Hillbilly-music.com says:

While [the barn dance] didn't have a headliner, perhaps they had a mainstay of the station. It was the familiar figure of Happy Jack O'Malley, who was playing his fiddle on the air from 1927, when he won an old-time fiddlers' contest. Happy was said to have had the first commercial program on WNAX. The article mentions that in the twenties, Happy used to be a bricklayer. He'd come up to the studio in his mortar-spattered overalls, trade his trowel for a fiddle, and just jump right into the swing of things whether it was a waltz or a polka and got the toes tapping in the audience.

I don't know anything about his son. Hope he made it back in one piece.