There is a sound Calhoun County makes on a Friday night in the fall, and if you grew up here you can hear it with your eyes closed. The band. The chains. The far-off roar when the home team breaks one loose. And under all of it, riding an AM signal and a little FM translator up out of Anniston, a voice saying the names out loud — Jacksonville, Lincoln, White Plains — like they matter. Because to the man saying them, they do.
That voice belongs to Johnny Ponder.
A local voice, live, on a Friday night, in a county most of America can't find and a medium most of America stopped listening to. That's the whole story.
The Last Local Voice
You have to understand what has happened to radio to understand what Johnny Ponder is.
Most of the dial got bought. It got consolidated, automated, and piped in from a studio in another state — the same forty songs, the same syndicated host pretending to be local, the same voice reading the same liner in a hundred markets at once. The local station, the one that knew your ballteam and your weather and read the lunch menu, mostly died. Somebody decided it wasn't worth the money.
Johnny Ponder is what's left when somebody decided it was.
He's on 95.1 The Mountain — WDNG, licensed to Anniston, classic hits since the spring of 2021, carried on 95.1 FM and old 1450 AM, owned by Lake Broadcasting. "East Central Alabama's Classic Station," the tent says. The home for everything NASCAR. Alabama Crimson Tide football and basketball. And then the part that tells you what kind of station it really is: Jacksonville High football and basketball. Lincoln High football. White Plains basketball.
White Plains basketball. Nobody syndicates White Plains basketball. There is no server in Texas that knows those kids' names. Johnny does.
Before the Mic, the Forest
The voice is the second thing Johnny Ponder built that outlasted the people who said it couldn't be done. The first was a forest, and a way of teaching kids to love it.
He grew up in Munford at the foot of Cheaha Mountain — boys on bikes, fishing creeks, arrowheads in plowed fields, bows cut from creek-side saplings. He writes about it now, short and plain, for Alabama Pioneers: "Growing up in Munford, Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s." A boyhood that lasted maybe twenty years in Alabama's particular geography before it was gone.
Then he went into the woods for a living. Forty years a forester.
And then he came home.
What He Built When He Got Back
Johnny Ponder joined the Talladega County School Board in November 1994, District 3 — the district that includes Munford, where he went to school himself. He's been there ever since.
In that time he was central to building something almost no other public school system in Alabama has: a 130-acre outdoor education campus at the base of Cheaha, right against the Talladega National Forest. Twelve outdoor classrooms. An amphitheater. A nature trail, a longleaf pine stand, a low ropes course, a greenhouse, a fish pond, a frog pond, a five-tier wetland, butterfly gardens, a bluebird trail, an aquaculture facility. Inside the buildings: a lobby built to look like a cave, hallways with life-sized trees, a cafeteria under murals of the national forest, a 250-gallon aquarium.
The Alabama Farmers Federation held Munford up as a model. Georgia-Pacific and the Forest Workforce Training Institute sent materials. It drew statewide notice for the least glamorous reason there is: it worked. Kids were learning biology and ecology by walking into a forest older than the county.
His own words for the whole ambition: "We're just trying to encourage kids to get off their laptops and phones and do some stuff outside."
The through line is not hard to find. It's the forest — and then it's the voice. Both are the same instinct: keep the local thing alive, and hand it to whoever comes next.
The Long Logic
Look at it whole and the pattern is plain. He grew up in the forest at the foot of Cheaha. He worked in it forty years. He came home and built a school around it so Munford's children could learn what he learned, in the same landscape where he learned it.
And on Friday nights and race weekends, he does the same thing with a microphone that he did with the woods — he keeps a local thing alive and says it out loud, so the next person will know it was here. The grandmother who can't drive to the away game hears her grandson's name because Johnny said it. That's not nostalgia. That's a man refusing to let the local disappear quietly just because the market says it should.
Munford, Still
Johnny Ponder is a member at Anniston First United Methodist. His daughter is Emmalie Ponder Whitney. He's a teetotaler — which, if you've ever stood in the infield at Talladega on a race weekend, is its own quiet kind of legend. He is, as more than one person in this county will tell you without prompting, the one and only.
Related on Southern Legends: His daughter — Scott and Emmalie Whitney · James Spann, Alabama's storm voice · Talladega — More Than the Superspeedway
Johnny Ponder is a retired forester, longtime Talladega County School Board member (District 3), and the local sports voice of 95.1 The Mountain (WDNG) in Anniston. He writes for Alabama Pioneers and is a member of Anniston First United Methodist Church. Southern Legends would welcome a longer conversation. Contact us.
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