Call it a crash course in Crosley 101, for both newcomers and longtime residents.
Nick Swartsell's Crosley at the Crossroads eight-part podcast released late last month provides a great overview of the Crosley Corp. in the first half of the 20th century.
Not only did brothers Powel and Lewis Crosley build WLW-AM, and were the first to mass produce radios in the 1920s, they also made appliances, a compact car, push-button car radios and a smart bomb.
Crosley at the Crossroads, a companion to his Round the Cornerseriesof stories about Cincinnati's Camp Washington neighborhood, was a passion project for Swartsell, who was long fascinated by that "hulking white building with a tower on top" just south of where I-75 is joined by I-74.
For the first four episodes, Swartsell interviewed Rusty McClure, Lewis Crosley's grandson and Crosley historian, in the company's former eight-story plant on Arlington Street. Built in the late 1920s, it was the home of the Crosley Corp. radio manufacturing, with WLW-AM's studios on the top two floors.
"This is the epicenter of the beginning of radio," says McClure, author of Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation, published in 2006. He calls radio "the first great electronic device of its time."
Powel Crosley Jr. started making radios in the 1920s when his young son wanted one of "the novelty toys" which retailed for $130, McClure explains. So Powel bought a booklet on how to make one, and built a radio for about $10. Then he decided to mass produce them — and to start broadcasting from his College Hill home in 1922 so radio owners had something to listen to on their battery-powered device. (Here's my story on WLW-AM's 100th anniversary last year.)
Powel, who flunked out of the University of Cincinnati three times, was the idea man. Lewis, a civil engineer, was the pragmatic one who converted his brother's visions into reality.
"Powel had a grasshopper mind. He couldn't sit still. He'd make coffee nervous," McClure says.
The Arlington Street plant was needed because Crosley received one million radio orders in two years, he says. After moving to Camp Washington, the facility was shipping more than 30 box cars of radios a day, he said. Crosley also made stoves, refrigerators (including the Shelvador, the first with door shelves in 1933, and another with a built-in radio), phonograph players, speakers, headphones, washing machines, ironing boards and a short-lived hair-growth stimulation machine (Xervac) for balding men.
At the same time, jazz pianist Fats Waller, singer Doris Day, actor Eddie Albert, baseball announcer Red Barber, Procter & Gamble's Ma Perkins soap opera, newsman Peter Grant, the Mills Brothers, various country and western performers, three full-time orchestras and other entertainers were broadcasting on WLW-AM and WSAI-AM from the eighth floor.
The radio stations were forced to move out of the building in 1942 to Crosley Square, a former Elks Lodge at Ninth and Elm streets Downtown, when Crosley started making the top secret proximity fuze on Arlington Street during World War II. A miniature radio transceiver in the tip of the fuze could detect an enemy target from a distance and explode the shell in close proximity to airplanes, making it the world's first smart bomb, McClure says.
Crosley was very much part of the so-called "industrial military complex," making 6,000 proximity fuzes a day, and shipping them hidden in milk containers, McClure says.
Immediately after World War II — and two years before the advent of commercial television, which would prove to be a goldmine for broadcasters — Crosley sold the company to the Aviation Corporation of America (AVCO) in 1946 to pursue his dream of building an automobile.
His dream as an American automaker went bust in six years. Car production ceased in 1952. Powel Crosley continued to own the Cincinnati Reds until his death on March 28, 1961, six months before the team won the National League pennant.
Swartsell spent a year researching and writing the Crosley podcast and Camp Washington series — while working full-time for Cincinnati Public Radio and editing a book, The Cincinnati Neighborhood Guidebook,released last December.
Folks at Action Tank, the Cincinnati-based non-profit that partners with artists to research and promote public policies, saw the pictures and suggested they collaborate on a coffee table book. Instead, Swartsell did the eight-part podcast with former Cincinnati Public Radio engineer Josh Elstro, with support from Action Tank.
Swartsell's podcast also gives a revealing historical perspective on how Camp Washington was sliced away from Clifton, Brighton, Mohawk and the West End by I-75, and from Northside by I-74. It's hard to envision how Colerain Avenue, near the old Crosley plant, once connected to Colerain Avenue a few blocks from Knowlton's Corner.
The last four podcast episodes and much of Swartsell's Round the Corner stories, look at Camp Washington's present and future, its diverse population and the plans to revitalize its aging buildings, including the outdated Crosley vertical manufacturing facility. It is context you can only find on public broadcasting
"It took about a year but I wish I'd had more time," Swartsell says. "It was such a fun project and I feel really lucky I got to be a part of it."
John Kiesewetter's reporting is independent. Cincinnati Public Radio only edits his stories for style and grammar.
