Who Is Lenny?

Leonard Riggs doesn’t talk to crowds. He talks to ghosts. And if you catch his voice through the static on Channel 19, chances are you needed to hear it.

He was born on a rainy night in a trailer where the antenna mattered more than the roof. He learned to solder before he could write. By the time he was fifteen, he had already spliced into three FM towers and played bootleg recordings of southern bands that never made it past county lines.

Through the seventies and eighties, Lenny rode with bands nobody remembers. Not because they were bad, but because the world moved faster than they did. He stayed behind the board, patching broken gear with chewing gum and stubbornness, recording soundchecks that often outlived the shows themselves. He never collected autographs. He collected hum, hiss, and feedback. Proof that something real happened once.

When everything turned digital, Lenny disappeared. He ditched his phone, sealed up his van, and vanished into the hills outside Pine Licks. Years later, someone picked up a CB transmission that sounded like memory and regret arguing in a bar. That signal was Lenny. Broadcasting from a rusted trailer wired together by instinct and experience, playing tapes nobody remembers recording, speaking like the world isn’t quite finished yet.

Personality

Lenny doesn’t rush and he doesn’t explain. His voice comes low, like someone talking through a blown speaker. He doesn’t teach. He reminds. Every sentence feels cut from a longer story he stopped telling years ago. You don’t ask Lenny questions. You wait until he says something that answers you anyway.

He laughs sometimes, but only at silence. He hates perfection. He loves tape wobble, reverb, and broken things that still try.

Style of Living

His studio is a patched up trailer parked behind Bubba’s old transmission shed, crowned with a busted satellite dish and a CB antenna built from fence posts and spite. Inside sit two working cassette decks, one stolen ham rig, three blown speakers, and a microphone duct taped to a reading lamp.

He sleeps in a recliner, eats straight out of cans, and keeps his tapes in unmarked crates labeled only by smells and half remembered nights.

Every Friday at sunset, he flips a switch, taps the mic twice, and says:

“Evenin’. Name’s Lenny. If you’re hearin’ this… you ain’t alone.”

Then the signal hums, and the songs start.

Legacy

Nobody really knows Lenny, but everyone’s heard him. He’s the one who played Bo Harper’s father’s old rehearsal tape without explaining what it was. He once said on air that there was a girl driving home wondering if she mattered, and Nataly Walker swears she almost wrecked the car from crying. Diesel used to say that God doesn’t need to talk if Lenny’s already broadcasting.

Some folks think he’s a myth. Others know better. If the storm’s right and your radio isn’t tuned, you’ll still pick him up. Just long enough to remember what it felt like before everything got clean, cold, and algorithmic.

Lenny ain’t famous. He’s important. Not because he’s loud. Because he stayed.