Mary Wheat, 97, with the Oak Ridge Boys onstage, during their concert in January in Virginia Beach. Photos: The Virginian-Pilot/TNS
Mary Wheat spun her red walker around, aiming toward a row of tour buses.
“Mum!” her daughter called from the sidewalk. “There she goes. Mum!”
Barely 152cm feet tall, Mary Wheat, a 97-year-old from Newport News in the United States, rolled toward the bus with “The Oak Ridge Boys” plastered on its side. On this Friday evening, shortly after 5pm, it was parked behind the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts in Virginia Beach. The sun was beginning to set, and the band was scheduled to go on at 8pm.
“The boys always want to see me!” Mary hollered over her shoulder, in a melodious, oh-so-Tennessee accent, warm with years.
Her band, the Oak Ridge Boys, has accumulated 12 gold and three platinum albums, one double platinum album, and multiple No. 1 hits, including the 1981 country-pop crossover Elvira.
In the process, it’s collected a legion of fans, but probably none more devoted than Mary – who is more than a fan.
She’s as close to a band member as one can be without playing an instrument or touring nonstop with them. She’s part of their culture. Her presence at shows is almost like a mascot’s.
She has gone on two cruises on which the Boys performed.
In 2022, she saw them 21 times around the country, most of them with her daughter Myra Wheat, who drove 10 hours from her home in Atlanta in the United States to ensure her mom made it safely to the Sandler.
Mary has lost track of how many concerts she’s attended since the 1970s, misplaced the exact number of times she’s danced in the aisles.
Always a ‘Mary story’But last weekend was special. This was the first in a “long, long” time her Boys were playing in Hampton Roads.
As Mary neared the bus, onlookers watched in the cold. Her bright red coat matched her walker, and a hat that she’d knit from every color of yarn in the rainbow fit as tight as a beanie.
A basket on the front of her walker was filled with Valentine’s Day cards for the band and good Virginia peanuts for the roadies.
She maneuvered the walker in between two buses, leaned on it with her left hand and banged on the bus door with her right.
Her daughter jested, “I used to call her a shameless hussy.”
With her red walker, Mary goes knocking.
Mary knocked again. Still no answer. Disappointed, she moseyed back to Myra.
“But I always get a hug from Duane? He’s not out yet?”
Then Darrick Kinslow, the tour manager, walked out a back door of the Sandler.
“Well, Mary Wheat? We never know if you’re going to be sky diving, bungee jumping, ziplining, motorcycle riding, surfing,” he said.
“You never know if she’s going to show up, huh?” Myra said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Everywhere from Las Vegas to here, to cruise ships.”
Rex Wiseman, who plays steel guitar and fiddle for the band, walked up from the stage door. He smiled and started to tell “a Mary story.”
He remembered walking out of a theater in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, about a decade ago and seeing Mary get on the back of a stranger’s Harley. Myra nodded in memory.
Mary asked, “What now?”
“We were talking about when you rode off on that dude’s motorcycle,” he said.
“Which one?” Mary quipped, and grinned, remembering how she’d sped off on the bike as he yelled after her, “Young lady, you better be back before dark!”
A guitar player and couple more crew members walked out, and Myra started recounting how two years before the motorcycle ride her mother wrote to the Boys that she was going to go ziplining before going to see them at their concert in Laughlin, Nevada.
They wrote back, expressing concern. Mary was 85.
But she went ziplining anyway the morning of the show. She didn’t get hurt, but later that day when getting ready for the night’s concert, her daughters bandaged her head.
They coated her face in dark makeup to look like bruises and a black eye. When the band walked off the bus in Laughlin, they were greeted by a beat-up Mary Wheat.
“Oh my God, Mary! We told you not to go ziplining,” they cried out.
“I was OK until I hit a pole,” she fibbed.
“You hit a pole!!”
“We all love Mary,” said David Boots, a production manager and lighting designer, as he and other crew members started to head toward their hotel to freshen up before the show.
Mary and tour manager Darrick Kinslow outside the Sandler Center.
Phone call from DuaneMary watched them go, still a little disappointed that she’d yet to greet a single core member of the Oak Ridge Boys – Duane Allen, Joe Bonsall, William Lee Golden or Richard Sterban – who sing the group’s signature harmonies.
She was headed for the warmth of the Sandler lobby when her phone dinged.
It was Duane Allen, texting to say he’d been “tied up” preparing for the show. He said he hoped she wasn’t standing out in the cold. Mary returned to the buses and found him hanging out a bus door.
“Hiii Duane,” Mary said, before hugging him and hearing him call her “family.”
Around 7.15 pm Mary and Myra were inside the Sandler lobby, where they’d met up with two of Mary’s other children, Tommy Wheat and Judy Wheat, and their significant others, everyone mingling with the other fans standing in line.
Mary made sure to greet concession sellers and the band’s merchandise manager. Everybody knew Mary Wheat.
After the band sang its way through two of their old hits, Everyday and American Made, the music stopped, and the house lights came on.
“Mary Wheat is down there,” said singer Joe Bonsall, pointing to the front row. “How ya doin,’ hon? We’re going to talk more about you later.”
The lights went down, the Boys started playing again, and then 10 minutes later, stopped. The house lights came on.
“Mary down there,” Bonsall told the crowd, “her mother followed us until she was 105.”
The show paused for nearly 10 minutes while he explained.
It was 1976. The Oak Ridge Boys took a bus to Virginia for a gig at the brand-new Busch Gardens, and Mary; her mother, Una Reeks; and Judy were all there.
Judy thought some of the musicians were cute and speculated about getting autographs.
“I’ll get an autograph,” Una told her granddaughter.
Una walked up to security and proclaimed that she was the drummer’s great-aunt Una and that she wanted to see him. When she, Mary and Judy made it backstage, she looked right at the drummer. “What’s wrong, you don’t know your own great-aunt.”
Confounded, the drummer just went with it, and Judy got her autographs before Una asked the boys, “What if I told you I was a fake?”
With that, Una began writing and sending presents to the band. Mary became their friend and when her mother died in 2005, picked up the tradition of taking the Boys little snacks and presents.
Bonsall finished the story, and the Boys asked Mary to join them onstage. The audience cheered. Mary beamed, posing with her Boys under the lights. The next day, Mary was replaying the moment as she and Myra were on the road.
“It was wonderful,” she said in a phone interview. “My head is still spinning every time I think of it.”
They were driving to Henderson, North Carolina, where that night the Boys would be playing their next show. – The Virginian-Pilot/Tribune News Service
