HEREFORD -- On the morning of the first fall freeze, folks in this small town in the Texas Panhandle tuned in to KPAN/860 AM on the radio dial.

A station announcer read the school lunch menus and sent out birthday greetings.

The station saluted its Good Neighbor of the Day.

At 7:45 a.m., after a message from Hereford Heritage Funeral Home, a familiar voice came on the air.

"Well-l-l hello there, and how are you?"

The signature greeting crackled over radios in homes and hospital rooms and pickups, across the flat eternity of the High Plains.

The longest running daily radio show by one person in America is broadcast county-wide and beyond, to rural communities like Dimmitt and Friona and Bovina, and can be heard as far south as Lubbock, 100 miles away.

The host's voice is friendly, unpretentious, gentlemanly, trustworthy, sincere.

If Texas could speak, it might sound like Clint Formby.

Many people in these parts have grown up listening to "The Old Philosopher."

Formby, 82, began broadcasting what he modestly calls "my little program" in October 1955.

He comes on six mornings a week and in 51 years he hasn't missed one day -- about 16,000 consecutive shows.

Formby doesn't hold elected office but most everyone in town is familiar with him and greets him as the "morning mayor."

Longtime friends jokingly marvel that KPAN's owner is the only person they know who not only has a profound thought every day but also an ego big enough to want to share it with the world.

The Chamber of Commerce presents honored residents with its Bull Chip Award -- a pasture pie mounted on a plaque.

"Clint earned it," County Judge Tom Simons said, grinning.

"The nice thing about radio," the judge reminds Formby, "is you can turn it off."

In truth, Simons is a regular listener of his friend's show and is himself heard on KPAN as the game announcer for the Hereford High School football team, which lost in the Class 4A playoffs this past weekend.

Formby is as old-fashioned, and reliable, as Epsom salts. He still writes his scripts on a manual typewriter.

His five-minute commentaries run the gamut, ranging from dandelions to outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Formby asks listeners, "When should Christmas season start?" He chides residents who park vehicles on their front lawns. His program staged a Most Beautiful Alley contest, which drew 18 entries, and he used his platform to help raise $89,000 in scholarships for local students to attend the Hereford campus of Amarillo College.

Once a week he talks politics. Little misses his watchful eye.

Ever seen that bumper sticker: "It Doesn't Count If You Haven't Been Caught"? ... That's one of the problems in our society today. In some categories of big business and even in government, that philosophy has caused us grief beyond belief. It is carrying over more and more to our young people.

Formby shares bad jokes and occasionally recites poetry -- not Keats.

The codfish lays 10,000 eggs

The homely hen lays one

The codfish never cackles

To tell you when she's done

And so we scorn the codfish

While the humble hen we prize

It only goes to show you

That it pays to advertise

Formby spent a recent program sharing memories of his grandfather in East Texas who knew the best way to enjoy the delights of sorghum molasses with breakfast.

In Deaf Smith County, people listen. A fretful mother called Formby and asked how he expects parents to teach their children table manners when he is on the radio instructing youngsters to poke a hole in a biscuit, using a finger, and fill it with the sweet sticky syrup.

The smell of money

Cattle are to Hereford what chocolate is to Hershey, Pa.

The town has about 15,000 residents, and there are about 3.5 million cows within a 100-mile radius.

Hereford High's sports teams are called the Whitefaces (and Lady Whitefaces), a nickname for white-faced Hereford cows. The local newspaper is the Hereford Brand.

That distinctive aroma from feedlots and dairies is the smell of big money. Hereford is the "Saudi Arabia of cow manure," proclaimed Todd Carter, president of a Dallas-based company that is building a plant here that will gasify 1 billion pounds of manure each year to process corn into ethanol fuel.

Don Cumpton is director of the Hereford Economic Development Corp. and a regular KPAN listener.

"It's a godsend for us," Cumpton said of the ethanol plant as he sat in Formby's office. One cow, he informed a visitor, produces 5 1/2 pounds of manure daily. Cumpton let that fact sink in. "Do the math," he said, smiling.

Formby agrees that the operation will boost Hereford's economy and help alleviate a monumental waste problem, but he reminded his listeners that when the plant begins operation next year, 300 or more truckloads of manure will be rumbling through town every day. That's a reality. Something, he said, that folks should think about.

Ranchers frowned at Formby's warning, but the radio host isn't hesitant to take an unpopular stand.

Some assume that Formby is a Republican. Others accuse him of being a "damn" Democrat. He has even been called a Presbyterian.

On this clear chilly morning, Formby shared the results of an 8-year study showing that Baptists tend to be fatter than other believers. Formby said that, according to a story published in the Baptist Standard news journal, the study by Purdue University also revealed that women who watched religious television or listened to religious radio weighed more than those who attended church.

"Kyle," Formby said , "are you listening?"

Kyle Struen is pastor of Hereford's First Baptist Church.

