It hadn’t sounded like a bad idea.
WOHO, the 1,000-watt radio station on 1470 AM, was second in the ratings chart behind the always-popular WSPD, and a fun contest might have helped bridge the gap. The premise was simple: Someone had stolen WOHO’s Os and buried them somewhere in Toledo. For a few days, silence substituted for the Os in the station’s jingles: “One forty-seven, W_H_, the station with the happy difference.”
WOHO offered $150 to whomever recovered the call letters. The on-air hints didn't try for subtlety: “Go west and look for a big brick tower, the one that tolls this very hour.” More than a few listeners correctly guessed the location: the University of Toledo bell tower. Fewer obeyed the station's instruction to mail a postcard with the answer.
The bad news came via the panicked call of a university security guard: “We got people digging up the lawn over here and they said WOHO was going to make them rich!” The next call came from the Toledo Police Department, and then from three TV news stations looking to confirm that WOHO had indeed instructed its audience to dig up the University of Toledo. Seventy cars filled the university parking lot.
WOHO aired an apology and paid landscapers to repair the university lawn. It was, Ken Deutsch later reflected, the “Titanic of radio contests." The fiasco had occurred during his first year at WOHO, in 1972, but it would hardly be the last misadventure into which the radio station careened.
“Those were all true stories that could happen in the time they did, but could not possibly happen now,” Deutsch said. It was a different era of radio, more spontaneous and more nebulous, and though he didn’t know it when WOHO hired him as a disc jockey, Deutsch had arrived just in time to see its final airing of color.
‘RAP’
WOHO had always courted controversy and competition. It had its beginnings in a five-way jostle for the Federal Communications Commissions’ newest radio license in 1949. Applicants included Unity Corp., owner of WTOD, and The Toledo Blade. The FCC eventually declared Midwestern Broadcasting Co. the victor. WOHO was erected at 2965 Pickle Rd. in Oregon and launched on Oct. 3, 1954 as Toledo’s fourth radio station. It aired music, news and sports.
WOHO didn’t need to wait even a year for its first lawsuit, courtesy of one spurned suitor: The Blade. The $250,000 damage suit filed on Aug. 30, 1955 accused WOHO of “pirating” stories from The Blade by “regularly reading the most important news items,” often verbatim, as part of its daily newscast. Common Pleas judge Tom Stahl eventually barred WOHO from broadcasting items in The Blade for a day following publication.
WOHO survived and in the 1960s began broadcasting 24 hours a day. When Deutsch arrived in Toledo in 1972, fierce competition raged between the major AM stations: WOHO, WTLO, WTOD, WTTO, and of course WSPD. By then, WOHO had already launched its “Rap” talk show, on Feb. 22, 1971. The title was derived from “a slang expression popular among the young set, which means to talk, to communicate, to get down to the nitty-gritty,” wrote Blade entertainment editor Norman Dresser at the time.
From the outset, the program prodded the provocative. Its first two two-hour episodes featured the host, Episcopalian rector Michael Nesbitt, defending legalized abortion. Its third debated legalized prostitution. But even this edgy approach had an uncrossable edge – the broadcasts, while live, had a seven-second delay to edit out any accidental profanity.
By 1973, WOHO had expanded its nightly programming to 11 hours of five different “Rap” talk shows. Deutsch, one of the station’s so-called “Good Guys,” hosted his show from 1 to 6 a.m. One of his “permanent guests,” Gifford “Saint Giffo” Cottle, intermittently hosted as well. He followed no format whatsoever — in the span of an hour, he would engage callers on the Psycho film series, the existence of God, local witchcraft, and favorite nightmares.
Saint Giffo was “kind of a deadbeat dad,” his son Scott Cottle recalled, but “he was a very interesting person” — a writer, painter, and bit of a “real-life beatnik.” He once gave little Scott a tour of the radio station — “the transmitter tubes, the teletype machines, the production studio.” Cottle never forgot it.
YOUR LINE TO CITY HALL
On the opposite end of the night, before Harold Salverda’s 10 p.m. show, aired the “Rap” with councilman Andy Douglas. It premiered on Nov. 20, 1972 at 8 p.m.
“It occurred to me that people generally were frustrated when they tried to find a councilman with a problem,” said Douglas, former Ohio Supreme Court justice and a board member of Block Communications Inc., parent company of The Blade. “It would be nice if people in the city could know, every night, where to find a councilman if they needed one.”
Douglas would arrive at the station at a quarter to seven, all seven lines on the console reliably alight, night after night. WOHO paid him “a pittance” an hour. People called in with questions about everything: snowmobile legislation, garbage pick-up, smoking addictions. The medium and the program, Douglas recalled, offered “endless possibilities that you could work with.”
Around Christmastime, Douglas brought his 7-year-old son David to the studio. During a lull in calls, he announced his son to his listeners.
“David, what would you like for Christmas?” Douglas asked. David pondered this important question for a few moments, before realizing that his father had silently raised two fingers.
“Peace,” David answered. A deluge of calls praising Douglas’s “angelic little boy” quickly followed. After about the fourth call, David recalled, he “broke under the pressure.”
“Actually, my father told me to say that,” he clarified. Douglas gave him a slightly exasperated look that said, “Oh, David, we could have pulled this off.”
When Douglas could no longer fulfill his talk show duties between running the city and building a law practice, WOHO accommodated him by building cables into his new house on Larchwood Lane. He hosted the show in his library, sometimes in his pajamas, while his adolescent children screened incoming calls in the kitchen.
“That was very rudimentary talk radio, compared to what Limbaugh and others had,” Douglas said. “We had a primitive way of doing things, but it still worked.”
The show’s popularity attracted political figures. When William J. Brown, the Ohio state attorney running for governor, visited Toledo, he dropped by Larchwood Lane for a radio session. Taffy rushed to the front door. Douglas ordered the dog back inside.
“No, no, no, I want dogs,” said Brown. “Dogs are the best judges of character.” He bent down to pet Taffy. She bit him.
From Douglas’ talk show emerged his campaign slogan: “Your Line to City Hall.” However, since the federal equal-time rule required broadcasters to give identical air time to political candidates, Douglas stopped hosting his show whenever he ran for re-election. He left WOHO for good in the late 1970s.
“It was one of the great periods of my life, because really it combined something that was innovative with public service,” Douglas said. "I enjoyed every minute of it, now that I think about it."
PLAYBACK
Deutsch began his DJ career as a child at WKRD — short for W-Ken R. Deutsch. In his bedroom-studio he had a $27 Sears turntable, a commercial-playing dictaphone, and, for announcements, a state-of-the-art paper cup on a broom. He’d grown up on WLS, a 50,000-watt station in Chicago, and dreamed of DJing: introducing songs, chatting with callers, being a personality.
WOHO let him do that, for a time. But by the late 1970s, “the McDonaldization of radio” had begun.
“By that time general managers didn’t want personalities, because they couldn’t be controlled,” said Deutsch. “General managers wanted radio to operate like shoe companies, where everything got done on time.” Once radio became “too corporate,” with ever-increasing levels of automation cutting costs and character, he left the scene.
With the departure of Carty Finkbeiner in 1982, following a six-month stint as talk show host, WOHO replaced “Rap” with a national consumer-oriented program. In 1990, shortly after switching to a country music format to compete with WTOD, the station temporarily went off-air due to low ratings. After repeated reformatting and renaming in the next two decades, the station was abandoned due to its deteriorating transmitter site. The FCC canceled the license on Nov. 30, 2016.
Saint Giffo passed in 2007, and Deutsch attended his funeral. There he met his son Scott Cottle, who after his father’s death happened upon a stunning discovery: a trove of reel-to-reel tapes buried deep in his now-vacant house. Only last year did Cottle find a way to begin digitizing the collection and uploading it to YouTube.
He soon dug up recordings of “Rap with Andy Douglas.” Those he uploaded, too, while alerting the former justice to his discovery.
For Douglas, it was yet another echo of a tape he thought stopped running 50 years ago. Just last month, while requesting an environmental study for a business group he was representing, the billing person asked him if he was the real Andy Douglas, the one from the radio. It’s the sort of unpredictability he had savored in that talk show and which court cases couldn’t always provide.
“It was never repetitious in that radio program,” he said. “You had no idea what you were going to hear at the end of that line.”
First Published March 21, 2021, 2:30 p.m.
