R.I.P.: Robert Mitchell, NOLA Radio Personality, Programmer

Lonnie Matherne Jr., better known as Robert Mitchell during his half-century career as a popular New Orleans radio disc jockey, program director and talk show host, died Monday at Slidell Memorial Hospital of complications from surgery. 

He was 79, reports nolA.com.

Matherne, who was called “The Real” Robert Mitchell on air, spent more than 20 years as a DJ on WTIX-AM during the station’s heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was also the station’s program director, before transitioning to a similar role on FM stations in the 1980s and ‘90s. Hurricane Katrina opened a third chapter in his career as a talk show host on WWL-AM and FM.

Matherne fell in love with broadcasting while listening to WTIX as a teenager. He asked some veteran DJs for career advice, and they told him to buy a tape recorder and practice talking into it.

By the time he graduated from high school in 1960, he had sent out three audition tapes and gotten two job offers. At 17, he landed his first job, at a tiny radio station.

His daughter, Meridith Legendre of Slidell, said it was there that a station manager suggested Matherne change his on-air name. He handed Matherne a stack of records. The name Bob Mitchell was on one of them; Matherne liked it, and it stuck.

Mitchell at WWL

From the first job in White Castle, he moved to on-air jobs in Bogalusa; Lake Charles; Charleston, South Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida, before returning to New Orleans in 1965.

He was later hired by WTIX AM, the top-rated local radio station throughout the 1960s. As a disc jockey – first on weekends, then weekday afternoons and then mornings – and later as program director, Matherne worked with popular on-air DJs Bob Walker, “Skinny Tommy” Cheney, Buzz Bennett, Bobby Reno and others on “The Mighty 690.”

As program director, Walker said, Matherne encouraged his disc jockeys to play more songs by New Orleans rhythm and blues artists, who had fallen off the popularity charts during the British music invasion of the 1960s.

“People loved it because we were playing all the New Orleans songs that were really buried up until that time,” Walker said. “When he became program director, he made a promise WTIX was going to be a great New Orleans station.”

Walker also credited Matherne with building a staff of strong on-air personalities. “He had this knack for hiring people and keeping good people around him,” Walker said.