Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Sept. 10, 2025 – For the last several days I have been in Detroit for a company training meeting. While up here in Detroit, I learned that a longtime friend of many of us here at the Jonesboro Media Group passed away.
Richard Carvell spent 37 years in the Radio-TV department at Arkansas State University.
He served with the Air Force in Vietnam as a photographer and has worked helping veterans in his retirement.
He served for many years on the Nettleton School Board.
He helped promote and run the Jonesboro Community Thanksgiving Meal.
And he was a devoted husband and father to his wife, Sue and their children.
When I first saw the news about Mr. Carvell’s passing, the first thing I thought about wasn’t my talks with Mr. Carvell during the time I was a student at ASU, or any of the many conversations in my adult life.
The first thing I thought about was the times I laid in my bed as a kid in Marked Tree, late at night, with thunder rolling and lightning flashing, listening to KASU Radio at 91.9 FM.
Mr. Carvell and Charles Rasberry, the chairman of the radio-tv department, were always dependably on the air — no matter the time of day or night — delivering the weather warnings and bulletins.
Back then, there were no computers, no internet, no in-studio radar. All that was available was the weather wire — the teletype. Mr. Carvell and Mr. Rasberry would read the information printing off the teletype and fill the gaps in-between with commentary.
As a little kid fascinated first with radio and second with weather, it was amazing to me to hear the way they did it.
And let me tell you, the way THEY did it formed the way I have done it for the last 50 plus years.
Mr. Carvell, first, thank you for your service to our country. And to your community. And to your family.
Thank you for the way you have blessed and served those around you.
And thank you for the inspiration you provided a young boy interested in radio and weather.