One of Charlotte’s biggest radio stars on his health scare — and when he might retire

Johnny “John Boy” Isley lives part-time in the home he and his wife Eve own in Ballantyne Country Club so he can easily commute to the iHeart Media building in Southend, where he pre-records “The Big Show” with Billy James on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

But Thursday to Sunday, this farm — out here in middle-of-nowhere Waxhaw — is the veteran morning-radio show host’s happy place.

It’s a country boy’s dream, an outdoorsman’s playground and a postcard rolled into one: more than 100 acres of pastures to patrol; ponds to fish; patches of collards to pick; lines of pines to admire; collections of cows, horses and chickens to count; and, generally speaking, zero of the hustle or bustle associated with his workweek.

“Isn’t it beautiful?,” longtime “John Boy & Billy” producer Jackie Curry marvels, as she looks out across the sprawling property that stretches beyond a point where the eye can see.

As he stands next to her outside his and Eve’s “barndominium,” John Boy explains how they bought 88 of these acres in 2004, how they then added another 20 more when they purchased the adjacent plot from a neighbor looking to move on and how they even more recently had 5 of those acres zoned as home sites.

They did that, he says, “so when I run outta money after I retire, I can start selling ’em.”

John Boy laughs as soon as those words escape his mouth, just like he laughs at a lot of the things that he says, or that you say. This is a man who loves to laugh almost as much as he loves this farm.

But if you can get the guy to be totally serious for a few minutes — and if you ask him the right questions — he’ll talk to you about a couple of things he hasn’t talked much about publicly: one, just how close the 67-year-old radio star actually might be getting to retirement, and two, just how close he actually might have been to missing out on any forthcoming retirement, if he hadn’t started being more mindful of his health.

‘Well, this is not that serious’

John Boy says smoking always just sort of came with the territory.

“Back in the ’70s, when you started off as a disc jockey, they gave you a pair of headphones and a pack of cigarettes.”

It became a pack-a-day habit. When he was first teamed with Billy at Charlotte’s WBCY in 1980, Billy smoked, too. And as the power couple moved to WRFX and steadily grew into a nationally syndicated behemoth that rivaled Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern by the ’00s, John Boy and Billy’s inner circle became populated with fellow smokers, from Jackie to executive producer Randy Brazell.

Meanwhile, John Boy was notorious for procrastinating when it came to going to the doctor. Rescheduling or just outright canceling appointments was a common occurrence, says Jackie, who was responsible for making a lot of those calls.

Roughly since turning 60 seven years ago, he started getting a little more responsible. That was at least in some small part, he says, because “I had to get a physical every year, for insurance.” But even when a CT scan revealed two small thoracic aortic aneurysms — weakened areas in the upper part of his aorta that are often caused by smoking — John Boy continued lighting up, much to his wife Eve’s chagrin.

“I thought, You’ve got these aneurysms in your throat! What are you doing still smoking??,” recalls Eve, herself a lifelong non-smoker. “But they were small. The threat wasn’t quite large enough. And by the next year, they hadn’t grown. It just gave him (an excuse to say): ‘Well, this is not that serious.’”

Not that John Boy hadn’t started thinking about it. Randy had stopped smoking years ago. So had Jackie. Then Billy eventually did, too.

“I always said, ‘Well, I gotta quit,’ and always thought in my mind I would quit,” says John Boy, adding that he once successfully cut out cigarettes for a year or so when he was younger, then slipped and fell back into it. “It’s stupid.”

But in 2021, he finally found the proper motivation.

A pretty nerve-wracking time

That fall, another routine test for older current and former smokers found John Boy had two more aortic aneurysms, this time on the lower part of his aorta.

Like had been done with the thoracic aortic aneurysms, Novant Health vascular surgeon Dr. Rebecca Kelso recommended a wait-and-see approach with the abdominal ones — i.e., check on them every six months. But she also made it crystal-clear: If these do grow, one of them could burst without warning, she told him.

“If that should happen, your chance of surviving it is very low.”

The good news was that John Boy decided it was serious enough to quit, which he did this time successfully and permanently.

The bad news was that after a year had gone by, Kelso determined that the abdominal aortic aneurysms were in fact growing, and that he would benefit from surgery to have them repaired.

