At the time I didn’t appreciate what I had …

Those countless late nights with Big Wilson on WCIX. Even at the tender age of seven, I knew that the show was cheesy. A fat Santa Claus character making obscure (bad) jokes while playing flourish-rich nightclub ditties on his old Casio keyboard, and chain smoking.

The night I met Big Wilson

I actually met Big Wilson at the Dade County Youth Fair around 1982 or so. He was sitting at a table outside, in a cage to the side of the main walkway, surrounded by a huge crowd. Over his head was a large sign, WCIX Channel 6 Night Owl Theater. He was asking trivia questions into a microphone. I was with my dad.

“Oh my fucking god Jesus Christ it’s fucking Big Wilson oh fuck God Jesus” I said.

“It’s B-i-i-i-i-i-g Wilson,” said Dad in his encouraging-demeaning inflection.

“Hold this!”

I handed him my fair crap and ran over to try to get near the table. A large crowd of mostly black and Cuban kids had gathered around and were looking for salvation in the commotion. People were gathering because people before them had gathered. Some were trying to comprehend what was going besides mere quantity and hubbub attracted them.

Then I saw him—I saw his face, a glistening congeries of moles, oil, and sweat. But it was Big fuck-God-Jesus Wilson, the King of the Nightgaunts!

To see Big Wilson, all 320 pounds of him, laughing merrily in his red jacket gives instant apprehension of his fame and stature. The WIOD disc jockey and WCIX late-night movie host did his one-man show from behind his keyboard, night after night, from our humble Channel 6 studio. It was camp. It was corny. It was addictive. Miami was a “hard” city to please. The Cuban chicks at the Catholic high school next to mine were coked-out sex-maniacs—that is, they had very short attention spans and were very hard to impress. In this boredom-phobic and disparaging environment, being King of the Nightgaunts was no small feat.

Big: brief bio

Big Wilson, who was 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds, came to New York in the early 1960’s and joined WNBC for 11 years as a disk jockey. He moved to Miami in 1975 and worked as a disk jockey on radio station WIOD and as a late-night movie host for WCIX-TV, where he became the most important and recognizable underground street-cred personality of the city. In 1976, WCIX produced its famous Night Owl Theater and chose Big as its host. During that time, he weight shot up from 260 to 335 pounds. He died on October 5, 1989. Click below to read his obituaries.

New York Times obituary (1989.10.7)

Sun Sentinel obituary (1989.10.7)

Remembering Big in photos