family lives here and he listened to their pleas to hear him sing over the radio here. His guest performance received so much comment that before he left the studio, he was signed up as a staff artist.
A gift of being able to project his brown-eyed and sympathetic personality into his tenor voice is probably the greatest secret of the following he has amassed during his radio career both down south and here. His real career started when he was scarcely older than his daughter when he was a church soloist but he abandoned singing after graduating from the University of Missouri and went into business. The habit of being able to express himself in song was greater than the call of business triumphs and thus we have “Sterling Harkins announcing” and “Program by Sterling Harkins, tenor,” coming out of the air through a twist of the dial.
(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 6/18/1932.)