It was, briefly, a pretty nerve-wracking time. John Boy was usually nonplussed by health concerns, but a previous doctor’s at-the-time-almost-comical warning to him about avoiding car accidents because getting in one could cause an aneurysm to burst had become increasingly unsettling to think about. And Eve says she would get super-anxious when he’d go spend the night at the farm by himself when she couldn’t get away from Ballantyne to join him.

This would be no minor procedure, either. As Kelso described it: “We made a cut on the side of his chest down to below his belly button, and through that we replaced the aorta and one of the kidney arteries to that with an artificial graft.”

He played it as cool as possible, though. “I’m sure he was scared,” Jackie says, “but he’s very good about hiding. That’s that man in him.”

In fact, “John Boy & Billy’s” listeners basically knew nothing about any of this until after he had disappeared from the show without warning at the end of October 2022.

‘More days here on this earth’

John Boy wanted the show to wait to announce anything publicly about the reason for his absence, first and foremost, because “I just wanted to make sure that I was alive!,” he says, only half-jokingly.

But having indeed survived surgery, he signed off on Randy explaining what was going on and was happy to put himself out there as an example who could motivate others to stay on top of their health care, too. “By the way,” Randy said in his Nov. 2, 2022, on-air announcement about John Boy’s situation, “if you’ve got the opportunity to get a full body scan, do it. Had this not been done, we would have eventually lost Johnny.

“I mean, this was that serious. Had that aneurysm ruptured, I mean, it’s lights-out quick.”

John Boy wound up missing almost two months of “The Big Show,” ultimately returning to work a few days before Christmas.

Outwardly, in the year since his recovery from the surgery — and in the more than two years since the initial diagnosis of his more-serious pair of aortic aneurysms — he hasn’t changed much. He’s still, as Billy calls him, “a guy’s guy,” someone who would rather talk to you about hunting and fishing and the old days of NASCAR than his feelings about his health journey.

But he’s definitely practicing what he now preaches about prioritizing check-ups, whether they’re with his primary-care doctor, the ophthalmologist, the dermatologist, or even the dreaded dentist.

And inwardly, says his wife Eve, there has been a noticeable change in him.

“Just the appreciation and gratefulness to the Lord above that he’s got more days here on this earth than he might of,” she says, particularly as that time pertains to their adult kids (all in their 30s) and his first and so-far-only grandchild (who turns 2 in April), but also as it pertains to life after radio.

When does he plan to retire?

It’s a natural question to ask someone who’s 67 and closing in on 44 years as a morning-radio host: When do you plan to retire?

It’s also a tricky one, though, for someone whose show — syndicated by Premiere Networks, a subsidiary of iHeart — is heard on more than 70 stations throughout the U.S. “We have a lot of affiliates,” Jackie says, only half-kidding, “who think they’re gonna die on the air.”

What she’s really trying to say here is that a formal announcement will need to be handled responsibly and thoughtfully, because those affiliates will want time to figure out how to fill a big, important hole in their schedules. She also wants to be perfectly clear that there’s no announcement to be made right now.

At the same time, John Boy’s official stance is that it might not be too long.

“About retirement, yeah. I’m — yeah. I’m gettin’ close. We are riding what we have done in radio out,” he says, on a wave. He then mentions many of those accomplishments by name, from the dawn of their syndicated days in the early ’90s and flirtations with Howard Stern’s then-boss Mel Karmazin to the multimillion-dollar ad-revenue days in the ’00s to today’s far-different business model.

“The wave that we’re ridin’ ... we’re goin’ right up to the shore where it comes down — just about like this,” he says, as he moves his hand slowly across the front of his chest, palm facing down, “— where you can skim-board maybe onto the shore, and step off of it.”

Once that happens? His version of “riding off into the sunset” is simple: a more-permanent move to this farm in Waxhaw.

“I got three ponds to fish out here, I got little baby cows, I got my love (Eve),” John Boy says, as he looks out the big window of his “barndominium” at those pastures that gently roll out toward the horizon. “Now that they’ve rebuilt me better, I’m ready,” he says, referring to the idea of a someday-soon retirement in general and of waking up on the farm every day after that in particular.

And once that happens? He laughs a hearty John-Boy laugh, then says, finally: “You’re gonna have to drag me off this land.”