Nearly 60 years after the Phil Donahue Show premiered, the groundbreaking daytime talk show will be honored with a Dayton-area historical marker on Monday, Sept. 14.
Donahue started as a local show on Nov. 6, 1967, on WLWD-TV (now WDTN-TV) on South Dixie Highway in the Dayton suburb of Moraine. The issues-driven talk show aired for 29 seasons from Dayton, and later Chicago (1974-85) and New York City (1985-96).
Donahue, who died in 2024 at age 88, will be represented at the invitation-only ceremony by Marlo Thomas, his widow. She met Donahue when she was a guest on his Chicago-based show in 1977.
The marker honors Donahue as the first TV talk show host “to engage with his audience in the studio and with phone calls, so they could ask questions,” says Dave Miller, the Moraine city council member who has shepherded the city’s historical marker program started for the city’s 50th anniversary in 2015.
Donahue, a former WHIO-TV anchorman and WHIO-AM afternoon talk host, was hired by Channel 2 manager Don Dahlman in 1967 to fill a hole in his morning schedule after variety host Johnny Gilbert left the station. (Gilbert ended up in Hollywood, and has been the Jeopardy! announcer since the syndicated version started in 1984.)
Knowing that big Hollywood celebrities didn’t often visit Dayton, Donahue did one-hour shows about controversial issues — everything from abortion, drug abuse, suicide, homosexuality, incest and impotence to AIDS, alcoholism, feminism, racism, consumerism, pacifism, Nazism and nudism.
"And sex," Donahue once told TV Guide. "Sex always works. Always."
Former Dayton Journal Herald TV columnist P.J. Bednarski recalls that Donahue once said, “Ann Margret just wasn’t coming to Dayton all the time so the subject had to be the star.”
Because of that philosophy, Donahue “gave people like Gloria Steinem and Ralph Nader national platforms early on, and then he became known for doing shows about issues — racism, homosexuality, abortion — at a time of the day when, as he put it, on another channel ‘Monty Hall was giving $5,000 to a woman dressed as a chicken salad sandwich’ (on Let’s Make A Deal) and on another channel, Ann Margret really was there talking to Merv Griffin,” said Bednarski, who was later TV columnist for the Cincinnati Post, USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times.
Donahue knew he was on the right track when, shortly after his debut, he showed Dayton TV viewers an anatomically correct boy doll. "It was like a bomb had gone off. The phone company said every phone in downtown Dayton was paralyzed because everyone was calling our show,” he once told a reporter. In his first TV ratings period, Donahue got a 50% share of the available TV audience.
It was considered revolutionary in 1968 when Donahue invited a gay man on the show. People said "the world was going to Hell, and we were leading it there. We took major, major pressure for appearing to celebrate what lots of our viewers thought was an evil lifestyle. We're proud of the history we have," he told me for the 25th anniversary of Donahue in 1992.
Donahue was the first talk show to go to death row (1971), show a baby's birth (1977) and visit Russia's crippled Chernobyl nuclear plant (1987). After moving the show to Chicago, he was the first talk show host to do a show about AIDS in 1982 when 300 had died and 700 cases were known.
But when celebrities such as Tonight Show host Johnny Carson came to Dayton, viewers saw them on Donahue.
Miller, a Moraine native, was surprised by the plain Donahue set when he attended the show in 1968, at age 13, with his mother, sister and neighbor.
“He had a very simple desk, and we sat on metal folding chairs,” says Miller, Moraine’s former parks and recreation director. Donahue’s dressing room was previously used by wrestlers who performed on Channel 2’s live telecasts.
It took nearly two years for sister AVCO Broadcasting stations in Cincinnati and Columbus to pick up the show in 1969 before it went national. The show, renamed Donahue when it moved to Chicago in 1974, earned 21 Daytime Emmys, including six for best talk show, eight for Donahue as best host and a lifetime achievement award, plus a Peabody Award.
Four consecutive Daytime Emmys (1977-80) not only helped Donahue top the daytime ratings, but his 6 million viewers in 200 TV markets were more than Good Morning America, the Today show or Carson's Tonight Show in 1979.
He was No. 1 until Oprah Winfrey came along and won the ratings and the 1987 best host Emmy. Winfrey told The New York Times: "If there never had been a Phil, there never would have been a me. I can talk about things now that I never could have talked about before he came on the air."
The late humorist Erma Bombeck, Donahue’s neighbor in the Centerville suburb of Dayton, told Newsweek in 1979 that Donahue was "every wife's replacement for the husband who doesn't talk to her. They've always got Phil who will listen and take them seriously."
“Phil had a knack for asking the questions we all really wanted to have answered," says Meredith Moss, the Phil Donahue Show promotion director before becoming a Dayton Daily News columnist. "He asked them, not in a combative way, but in a conversational, friendly manner. He treated everyone with respect — his guests, his audiences and his staff.”
Moss, who had done publicity for AVCO’s Cincinnati-based Midwestern Hayride, 50-50 Club and the Paul Dixon Show, said “it was obvious to me that this (Donahue) show would dramatically change the face of daytime television.”
“Nothing was taboo, and live TV meant anything could happen,” Moss says. “Yes, there were lots of celebrities, but I often heard Phil say it was the issue-oriented shows that he found the most fun and most stimulating.”
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