BY BARRY MCNAMARA
Monmouth College
During their four years on campus, Monmouth College’s Class of 2025 has had the opportunity to hear some outstanding Commencement speakers.
Their freshman year, it was Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor, a 1997 Monmouth graduate. The next year featured former Congressman and presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Last year, it was actress Sigourney Weaver and her husband, writer/director Jim Simpson.
Coming in at the No. 1 senior-year slot on this “Commencement countdown” for the Class of 2025 is another Monmouth graduate, Lon Helton ’72, the longtime and award-winning host of Westwood One’s Country Countdown USA.
Helton will deliver the address at his alma mater’s 168th Commencement Exercises at noon May 18 on the Wallace Hall Plaza, not far from where he got his start in radio on Monmouth’s campus.
“We are thrilled that Lon has agreed to return to campus and share his story and insights with our graduating class,” said Monmouth President Patricia Draves of Helton, a 2017 inductee into the college’s Hall of Achievement, the highest honor Monmouth bestows upon its alumni.
“Over the years, Lon has interviewed scores of household names in music and entertainment on his various platforms, and he is certainly a household name himself in the world of country music. We’re very proud to call him one of our own.”
53 years in radio, and counting
A chemistry major, Helton said he so loved his time on the airwaves of WFS/WMCR – especially as compared to a three-hour lab session – that he had the “minor epiphany” to make radio a full-time pursuit. The professional start of his 53-year career in the industry came at Monmouth’s downtown station. He kept moving up the charts, first to Galesburg, then taking on-air and program management posts in Denver, Chicago and Los Angeles.
In 1983, Helton joined Radio & Records as its country editor, and he became its Nashville bureau chief in 1986. When Billboard Magazine bought R&R in 2006, Helton launched a new publication, Country Aircheck.
Helton has hosted a variety of nationally syndicated country radio shows since 1984, including the current Country’s Inside Trak, plus Country Close-up, Nashville Live, Country Star Traks and Listen In, providing a forum for more than 100 world premieres of new albums by country artists.
Top broadcast personality is ‘living legend’
A 2022 National Radio Hall of Fame and 2006 Country Radio Hall of Fame inductee, Helton has hosted Country Countdown USA since its inception in 1992. He has received the CMA National Broadcast Personality of the Year an unequalled 12 times and been named the ACM National Broadcast Personality of the Year an unprecedented five times.
In 2019, Helton became the sixth recipient of the Bob Kingsley Living Legend Award, and he was presented the J. William Denny Award by the CMA for distinguished service to the CMA Board of Directors, which he’s served for 40 years, including a three-year stint as its president and chairman. Helton is also a 24-year member of the board of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum, an eight-year member of the Country Music Foundation Board of Directors, and a member and past chair of the National Corvette Museum Board of Directors.
Along with Alabama band front man Randy Owen, Helton is one of the founders of Country Cares for St. Jude Kids, which has raised more than $1 billion for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis over the last 36 years. In 2020, Helton received the Country Radio Broadcasters Humanitarian Award.
Helton and Monmouth alumna Anne Buckhouse Helton ’73 have been married for 52 years. They have two children and three granddaughters.