Collage by Carlie Burton
I went to see my old boss and friend, Frank Wood. He’s the person you can credit with (choose one) Cincinnati’s shameful decline into coarseness and vulgarity or Cincinnati’s elevation to a showplace of fun and creativity. He was the legendary ringmaster of WEBN, mastermind of its conquest of Cincinnati radio, and creator of our iconic Riverfest fireworks.
Visiting Wood, I rattled off some of the outrageous stunts we got away with in WEBN’s prime, and it was great to see him light up from these memories. He is forgetting so many of them now.
Alzheimer’s has been lowering its dark cloud onto the once-formidable man, and he recently moved to a memory care facility. He had once assembled a gloriously talented team that ignited wildfires of laughter and fun, entertainment that got thousands of people to hear their radios crackle with creative energy and then gathered even more thousands (millions, if you add up the years) to enjoy thunder, lightning, and music from a fireworks show that made Cincinnati world famous.
Wood changed my life, our lives, and the life of this entire city. He deserves to feel our deepest gratitude forever, but that capacity has faded away. We can’t thank him enough, and yet we can’t thank him at all.
There is so very much to appreciate. WEBN’s gorilla-sized ratings from the late 1980s have yet to be matched by anyone, thanks to Wood and his smart moves. He transformed the tiny radio station started in 1967 by his father (also named Frank) into Cincinnati’s No. 1 frequency. Just as Baby Boomers were coming of age, he devised a combination of hardware (FM radio), software (progressive rock), and what you might call a home page (Jelly Pudding, the station’s first rock program) into an electronic gathering place.
Today we call it social media, an obvious thing now, but Wood preceded Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg by decades. He shared with those visionaries a willingness to gamble, to test boundaries, to stare down failure. He also conjured the frog station mascot from WEBN’s famously fictitious Tree Frog Beer (“Doesn’t taste like much, but it gets you there faster”).
If Frank Wood can no longer appreciate his own legacy, please allow me—along with some others whose lives were directly impacted by him—to pay tribute here and now. “One of the first things he told me was, There is no line, as in, Don’t worry about crossing a line; we’ll handle it,” says Eddie Fingers, who joined the WEBN Dawn Patrol show in summer 1985 and added the first elements of amiable danger and debauchery to its morning program. “I was tiptoeing when I started, but Frank said go full speed ahead and he’d have my back.”
When the edgier content resulted in more listeners but also more complaints, Wood kept his word and ate the losses from advertisers who clutched their pearls and left. Calculated risk in service to long-term goals—that was a lesson he gave to many. “He loved chaos,” says Fingers.
It’s no contradiction that his on-air partner Robin Wood also saw Frank, her brother, as an agent of calm. “You’d go into his office all pissed off about something and come out half an hour later smiling,” she says. “He had this gift for listening to you and really paying attention. He just made people feel special.”
Robin had taken over WEBN’s morning show in the mid-1970s after an apprenticeship working weekends. It was another winning gamble. The Dawn Patrol became Cincinnati’s top morning show by the 1980s, staying there for a long time.
“The thing about Frank was he didn’t just give you stuff. He made you earn it,” says Craig Kopp, the show’s third original member. As WEBN’s news director, he was tasked with fitting high-minded journalism into low-minded morning radio. Wood also gave a young City Council member named Jerry Springer his start in broadcasting by allowing him to deliver commentaries twice a week. Yes, there was once a time when a raunchy and offensive radio show’s only oasis of respectability was Jerry Springer.
The list of high-risk moves Wood made is long. In 1984, when the world’s hottest rock band was The Police, he got Cincinnati added to their U.S. tour by purchasing all 16,336 tickets at Riverfront Coliseum. He resold the tickets at face value through a post office box, holding back 500 tickets to sprinkle among WEBN listeners. Bottom line: No other station got giveaway tickets—or ad dollars—for the biggest show of the year.
Wood embodied this kind of sideways surprise attack, the one nobody thinks of. His attraction to risk also extended to skydiving, bungee jumping, muscle motorcycling, and WEBN’s giant hot air balloon, which he piloted.
