JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

WROV Program Director Jay Prater is shown with his father, former station manager Bart Prater, at the Roanoke studio.

JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

"A big help for me is having Dad as a resource," says Jay Prater. WROV-FM is the successor to the old AM station.

It's 1974 inside an oft-modified Quonset hut that is the home of WROV-AM. A 4-year-old boy sits on his father's lap, telling a dumb joke on air during the afternoon shift.

When the joke is over, the father cues up sound effects of loud laughter and applause. The father is Bart Prater, at the time Roanoke's top disc jockey and the station's program director. The boy is Jay Prater.

"I thought that was the neatest thing in the world," Jay Prater said in his office at 96.3 WROV-FM -- the successor to the old AM station -- where the younger Prater is now afternoon shift disc jockey and program director.

On Monday, father and son got together at the station, which turned 20 years old this month, to talk about old times and coming full circle.

That early foray onto the public airwaves was the beginning of a long journey that would take Jay Prater to one station after another before he came to WROV-FM, which remains a radio force in the Roanoke Valley.

The elder Prater, 62 and still the wry joker of local legend, said he would've preferred that his son become a doctor or lawyer "and support me when I'm old." But he understands the lure of terrestrial radio.

"I'd do it again if I had a chance, all over," Bart Prater said.

Like father, like son

WROV-AM was Roanoke's rock 'n' roll haven. Jocks such as Bart Prater, Fred Frelantz, Jack Fisher and Larry Bly became a huge part of the valley's music scene, spinning records from inside that hut at 15th Street and Cleveland Avenue Southwest.

"Looking back, it was a really neat thing to have been around all those incredible personalities that were on the air over the years, but to me, he was always just my Dad and those other DJs were his co-workers," Prater, 39, wrote in an e-mail. "In fact, when I was really little, I thought everyone could hear their father on the radio. It just wasn't anything unusual to me. ... I went through a phase at about 3 or 4 where I called him 'Bart' instead of 'Dad' because that's what EVERYBODY called him. It was 'Mom and Bart' for a few months."

The driving force behind the station's popularity was station owner Burt Levine, Bart Prater said.

"He was my mentor," Bart Prater, now an engineering and computer man at WVTF-FM, said. "I loved him like I would a father."

And like a father, Levine let the elder Prater go when it was time. In 1981, Prater left for K92, WXLK-FM. By 1986, Jay Prater had joined him there, doing overnight and weekend shifts at K92.

In 1988, Levine sold the station. The new owner began WROV-FM in February 1989, moving the rock 'n' roll format there and spinning oldies on the AM side.

Since 1998, the AM side has gone by the call letters WGMN "The Game," with an emphasis on sports talk. After changing corporate hands several times, the stations wound up under the Clear Channel umbrella in 2000.

After pursuing general studies at Ferrum College in 1988-89, Jay Prater decided to pursue his first love, radio. He had already worked at several local stations, including a short stint at WROV-AM, before he started "chasing radio gigs." Prater moved toward many compass points for about a decade -- Seattle, Detroit, Norfolk, among other markets -- he said. He returned to Roanoke in 2006, having married and started a family.

"I knew Roanoke had been a great place to grow up," he said.

But this time, he would be here without radio. Jay Prater had turned his attention to new media, and he freelanced for most of 2006, doing freelance Web design and voiceover work. In February 2007, he took a job in the advertising department at roanoke.com, The Roanoke Times' Web site. He thought he was out of the radio business for good.

"I felt like I'd done all I wanted to do," he said.

Then the call came.

Back to the booth

Jay Prater was at the paper for only about five months when WROV's management called him, asking him to return.

"This is the only station I would've left for," he said. "I'm done chasing the radio gigs. I want to retire here. This will be my last stop."

He said that his father was the first person he called with the news.

"When the kid got a chance to come back to these call letters, I was excited," Bart Prater said.

Other musical formats rule the Roanoke waves these days -- Arbitron.com's public report shows country music station WSLC-FM first and adult contemporary WSLQ-FM second atop the heap of 20 stations in the Roanoke-Lynchburg listening area, among listeners ages 12 and older. WROV is fourth in that overall, "beauty contest" rating, but the station continues attracting the audience it wants, Jay Prater said.

"In our target male demographics, we're consistently top rated," he wrote in the e-mail exchange. The overall ratings ebb and flow, he said, depending on the number of women reporting to Arbitron that they're listening to ROV.

The station pulls it off by giving its listeners what they want to hear, based on local focus groups, and partly on some father-son discussions.

"A big help for me is having Dad as a resource," Jay Prater said. "When I think of programming a certain song, I ask him, 'Would Roanoke remember it?'

"The Outlaws probably wouldn't play in a lot of cities, but that Southern-fried feel goes over here. This is a rock station for Roanoke and Lynchburg. There's no corporate direction of the play list. At the end of the day, they want us to do what works and what Virginia wants to hear."