Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
For anyone 50 or older, “BR-549” conjures up memories of a television variety show that ran for nearly 30 years in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
“Hee Haw.”
“BR-549” was a regular sketch on the show. It featured a hefty country bumpkin named Alvin Monroe Samples, Jr.—better known as “Junior”—portraying a shady used car salesman. What made it funny … or sort of funny … was that Junior stumbled and bumbled his way through the routines and butchered his reading of the cue cards. He’d end the skit by asking customers to call him at BR-549 in an era when rural telephone service often had extensions like “BR” instead of the usual 10-digit phone number.
Samples became a household name because of his 14-year run on “Hee Haw,” but did you know that he got his start in show business because of a world record largemouth bass he claimed he caught in 1966?
At that time, Samples was 40 years old and living in his native Cumming, Georgia with his wife Grace and their five children. They lived in a three-room shack without running water. Grace had a job, but Junior mostly raced cars, did a little carpentry work, and went fishing at nearby Lake Lanier. The family often ate fish three meals a day. To call their circumstances “modest” would be an understatement.
That spring, Junior was at the racetrack when his brother pulled up in a pickup truck and told him to look in the back. There he found the head of a large fish that looked a lot like a largemouth bass. Junior picked it up. He opened the mouth and discovered that it was big enough to fit on his head, so he wore it as a hat for a little while.
Someone asked him about the fish. Junior told them it was a bass he had caught from Lake Lanier weighing 22 pounds, 9 ounces. In Georgia—home of the world record largemouth—a lot of people knew the world record weighed 22 pounds, 4 ounces, so Junior’s story spread fast.
It soon reached the Georgia Game and Fish Commission. They sent a media staffer named Jim Morrison out to interview Samples. When questioned, Junior readily admitted the big fish story was just a joke, but Morrison thought it was funny and asked Junior if he could record him telling the tall tale. Junior agreed.
According to the embellished story, he caught the bass on Lake Lanier while he was drunk. Said he caught it on a “little white-bellied spring lizard” fishing with a “Zebbie-co 33.” Said he couldn’t remember just what marina he stopped at to weigh it, but that it weighed 22-9.
Morrison took the recording to an Atlanta radio station, and it started getting a lot of air play. A tape was sent to Chart Records, and they released it as a single. It was titled “The World’s Biggest Whopper,” and it made the Country Music Top 50 in 1967. After that, Junior Samples was cast on “Hee Haw.”
And he became famous and made some big money … but he never had a big lifestyle. His indulgences from his TV paychecks were a brick home—complete with indoor plumbing—a new Ranger bass boat, a Lincoln Continental to pull it, and a big color TV so he could watch himself on “Hee Haw” at 7:00 p.m. every Saturday night.
Junior’s record largemouth was actually a red grouper, and his claim of being drunk and not recalling the marina where he weighed the fish proved beneficial. After the recording came out, every marina on the lake came forward to claim that the fish was weighed at their establishment, and each offered plenty of witnesses to back it up.
It’s harder to explain the success of “Hee Haw.” It was a different time. “Laugh-In” was a popular variety show on NBC, and it tapped into the hippie counterculture of the day. “Hee Haw” was the rural, country music version of “Laugh-In.” But while “Laugh-In” ran for six seasons, “Hee Haw” ran for 25.
And although Junior Samples was only on “Hee Haw” for 14 of those seasons, he was extraordinarily famous in a way that’s hard to comprehend today. In the 1960s and ’70s, if you were on TV every week, you were very, very famous. “Hee Haw” was regularly watched in over 21% of American homes. It’s possible that no one will ever be as famous as the most famous personalities of the 1970s—before cable television and the internet—people like Muhammad Ali or Alan Alda (“M*A*S*H”).
There’s a pretty good argument that Junior Samples is the most famous person in history who attained fame using bass fishing as a steppingstone. In his day, he was far more famous than any angler you can name today.
On November 13, 1983, Junior Samples died of a heart attack. He was 57 years old. He’s buried—wearing his favorite pair of overalls—at Sawnee View Gardens and Mausoleum in Cumming. His headstone features a bass boat and fishing scene.
