It turns out David Crean, the new WGUC-FM music director who also programs Dayton’s WDPR-FM, is not the first staffer shared with another public radio station, as I wrote recently.
Says who?
Says long-time morning host Brian O’Donnell, who started hosting WGUC-FM mornings in 1997 while doing Saturday mornings for old WNKU-FM, then operated by Northern Kentucky University.
“Karla Walker was program director at ‘GUC and called me on a Saturday morning at WNKU to offer me the ‘GUC job and thought it was a great idea to continue on Saturday mornings at WNKU along with WGUC, God bless her,” he says.
He turned Walker down at first. Becoming an instant expert on 500 years of classical music was too imposing for “Brian O.D.,” who started his professional radio career at rock station WEBN-FM in early 1973, shortly after graduating from the University of Cincinnati.
“I was too overwhelmed. I was not brought up on classical music. I had to turn her down. I only knew about the tunes we grew up hearing on cartoons and stuff,” he says. O’Donnell didn’t want to stumble introducing “a Japanese conductor with a Russian orchestra and an Italian soloist.”
His wife and close friends, however, “nudged” him to reconsider. He joined WGUC-FM in October 1997 while still at WNKU-FM. He did Saturdays on WNKU-FM until 2015, a year before the university hired a media broker to explore selling NKU’s radio stations.
O’Donnell says he became a classical music lover quickly, with help from WGUC-FM coworkers Mark Perzel, Suzanne Bona and Gary Barton. “It didn’t take too long.”
He arrives at Cincinnati Public Radio at 5:30 a.m. for his 6-11 a.m. shift. Bedtime is supposed to be 9 p.m. — unless his beloved UC Bearcats or Reds are playing a night game.
Radio wasn’t on his radar when graduating from Purcell High School in 1968. He liked to cut hair for his brother, father and friends, so he enrolled in the Moler Barber College. He didn’t attend UC until 1970, where he took liberal arts classes. When he discovered that UC had a campus radio station, WFIB, “I thought that would be fun to do!”
His experience at WFIB led him to be one of many unpaid students to host Full Moon Radio overnights on WGUC-FM, then owned by UC. He was the first local DJ to play a Bruce Springsteen record on Cincinnati airwaves.
“I don’t claim that, but other people told me that,” O’Donnell says. He explained to me years ago that “in 1973, Full Moon got a 45 rpm record of a new artist, Bruce Springsteen just prior to his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park. It was a little 45. He was one of many being promoted as ‘the Next Bob Dylan.’ He was traveling around by station wagon to Cleveland and Athens and Toledo back then, scraping for every penny. WEBN didn’t play Bruce Springsteen until Born To Run came out in 1975,” he says.
O’Donnell also has been heard on Hamilton’s old WMOH-FM (now 103.5 WGRR-FM; Cincinnati’s WLLT-FM (“LITE 95”) which later became WOFX-FM “The Fox,” the city’s first classic rock station, and smooth jazz WVAE-FM (“The Wave”) before coming full circle back to WGUC-FM. He also did commercial production off-air at WLW-AM. He first did double duty working the midday shift at WVAE-FM and Saturday morning on WNKU-FM.
A Chicago native, O’Donnell’s family moved here when he was 6. He “grew up in Golf Manor four blocks from Cincinnati Gardens. I was there all the time. I saw The Beatles, Elvis and the (NBA Cincinnati) Royals. There was no problem sneaking into an event there. Security was not what it is today. I’d say we went there on a weekly basis — for a boat show, car show, concert, whatever,” he says.
In 2013, I ranked O’Donnell No. 17 in my list of Top 40 radio personalities in the last 40 years (1973-2013) for the Enquirer. Three years ago, O’Donnell marked his 50th anniversary on radio, all in Greater Cincinnati. Not many broadcasting personalities can say that.
“Hamilton was the farthest I went,” he says.
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