Ed Ferenc Interview, 06 August 2014

Joseph Wickens [00:00:01]
This is Joseph Wickens. I am here with the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities, conducting this interview as part of Cleveland State University's 50th anniversary commemoration project. I'm here with– You can introduce yourself.

Ed Ferenc [00:00:13]
Ed Flash Ferenc. And middle name is Flash. I can get into that a little bit later in the show, but the last name is Ference. F as in Frank, -E-R-E-N-C. Today's date is August 6, 2014.

Joseph Wickens [00:00:31]
Alright, maybe we could start off by getting a little bit of your early life and background where you were born and raised.

Ed Ferenc [00:00:36]
Okay, well, I'm a lifelong Clevelander. I was born on the city's east side, grew up right below the old John Adams High School, which was since rebuilt. The address was 101202 Greenwich Avenue. I remember that like it was yesterday. I was born in 1953, part of the Baby Boom generation. Went to Paul Revere Elementary School, then went on to Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was on Aetna Road. And in the 7th grade — the year was 1965 — my parents decided to move to the southwest side to a place in Seven Hills. They purchased a ranch home, and I transferred to the public schools at the time, went to Hillside Junior High school and, for the first year, and then they built a new junior high. At the time, they didn't call them middle schools. Then I went to Shiloh on Grantwood, and then Normandy High School was being built. You have to understand, this is late sixties. There was a population boom in Parma. They were part of the Parma school system, Seven Hills, Parma, and Parma Heights. And they had Parma High and Valley Forge High. And they decided to build a third one. So for 10th grade – it was 10th, 11th, and 12th – I went to Normandy High School. Normandy, you have to understand, too, what was going on. This was a music revolution. You had the Beatles, you had the progressive revolution with Led Zeppelin, a lot of new artists. And everybody was into music and rock and roll, and I was certainly no exception at Normandy High School. I got interested– I was part of the audio-visual department. That was one of my side projects. I was kind of an electronic geek. And in fact, when I was about 14 or 15 years of age, I bought a wireless transmitter. In fact, it was one of these kits. There was a company called the Heathkit, and they did electronic devices. And there was Lafayette Electronics and Olson Electronics. There were a lot of these stores where they [sold] transistor radios. I can build this stuff. This was top 40 radio. And at that time, I was intrigued by radio and what I did, we, a couple of friends in the neighborhood, we built a little 500-milliwatt radio station in my basement. And I would ride around on my bicycle, make recordings of myself, and ride around the neighborhood and listen. I mean, this is what I did. And I'd go see the disc jockeys when they did any remote appearances. WIXY 1260 was the popular station back then, and I just watched them for hours. So getting back to Normandy High School, that kind of got me into the morning announcements, and I was the voice of the morning announcements. In fact, they had a call letters, WPOP, the Pride of Parma. That was it. That was my first radio experience. And the senior class – I did the morning announcements – told everybody what was going on. If there was anything newsworthy to talk about, I did it. And graduated from Normandy, 1971. Went right to Cleveland State. My parents, very traditional parents, they really didn't even want me to go away to school. And college was very affordable then. In fact, this is a funny little tidbit here. I worked part-time from the age of 16 to 18 at McDonald's in Parma on Broadview and Snow Roads. And minimum wage at that time was a buck 30 an hour. I saved enough money when I left there two years later, I got myself up to a buck 70 an hour. But I saved enough money to afford to go to Cleveland State for four years. You have to understand, Cleveland State at the time was $230 a quarter. So you multiply that times three, unless you wanted to go summer. I didn't want to go summer school. I wanted to work. So that's what, $690 a year? Say 700 a year times four. Under $3,000, you can get a four year degree, which I, which I did. I have to say this, though. I didn't start out– When I went to Cleveland State, I didn't think radio was going to be my profession. It was a hobby. I decided to go into electrical engineering, and I was kind of a science geek, because I was telling you about the radio transmitters and all the stuff that I was reading, Popular Electronics, Popular Mechanics, and things like that. It was only a natural thing to get into the electronics part of it and go into engineering. After a couple of quarters of calculus, I didn't think it was fun anymore. And I really enjoyed radio at that point. It wasn't immediately when I went to Cleveland State. It was about a quarter after. It was the winter quarter of 1972, and joined the campus radio station. Now, the campus radio station was really not an on air radio station at the time. It was called WCSU, and it was a glorified public address system. The station was located in Stilwell Hall, which I think is torn down now. [Stilwell Hall still stands as Fenn Hall.] And there was four stories. It was on the fourth floor. There was physics rooms up there, too. They had labs up there, and they carved out this little area for a radio station, and they had a control board, mics. It was pretty nice. And all it did was broadcast to the cafeteria. That was it. At that time, I met some rather interesting people. Kid Leo was