"I'm not sure what can be gleaned of this" study, Formby said, finally. "Well, time's up. We better get out of here."

The Old Philosopher signed off, smiling to himself.

Blessed with humor

KPAN made its debut in 1948. Formby's uncle, who owned the station, coined the slogan for his enterprise: "The only radio station in the world that gives a hoot about Hereford, Texas." Then a student at Texas Tech University, Formby read the station's first commercial. Western Auto offered a one-day $29.95 special on its "two-tube Truetone radio."

The nervous youth stumbled over the tongue twister.

Formby went to the business at noon and apologized profusely to the proprietor.

The store owner laughed. He had sold out of the advertised item by 10 o'clock that morning.

"Everybody who comes in," he told Formby, "wants to see the radio that ol' boy couldn't pronounce!"

Back then, Formby never dreamed that one day he would marry Margaret Clark -- Miss Texas Tech -- and later own six Texas radio stations, become chairman of the board of regents at his alma mater, and serve as president of the Associated Press Broadcasters and other professional broadcasting organizations.

He traveled around the world, dined at the White House and met six U.S. presidents.

"Clint has seen and done more during his life than any person I know," Simons said.

Friends kid Formby about his travelogues. One day a local attorney presented Formby with a free one-way bus ticket to Umbarger (pop. 327) -- a town 20 miles from Hereford. The only stipulation, the lawyer said, was that he couldn't talk about the adventure when he got back.

Fortunately, the broadcaster is blessed with a sense of humor. He was the victim of an elaborate and now legendary practical joke.

Years ago, the pastor of the Baptist church where Formby and his family worshipped traveled to Japan on a two-month mission. Rather than name an interim pastor, the clergyman selected members of his flock to occupy the pulpit on Sundays in his absence, and he posted the schedule on a bulletin board.

"Clint, you know you're preaching?" a friend remarked.

Formby rushed to the church. He scanned the list. To his horror, the pastor had picked him to give the sermon on Easter.

Formby had never preached, or wanted to, and so began an agonizing month of dread and worry and sleepless nights.

Meanwhile, unknown to Formby, a radio colleague in Midland printed and mailed 300 invitations -- as if Clint had sent them -- asking the recipients to join him in worship on Easter. "It was a nice way of saying 'Come hear me preach,'" Formby said. "Embarrassed me to death." The invites said a reception would follow, at Formby's residence.

One was sent to Washington, D.C.

Formby received a letter from then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

LBJ told Formby that he wanted to attend the Easter service but he didn't think his plane could land at the Hereford airport.

Somehow Formby faced his fears and delivered the sermon, before a packed house.

But he couldn't possibly host a reception for hundreds at his small home.

So immediately after church, as those still unaware of the joke went to the Formby address and knocked on the door, expecting punch and cookies, Formby and his family secretly checked in at the local Lucky U Motel. He spent the afternoon entertaining their four children by feeding quarters into a coin slot that activated the room's vibrating bed.

'Kiss your wife goodnight'

"Formby," colleagues ask, "when you gonna fire yourself?"

He has contemplated retirement, and if he stepped aside tomorrow, no one could accuse Clint Formby of being a quitter.

When he began his program, satellite radio disc jockey Howard Stern was 1 year old.

A World War II veteran and cancer survivor, Formby is wise enough to recognize the motivational value of his daily routine: awakening at 5:30 a.m., reading the morning papers, dressing in a coat and tie, picking up his mail at the post office, driving to the office. "Having things you look forward to, or facing things that have to be done, that's living," he said. "You need something to meet you, every day."

So he plans to keep typing on his old Underwood and sharing his observations and opinions with his neighbors as long as he believes that what he has to say is relevant and his program is not simply "filler" between birthday salutes and the farm and ranch report.

Recently, Formby received a speeding ticket.

The highway patrolman noticed the driver's birth date.

"You don't look that old," the officer remarked, handing Formby, a grandfather, his license. "What do you attribute that to?"

"Fast livin', fast drivin' and fast women -- if I can find 'em," came the reply.

In fact, the only woman in his life was a university queen -- his sweetheart, his bride, a lady.

Margaret Formby, who founded the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Hereford -- it's now in Fort Worth -- died unexpectedly three years ago.

As the lonely days passed after Margaret's funeral, and their home grew larger and emptier and seemed so quiet in her absence, Clint reflected on the sentimental journey of the life and love they shared for more than half a century.

She had given him a family, and so much more.

He thought of little things. The everyday things, simple routine acts of kindness that he took for granted and didn't fully appreciate at the time, as he knows he should have.

One morning in his solitude he sat at the microphone. He wanted -- needed -- to say something, and if his heartfelt words came off as sounding corny to listeners, well, he didn't mind.

Formby ended his program with a request that he now repeats once a week, every week, without fail.

"You men," Clint says, "remember to kiss your wife goodnight tonight."