If you've eaten at TGI Friday's or seen any nostalgia movies or TV programs, or if you've listened to the various music programs broadcasted by the ABC Radio Network, you've been touched by my friend Bud Buschardt.

Bud has one of the largest catalogued record collections in the world.  There are more than 100,000 of those babies.  They are in specially built open cases that line almost every closet in his home plus every wall -- floor to ceiling -- in his home control room that overlooks one of the most Tony neighborhoods of Dallas.

It's from that enormous collection and that control room that Bud specially programs and supplies the music to them all.  And he has for years and years.

And it was from the big ABC building near Dallas' Galleria that for many years Bud produced the programming for ABC's Starlight Network.  In addition to his enormously popular rhythm and blues program..the program that he hosted and loved,  "The Night Train," he was the on-air sidekick of DJ legends Joe Lucina and Eddy Hubbard.

Bud was born in Houston in the early ‘40s, and he had the misfortune of coming with acute asthma.  The doctors said he needed to spend as much time as possible indoors.  His mom and dad noticed that he was interested in music, records and wondered how record players worked.

They bought him a small 78 rpm turntable, some records, and that started his passion for adding more and more and then some more, and saving them all.  He worked at radio and TV stations as an apprentice until he got his degree in communications from the University of Houston.  Fate brought him to Dallas.

Here he worked with all of the Big Boys, beginning as a floor and cameraman at WFAA-TV.  But all the while his record collection was growing, and then growing. 

Bud retired a few months ago, but he continues as an adjunct professor of radio and television at the University of North Texas in Denton, and as the nation's best authority and source of recorded music.

Although we've known each other for a long time now, and we have our irregular monthly lunches, this past Wednesday was the very first time I ever got to see Bud's soul.  He invited me to come see, and he said I could bring my camera. 

"I don't worry about losing the collection in a fire.  At least the melted vinyl would fill all of the pot holes Mayor Miller didn't get around to filling on my street."

Copyright 2008 - William S. Cherry

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