the first person. Well, he wasn't Kid Leo at the time. His name was Leo. He eventually became that name. There were a group of us that just kind of clicked right away. Matt the Cat was another one. Betty Korvan came by. There was another fellow by the name of Larry Bole, who we were all, within a year's time, we were doing shows. We were hanging out together. We were having a good time. I'm still continuing my education at Cleveland State, and some opportunity came up. I remember the day like it was yesterday. There was a phone call to the radio station. I just happened to be at the desk, the front desk, answering the phone, and on the other side was the news director of WHK. And what had happened? WHK and WMMS were sister stations. They were recently purchased by a company called Malrite Communications. The deal happened in December of 1972, and in 1973, they were taking over the facilities. When a new owner comes to town, a lot of heads roll. Typically, it's like any corporation. There's some people, there's some bad blood, and there's some new life coming in. They're going to change this, they're going to change that. They want to make it more efficient. I could go on. So a number of people left, some of them voluntarily, many of them involuntarily, and they needed some help in the newsroom. So they said, you know, we've got an opening here. It's $2 an hour. If you want to come by, we need you to make some phone calls in the newsroom. And they had a pretty active newsroom. WHK, they had about seven or eight people. They had a city hall reporter. They were, they were a viable force when it comes to news. So I pretty much got in my Volkswagen Beetle, zipped down to 50th and Euclid – they were in a different location back then – and got in there, did the interview on a Friday afternoon. I started working on Monday, and I was working primarily for just a couple hours in the morning or early morning, like from five to eight, five to nine in the morning, so I could still go to school. That was the beauty of it. I was just making phone calls, writing some news copy, learning on the job. And I have to tell you this. At that time, I already switched my major to communications. I decided this engineering thing is just not for me. I'm going to go into communications, and I'm going to go in that head first, and I'm going to do what I can with it. So that was in February of 1973. Got a job there and got a few more hours on weekends. I was what they call a board op. Just running the board overnight. And slowly but surely, MMS, WMMS, the sister station, which I had my eye on all the time. I figured if I can get my foot in the door, that's the station I really want to be in. They were developing, and they needed somebody to write some news for them in the morning. Denny Sanders was the morning show personality, and it was just what they called rip and read whatever the AP or UPI wire had. They would rip it off, but a lot of times it needed some editing, things of that nature. And I said, well, I'll be happy to write for you. And I started writing the news, and he would read it one day. This is kind of funny. I was on the phone trying to get confirmation on a story, and I was waiting and waiting and waiting. And I'm looking at the clock and saying, man, he's gonna go on the air with the news. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. I came in there and the records, this is records back, okay? I'm dating myself. The record is fading out, and Denny's getting all nervous. And I run into the newsroom with the copy in my hand, and he goes, there's Ed Ferenc. He just flashed in. Oh, that's your name. I'm going to call you Ed Flash Ferenc, because you just flashed in here with the, with the latest news. And that's how I got my name. It's kind of funny. He kept crediting me. The news is prepared by Ed Flash Ferenc. And it got to the point where people were saying, who is this guy? How come we don't hear him on the air? And at that point, I was only, what, 20 years old? You often wonder when you're ready to go on the air. I was behind the scenes. I was working at it. The program director, John Chaffee, said, well, why don't you come up with a tape? Why don't you record something? Give me what they call an air check. And I submitted it, and he said, hey, you know what? You sound pretty good. I think this will be a good thing. So, January 1974, less than a year after I walked into that radio station, I was on the air, and I had a full-time job. It was a member– I was full-time on the air. Benefits, everything. I was a member of the union. They were the American Federation of TV Radio Artists, AFTRA, which has since merged with SAG. I'm still a member of that union today, and I was– It was a dream come true. Let me put it that way. It was a dream come true. I was, like, on the station that I wanted to be. Never thought I'd be on it in 20 years of age. And it was– Still had a lot of potential. We all knew it. A lot of the people that I mentioned that worked at Cleveland State found their way to MMS. Kid Leo was actually the first one, and then I was, I think, second, and then Matt and then Betty through it, the next two to three years, there were part-time openings, and they all kind of just– And there were stories written about it, too. It's like, what's this place? CSU grilling, you know, becoming a hotbed for the broadcast community. And the funny part about it, there was– This was not a class. This was a– This was a part-time activity. Cleveland, the radio station was just a part-time activity. It was not like I was going to radio school or anything like that. It was just a glorified PA system with a bunch of people that struck at the right time, at the right place.