His biggest gamble by far was in summer 1977, celebrating WEBN’s 10th anniversary with a massively expensive fireworks display on the Ohio River. There was no Riverfest yet, no sponsors, no daytime events—just an invitation to see a free fireworks show at 10 on a Tuesday (the station’s actual birthday of August 30), promoted on one radio station and paid for out of one guy’s pocket. Nobody knew if the crowd would be 1,000 or 20,000 or 20.
Riverfest is Cincinnati’s annual reminder that the only thing Frank Wood loved more than running a radio station was blowing shit up. The very first time I visited his home, years before Riverfest, I watched him light the fuse of a clearly illegal-sized rocket on his balcony and jump back, just because. His backyard Halloween parties were well-known for their exploding pumpkins. “He tried to get a bigger pumpkin to blow up every year,” says John Phillips, the station’s former traffic helicopter reporter. “One year he wanted me to fly by his party with a 500-pound pumpkin and explode it in mid-air after I dropped it.” Having no desire to upstage the most famous episode of WKRP in Cincinnati or to lose his pilot’s license, Phillips declined.
“Frank never lost his almost childlike creativity, combined with super adult intelligence,” says Randy Michaels. “It made him just a very special person.” He spent years as the anti-Frank Wood, running Q102 and the original 96 Rock, mortal enemies of WEBN. Nothing you heard on the air was more outrageous than what these two men did off the air to each other. “There are a lot of stories I’m not sure you should put in print,” says Michaels.
It was nothing less than an industry earthquake when their two radio companies melted into one, turning Wood and Michaels into partners. Everyone knew they’d already become friends. In one of their earlier lawsuits—Wood had a law degree and often competed via the courtroom—they agreed to a settlement stipulating that all charges would be dropped if both parties sat at a table with a bottle of Chivas Regal and consumed it in one sitting. So they reached a more formal settlement by merging, going through with the original one in private. “Frank and I just got each other,” says Michaels.
Then there’s me. The bulk of my radio career is a direct result of Frank Wood. Things did not begin easily, because the son of a bitch refused three times to hire me.
I was at a small-town radio station in Pennsylvania, and one day a coworker got hired away by some scrappy rock station in Cincinnati. I went there to visit him and instantly knew that WEBN was the place for me. Wood’s attraction was not nearly as instant. I sent him tapes of my stuff, and he said no. The fool turned me down again a year later, and then dumped a third rejection on me the year after that.
I gave up, crushed. But a few days after the third refusal, Wood called me. The guy he’d chosen for the job backed out for some reason, and now he would settle for me. How’s that for a ringing endorsement? My revenge: I worked at WEBN for 37 years, longer than anyone.
Wait, that’s not quite accurate. I quit WEBN in my third year and didn’t return full-time for almost a decade. Wait, that’s not accurate, either, because we’re talking about Frank Wood. For several months, he let me slowly withdraw from WEBN and establish my own business producing commercials and jingles. I worked half-days at the station getting my footing while he volunteered advice about marketing myself and avoiding mistakes. Have you ever had a boss like that? I did.
Now and then I still get recognized somewhere and am complimented for the fun I helped produce over the years. Everyone from the old WEBN team experiences this, and it feels really good. But Wood himself—the guy who built the very playground where we got to run around jumping in puddles and play way past our bedtime—isn’t able to feel the appreciation anymore. He was watching the fireworks on TV last summer, and when he was reminded that he launched the whole Riverfest phenomenon, he seemed to take it as a joke. That’s heartbreaking.
Frank Wood changed my life, and if you lived in Cincinnati during the second half of the 20th century he changed yours. That damned radio station either made your days or ruined them. Those billboards either made you laugh out loud or caused an accident when you tried to cover your kids’ eyes. And of course, those fireworks shows…next year will be the 50th one. You were affected, even if you avoided them.
The courage to take chances and the fearlessness mixed with joy that Frank Wood inspired in me and in so many others is his lesser-known legacy. I think it’s the more powerful and lasting one. If he can no longer keep that legacy going, I hope you will.
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