Dolly Parton touched millions around the globe.
“I cried. I did,” George Boyce says. “She’ll be remembered for a long time. I don’t think there is another Dolly, and I doubt there ever will be one.”
Before she was a global icon, former broadcaster George Boyce met a 20-year-old Dolly at a radio station in New York.
“She was 20 years old at the time. I was 24. You know, a couple kids, really. And we just hit it off,” George says.
While both their careers took them in many different directions, George says they kept in touch over the years; catching up whenever their schedules allowed.
“We kept in touch on and off, usually by phone,” George says. “Just catch up with one another. ‘Where the devil are you? What are doing now? Why do you keep moving? Why? Well, why do you keep going?’”
That ability to stay down to earth was vintage Dolly. When she took to the stage at the Great Allentown Fair in 1977, WFMZ’s own Kathy Craine met her; getting a taste of that legendary warmth firsthand.
“I got up to her and it was my turn. I said, ‘I just adore you’. And she says, ‘Well, you cute little, small thing, you,’” Kathy says. “She was beautiful inside and out. Just a beautiful soul inside and out. And I just could feel that when she hugged me.”
Kathy asked the superstar if she ever got stage fright before stepping out in front of massive crowds.
“I said, ‘Do you ever get nervous before a show?’ And she said, ‘Heck, no. Those are my friends,’” Kathy recalls. “She was different. She was just so special.”
From $9 tickets in Allentown, to decades of heart-to-heart phone calls, Dolly’s genuine spirit left a mark that won’t soon be forgotten.
“All the artists aren’t like that,” Kathy says. “And I don’t think I’ve ever met one that kind and that sensitive in all my life.”
“She had a hell of a talent for whatever it was, you know, songwriting, singing personality, you name it. I mean, it was one of a kind. It was Dolly,” George says.