Joseph Wickens [00:13:17]
Who sort of organized the radio station and what was sort of like the format of the program?

Ed Ferenc [00:13:23]
It was all over the road. I mean, it was, I think for the most part, it was what we call a progressive– It was album-oriented rock. Everybody did different show. We had a jazz show, they had a classical show, and people could say just about anything they wanted. Keep in mind, you're not on the air. It's a PA system. You could do– I mean, there was no swearing or anything like that involved comedy. There was a group called Fire Sign Theater with funny comedy and stuff. A lot of shtick, produce up funny commercials and stuff. Like, it was, it was– I think there was an advisor, a faculty advisor to the station. There was– It was kind of run like a, like a– You had a– You had certain hours to fill. People had to come in there and do their show. I mean, it was run very professionally. There was a general manager and a program director. Nothing on promotions or anything like that. There's nothing to promote. But it was a well-run radio station. It just happened to be a college radio station that just broadcast in Stilwell cafeteria. That's all. Now there were other radio stations on the air. I believe Case Western had one, John Carroll had one. And not a big signal or anything like that, but it served its purpose, certainly. And it was a training ground for a group of people that I don't think anybody thought that they'd all end up at the same radio station. It just so we often say it was the right place at the right time. We got there when the station was sold, they needed people. Leo was the first, actually to be hired myself, then Matt the Cat, then Betty Korvan. Betty was a philosophy major. Leo, I don't know exactly what. I think Leo had– He was really brilliant in math and science and engineering. Betty, I mentioned philosophy. Larry Bole, he did a show. He ended up in the record business. I don't know exactly what his degree was in. And it was like, wow, we're here. We're all together doing it. And at that time – we're talking mid seventies – the station started to really catapult into what it became. I often say that it just had a solid foundation because most of the people were from Cleveland. It's so important that you have a good foundation to build on. People that were on that radio station knew the city. They knew the streets. They knew how to pronounce the names of the streets. A lot of people in radio, they come from another municipality. They don't even know how to pronounce Cuyahoga or Elyria. I mean, you got all these old Indian names and we used to laugh at them. We often– And you know, the other part of this, too, it was we all use our own names. You often hear what was really big. You had this, like, I'm not gonna slight them or anything. Tom Kent or Doug Williams or something. You know, where they were kind of a generic name. Chuck Collins, names like that. Ed Ferenc is not what you call a radio name, nor is Jeff Kinzbach. Leo's name is Travagliante, but he went with Kid Leo. Matt is Matt Lapczynski, but it was Matt the Cat. I mean, they did have a little fun with it. And we were Jeff and Flash in the morning, but our names, we kept our full names. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that that's what made MMS so special. We celebrated the ethnic diversity in Cleveland. You know, if you're Russian or Polish or Irish, Hungarian people knew that. And so it's probably that's what made it so unique, I think, or one of the many things that made it so unique. You got a question?

Joseph Wickens [00:17:46]
You just mentioned Jeff Kinzbach, and he was your longtime co-host.

Ed Ferenc [00:17:50]
Yeah.

Joseph Wickens [00:17:51]
He wasn't one of the people that you mentioned at Cleveland State because he didn't attend. How did that whole– How did you two meet and how did that friendship develop, I guess?

