[Old School Hound]

I grew up in SE KY and one of the handful of TV channels we received when I was a kid was WBIR out of Knoxville.  It was my mom's favorite channel and one of her favorite shows was Cas Walker's Farm and Home Hour  "variety show,"  which was essentially one long commercial for his grocery stores.  This guy was something else; eccentric , cranky , politically incorrect, even before there was such a thing.

In this thread, I am going to share some things that I remember about Cas' show along with a couple stories attributed to the East Tennessee legend and grocery store magnate. If you grew up in the fifties, sixties, or  seventies and was from the SE KY or East TN area, you know who Cas was. 


He was born Orton Caswell Walker in Sevier County, TN.  AT age 14,  Cas set out for the mountain and worked at a paper mill in NC and then he worked in the coal mines in eastern KY and saved up $850 to buy his first grocery store in Knoxville.  By the mid fifties, the old coot already owned 27 stores that brought in about 60 million gross revenue.   The man was a born showman. He once buried a guy alive in an asphalt grave in his grocery store's parking lot for a publicity stunt. More on that later...

Cas also discovered a young singer from East Tennessee  by the name of Dolly Parton.

To give you an idea of what Cas was like, I'll post a video that I posted in another thread. This is legendary Cas--- contentious, crass, cantakerous, politically"I don't give a damn what you think."

In this video, you will get the feeling that Cas doesn't like thieves: