[March 21, 2010] OPINION: Back at a time when radio actually reported news Tweet Mar 21, 2010 (Star Beacon - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- As a sophomore in high school, there was nothing better than waking up, turning on the radio and hoping a Rolling Stones song was playing. Even better -- yes better -- was having Ken Vaughn come on WWOW and announce school was closed because of the weather. Vaughn was so important in revealing northeast Ohio weather conditions, including school closings, that when things got too bad, he called the police department who escorted him to the radio station back when it was located in the Conneaut Plaza. Fortunately for him, most of the time the station was located in downtown Conneaut, a couple of blocks from his Victorian home on Liberty Street. Ken died a few weeks ago at his home. With no Internet, Ken's weather updates and school closings were a must listen while in school. Heck, I can remember listening to his show while in driver's education classes. After high school and getting my college degree, I returned to the old hometown, got hired by the then Conneaut News-Herald and found myself covering many of the same events as Ken. WWOW at the time was called a daytimer. It got special permission from the FCC to sign on at 6 a.m. (later 5:30 a.m.) even if it was pitch black out, but had to sign off the air at sundown, which ranged from before 5 p.m. in the winter until 9 p.m. in summer. Ken was a jack of all trades at the station, often working from before sign-on until 5 p.m., so he could do the final local newscast of the day. He had to apologize to listeners a couple of times when he overslept and didn't get there to sign the station on in time. But that might be because of those hours he put in. After 5, he often attended City Council and School Board meetings to report on them in detail the next morning. I can attest to the fact during the late 70s when Conneaut was in line for a U.S. Steel mill, expected to be the largest industrial expansion in the world, there were meetings and hearings every night. But Ken knew it was part of the job. He usually had a weekend show, too, either Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoon. He thought he had it easy on Sundays when he worked the boards during religious shows and read the Sunday papers and still got paid for it. I remember him saying he was going on vacation. It consisted of getting off work at noon on a Thursday instead of working until 5, taking Friday and Saturday off and being back at work Sunday afternoon. I remarked that didn't seem like much of a vacation to me. He replied, "Ah, that's plenty. Take much more than that and you get yourself in trouble." Later, I asked him how his "vacation" was. He said something like, "Fine, but the kids (other staff at the station) did something to the turntables and the first thing I had to do was get underneath with my screwdriver and fix them." Besides news, deejaying, producing commercials, fixing turntables and doing remote broadcasts, he had to find and hire new deejays for the station. It didn't pay much and except for Ken, there was a revolving door. He often got employees set up at the Cleveland Hotel for $15 a week. "It doesn't hurt them to share a bathroom," he would say. He was a true intellectual who enjoyed poetry and philosophy. Sometimes when the phone calls were scarce, he would ad-lib a bit on his talk show (which by the way never had a name). Sometimes the show went something like this: Ken: I was reading Immanuel Kant the other day who believed using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions and I wonder if anyone out there would care to comment. Caller: Ken, I saw the first robin of spring outside my kitchen window this morning. Ken: That's nice. When a house exploded in West Conneaut in October 1989, tearing up a neighborhood and killing two, Ken broadcast via telephone from a nearby damaged home all day until signoff. Once when weather looked really threatening, he phoned the afternoon disc jockey who lived in Cleveland and told him not to come in. He stayed on the air the whole broadcast day. He did the same thing on Christmas to give everyone else the day off. One election night when WWOW also had the FM outlet which is now WGOJ, he was broadcasting results throughout the evening. The Board of Elections experimented with computers from a local bank for the first time to get results. They broke down and Ken had to leave Jefferson at 5 a.m. before results were known to sign on the air. He worked through the morning, having not slept in days. He finally fell asleep over coffee with then Mayor Paul Williams at the old Sugar Bowl on Main Street after his morning stint was over. I had to take final results to the station for him. WWOW dismissed him in 2000 as part of new ownership and a format change. Since then, WWOW has greatly boosted its daytime power and operates 24 hours a day, but no longer has a niche. I don't know what Ken thought of the station recently when it became a citadel for the far right. Instead of the morning show allowing listeners to comment on spring robins or road conditions or what happened at council meetings, it became a platform against President Barack Obama, health care reform and many things people here find important. It called itself a "news/talk giant" with no one locally who could objectively do news. One of the more recent local morning "personalities" hosted a Republican gathering which included disgraced former U.S. Rep. James Traficant, a convicted felon, as well as one of those tea parties. The Web site for the station for awhile even had a link to the Republican party. (It would have been just as bad going to the other extreme.) Ken believed in a free-flow of ideas and unlike many of today's radio people, knew how to sit through meetings to gleam information, sift through police reports and ask the right questions to get the news. He was a real newsperson while some of today's radio people are more like Internet bloggers, giving opinions without knowing how to collect and disseminate information on their own. The conservative format recently failed and the station is back to a format from a few years ago, Catholic programming, which most people can get on cable TV. It too must have limited local interest. I always respected Ken although I didn't always agree with him. Mainly, two days is simply not much of a vacation. Lebzelter is special sections editor. E-mail him at [email protected]. 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