Everyone WCET-TV interviewed for Be The Change: The O’dell Owens Story, which premieres 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24, on Channels 48 and 16, had lots of great stories.
“We could have done a six-part series,” says Kitty Lensman, president and CEO of WCET-TV and Dayton’s WPTD-TV.
But the most compelling comments about Owens — who died in 2022 at age 74 — come from the man himself. A half-hour interview with Owens on WLWT-TV’s Let’s Talk Cincy, woven throughout the hour by director-producer Richard Wonderling, allows the former fertility expert, university president, Hamilton County coroner and public health advocate tell his own story.
And what a story it is.
As Hamilton County Commissioner Alicia Reece says in the film: “When you think about Dr. O’dell Owens, you really can’t go straight to his accomplishments. You have to go to where he began. To me, I really believe what makes a great leader is not what they achieved, but what they had to overcome to achieve it.”
And he overcame a lot.
Owens was born in poverty in the West End. His mother died when he was 11. He flunked out of prestigious Walnut Hills High School.
“In the ninth grade, I was told by a college counselor after flunking out of Walnut Hills that I was too poor and too dumb to go to college; that I needed to take classes in shop,” Owens says in the WLWT-TV conversation with Courtis Fuller in 2021, a year before his death.
“That’s what I want young kids to understand: That no one should put you in a box. No one should write you off.”
Owens' story also is told by 15 others, including his son, Christopher; sister Belinda Ullmer; Calvin Buford, who calls Owens his older brother; former U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup; former Cincinnati State president Monica Posey; the Cincinnati Zoo’s Thane Maynard; and two women who went to Owens for in vitro procedures, one successful and one not.
Buford tells how Owens’ father moved his three kids to North Avondale, where O’dell became friends with his sibling and his parents, Dr. Clinton and Cathryn Buford. O’dell was their babysitter, grass cutter, snow remover and caddy. His interest in medicine was heightened by going on rounds with Dr. Buford.
When Owens’ father decided to move his seven children to Detroit to be closer to family, O’dell argued to stay behind with the Bufords for his senior year at Woodward High School (1965-66).
“When you live in a house with the first Black surgeon in Cincinnati, and your stepmother is a community figure who one of her best friends was Coretta Scott King, and you have siblings who were excelling in school and going off to law school, it makes a great impact,” says Christopher Owens, O’dell’s son.
And the racism Owens experienced also made a great impact — and provided great motivation.
Buford recalls when Owens started advanced classes his senior year at Woodward “a white student, a girl, came in and said, ‘I must be in the wrong class. There’s a Negro in here.’ And she turned around and walked out.”
Owens, in a Channel 5 clip, tells about his first biology department meeting at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The professor advised students on what courses to take, and told them they needed a 3.3 grade point average to get into medical school.
“I was the only Black person in the room. As I was walking out of the room, the professor grabbed my arm and said, ‘Of course, you are going to need at least a 3.4 or higher. And some of these schools are not going to take you,’ “ Owens said.
The message was clear.
“I had to stand out, just be to equal,” Owens said on WLWT-TV.
Not only was he accepted at Yale, he earned two degrees, one in medicine and one in public health. He studied in Africa his junior year. He was Yale class president. He captained the Yale medical school basketball team. And he served on the Antioch College Board of Trustees while studying at Yale.
After his residency at Harvard University, he and wife Marchelle came home to Cincinnati where he specialized in IVF and reproductive endocrinology at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center in 1983.
But for some people that was not enough. Again Owens tells his own story, displayed in a vertical video board throughout the film.
“So I come back to Cincinnati, with all this training behind me, only to have whites walk in the office, see that I was Black, and walk out. I was the only reproductive endocrinologist in the city for three years,” he said. “And people walk in and say, 'Oh, he’s Black,' and walk out. But I never let people pull me down.”
One of his in vitro patients was Julie Geisen Scheper, who remained a friend for 30 years despite the lack of success in two pregnancies four years apart. “I think he’s one of the most remarkable, and inspiring and compassionate people I’ve ever met,” she says.
Owens also advised the Cincinnati Zoo’s Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) program, which produced the world’s first test tube gorilla.
“He was a great leader,” says Thane Maynard, executive chair of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. “His voice, his swagger. And people follow swagger — they do! And when he would say, ‘I know we can accomplish this,' it meant something.”
After 20 years, Owens quit his pioneering medical practice in 2004 to run for Hamilton County coroner. He served two four-year terms, seeing it as a platform to promote education as a means of curbing violence. He wanted the coroner’s office to be more about life than about death.
“The majority of the shooters didn’t finish high school. And the majority of the victims didn’t finish high school. And studies have shown that if you raise your graduation rate just 10 percent, you lower your felonious assaults and homicides by 20 percent,” he told WLWT-TV.
His commitment to education took another twist in 2010, when he was named president of Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. Among his accomplishments was encouraging Gov. John Kasich to promote two-year degree programs at community colleges teaching job skills.
The O’dell Owens Story is quite impressive, but it’s not comprehensive. The film doesn’t mention his tenure as Cincinnati Health Department medical director (2016), president of the Interact for Health nonprofit promoting public health (2016-2021); serving on the UC Board of Trustees; or being named a Great Living Cincinnatian by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber (2020).
And his record 12 years as chair of WCET-TV’s Action Auction — which brought him into viewers’ homes multiple nights — was dismissed in less than a minute. There was no mention of the Dr. O’dell M. Owens Community Service Hero Award established by the station in his memory in 2023.
Wonderling told me last month that he “didn’t want this to be self-serving” for Channel 48.
“When you look at the many things he did, we (public TV) are probably not even in the top 10. He did so many important things,” Wonderling said.
At a WCET-TV screening earlier this month, Owens’ son called the one-hour program “a great tribute to my father.”
Then he added: “He’s up there muttering under his breath, ‘It should have been a three-part series.’ “
How to watch Be the Change: The O'dell Owens Story:
- Thursday, Sept. 24: Premieres 8 p.m. on WCET-TV (Channel 48) and Dayton’s WPTD-TV (Channel 16)
- Sunday, Sept. 27 at 4:30 p.m. on Channels 48 and 16
- Friday, Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. on WPTO-TV (Channel 14)
- Saturday, Oct. 3 at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on WPTO-TV Explore (over-the-air Channel 14.2)
- Thursday, Oct. 8 at 10 a.m. on WPTO-TV Explore (over-the-air Channel 14.2)
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