Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 11, 1993 TAG: 9303100270
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: STANARDSVILLE LENGTH: Long
TRUE CALLING
Hilton Ridge says this is the way his daddy always did it.He cups his hands just so, the better for amplification.
Then he scrunches his eyes shut so tight his eyebrows nearly disappear, and lets loose with a holler that rings till his cheeks turn pink.
"HERE PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY!
HERE PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY!"
Next comes the more traditional SOUU-IE!"
But the experts agree it's the authentic SNORT SNORT through the nose that brings those piggies running. Makes 'em think of mama, he says.
Or maybe it's the plaintive, high-pitched wail "COME ON, LITTLE PIGGY!" that almost always sends his two-legged listeners into howls of laughter.
Whatever his secret may be, Hilton Ridge's hog call has made him the pied piper of pigs. And now he's called in the biggest porker of them all: Two weekends ago, the Greene County school custodian won the World Championship Hog Call.
Of the dozen or so contestants who tried, he was the only one able to impress the judges - four little piggies that came running toward him so fast they nearly knocked him down.
`It was just like if the president had walked in'
"Someday," Hilton Ridge figures, "I'll go back and be a plain ol' janitor working around quietly."
But for now, there's nothing quiet about being the world championship hog caller.
Ridge started wallowing around in his celebrity status on the flight back home from the contest in Oklahoma. "On every one of those big jets I was on," he says, as he aw-shucks his way through the story, "the pilot would call me to the front and say, `We've got somebody famous on board.' I don't know how famous I am."
But the American Airlines pilots thought he was, and insisted he give a demonstration. Flight attendants held the microphone while Ridge let loose with a holler that could rattle the wings off a 747. The passengers high-fived him all the way back to his seat.
But hamming it up on the plane was nothing compared to what happened when Ridge got home. The teachers at the Greene County Primary School, where Ridge works, cranked their snow-day phone-tree into action and turned out a crowd of 100 or so parents and kids to meet Ridge at the Charlottesville airport. They wore pig noses, they oinked, they squealed and generally made a big commotion. "It was just like if the president had walked in," says 10-year-old Jason Williams. Some of the smaller kids even cried, they were so happy.
The next day at school, well, Ridge didn't get much sweeping done.
Kids clamored to hear Ridge's hog call. Some teachers appeased them by having Ridge stop by their classes. "I gave 'em a small one," he says, although that wasn't nearly enough for some. Ridge couldn't walk down the hall without the kids begging him to please, oh, please, do one more. Even students from the high school next door snuck over to hear the hog-callin' custodian.
And then there were the radio stations. They called all day long, for days, from everywhere. The phones jangled so much that Principal Bill Wade finally gave up paging Ridge over the intercom. "Mr. Wade told me to stay up here in the office," Ridge says. "I couldn't do any work. I've even been in the principal's office. They shut the door and let me do my call in there, so you know they're good to me."
When Ridge went home, to the place he built atop Saddleback Mountain, the calls kept coming there, too. "I've talked to every state in the union on the radio," Ridge claims. "One night I sat in my chair and never got up. I got a glass of water and sat there till 11 o'clock. Even Alaska called. They kept me on for 15 minutes."
That's a lot of hog-calling.
But this may just be the beginning. Pepsi-Cola came and strung up a banner in Ridge's honor across Main Street. There are plans in the works for a big assembly at school so that all the kids can get a chance to hear Ridge do his hog-calling. The county fair wants him to be the grand marshal of the annual parade.
And there's even talk of trying to get Ridge on television. Maybe Leno. Or Letterman.
"I had no idea," Ridge keeps saying, "I didn't ever think there would be this much attention to it."
`They just want to hear you hollering'
Strange how this celebrity business works. Hilton Ridge makes a name for himself simply because he remembered how his daddy used to call the hogs back on the farm and figured it would be a fun thing to do at some county fairs.
The real thing Hilton Ridge ought to be famous for, though, is just being Hilton Ridge.
He's a gentle soul, with a calloused handshake, a soft voice and a smile that seems permanently suspended from his puffy cheeks. He retired from bricklaying a few years back and now, at age 56, is working at the school because he wants to, not because he has to. And Lord, does Ridge want to work.
Take a listen to the principal and the teachers sitting around the lunch table:
"This man is a saint. He wants to do all he can for you. It's not in his job description, but he puts the stickers on my car for me."
"He's put the chains on my tires."
"He cuts down everybody's Christmas tree."
"I call him Santa Claus, because he has the personality of Santa Claus and wants to do everything you."
"He's just an animal nut. Did he tell you he raises turkeys and chickens and peacocks?"
"He adores the children as much as the animals. When my son was 3 1/2, Mr. Ridge taught him to oink like a pig and that was the highlight of his life."
couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He gets angry if you do something and don't ask him to help. He's just that type of person."
And Greene County is this type of place: When a secretary in the superintendent's office read a squib about the world championship hog-calling contest in a travel magazine, next thing you know the teachers were taking up a collection to pay the way for their favorite custodian.
The teachers raised $308, and somehow talked both the state and county fair associations into kicking in some more money, so Ridge's wife, Marilyn, a dispatcher in the sheriff's office, could go along, too.
Ridge was so overwhelmed he decided then and there that nothing less than winning the contest would do. "He told us `I'm going out to there to win it,'" says Wade, the principal. "We said `Now don't be disappointed.'"
But Ridge insisted. After all the folks at the school had done for him, "I didn't want to come back a loser. I wanted to win it for the school."
And sure enough, he did. Before a raucous crowd of 10,000 folks packed into an sweaty National Guard Armory in Weatherford, Okla., one contestant rang a dinner bell and called "yip! yip! yip!' like a Chihuahua being stepped on. Another clanged a fork against a lid. Still a third yelped like Tarzan.
But only Ridge got the pigs to budge. "I think with all the people, they were scared," he says quietly, as if trying to explain away his own success. Still, that was all it took for the judges to thrust a gold crown onto Ridge's head and the television cameras to crush in toward him, recording his every comment as if his words held the key to world peace.
Ever since then, though, Ridge has been in hog heaven, so to speak, but also kind of confused about why folks have gone so whole-hog over him winning something as silly as a hog-calling contest. "I've been trying to figure out why they love it so much as they do. I think people like for you to put on a good show. I don't think they care about the hogs coming. They just want to hear you hollering. When I grunt, they always start laughing."
Maybe that's what the judges think, that the secret is the grunt.
But folks back in Greene County say it's the guy who does the grunting.