Ed Ferenc [00:17:57]
Well, I started in February of '73. He came about April. He came about two months later. Jeff grew up in Lakewood. He went to Lakewood High School. He didn't finish because he got a job. Well, he did finish Lakewood High School. I take that back. He did work at WIXY 1260, the station that I idolized. He answered the phones there. In fact, he answered the phones for Larry Morrow, who is a legendary broadcaster in Cleveland, author of a book about himself, too. But Jeff got a gig in Michigan. He worked at– In fact, he worked at the old CKLW for a little bit in a radio station. I think it was in Saginaw or Flint, WCAR. But he got an opportunity. He was 18 years old, and he moved up there and he was having fun. They needed a production director at MMS, and he applied for the job because it's his hometown. So he came in April of '73, and we became friends on weekends. And I was telling you earlier about being the board op on the weekend. I did the news in the morning. His schedule was completely opposite of mine. He'd come in about noon and work till late at night, and I'd be there early morning. But on weekends, he would be like a fill in on a Saturday night show or an overnight show, and I'd be on WHK running the board. He'd be on MMS. We knew each other. We hung out with each other. Eventually, when I became full-time, we became friends because he was in production, I was in news. What had happened, how we got together is an interesting story. The first person, when I went on the air, her name was Debbie Ullman. And Debbie was very progressive, lived in Kent, more folksy-oriented. The time she was there for about a year. Not a strong morning personality. I don't want to be critical, but what had happened? I don't know if they were thinking of moving her out, but she got into a car accident and, the worst thing that could happen to a broadcaster, her head hit the windshield and her jaw was smashed. She had her jaw wired shut. And she was out for a while and she never really came back. I mean, it was a long time healing, and they had to move on. They hired a fellow by the name of Charlie Kendall out of Boston. And Charlie was there. We're talking 1975, great jock, great set of pipes. He did a lot. He ended up doing national TV and radio spots. He has since retired. I think he retired about a year ago, and he was there for about a year. Charlie was a great guy, a great personality. Loved the ladies. The ladies loved him. And he loved a party to the point when 6:00 came around, they couldn't find Charlie to do the radio show. So I'm over there. The shows were like 2 to 6 in the morning, 6 to 10, 10 to 2. So there were four-hour shifts and 6:30 or so, he's still not around. Well, what they did, they'd contact Jeff. Jeff moved back to Lakewood, and Lakewood was 15 minutes away. In the morning, you just go down the Shoreway. So if Charlie wasn't there, he'd get a phone call. And two or three times a week he would get that phone call. Well, it got to the point where Charlie said, well, they had enough of Charlie. And he went on. And the owner of the radio station, Milt Maltz, kind of liked what we sounded like because he was filling in and it was Jeff Kinzbach and Ed Flash Ferenc with the news. And it started to evolve. So December 26, 1976, Jeff and Flash was born. It was the day after Christmas, or maybe it was the 27th one of those days. It was right after Christmas. They basically– It was the Jeff and Flash show. We had a way to go. The ratings– When I first worked at the radio station that morning show with Debbie Allman had like a two share, and Charlie brought it up to probably four or five, got things really going there, and we started to gel '78, '79. The top morning show personality at the time was Gary Dee, who worked at we and eventually across the hall from us at WHK because they couldn't afford him anymore. But Gary Dee was what they call a shock jock, very popular for his day and just electrified listeners. It was an all talk show, really, but it got old, like a lot of things do, probably. It was the late seventies, early eighties. We really, really started taking off, and the show started taking on some characters. We had a janitor by the name of Kenny Clean who joined the show. Len Goldberg, who was the voice of the station, became a part of the show. We added an astrologer. We had sports. We started doing traffic reports. It became what we call a full-service morning show. Ruby Cheeks came on in, I would say about '84, '85. I think that's probably what we peaked in the mid eighties, I told you it was a two share when we started. It became a 20. The ratings were ten times what they were in the mid seventies in a ten-year– And to give you, to show dominance in the market, Lanigan was the other personality in town, and he had a sixth share, and that was second place. We had a 20 for number one and a six for number two. There was no touching us. It was just full– I mean, the governor at the time was Celeste. He would listen to the show. We've had national comedian Sam Kinison for one. We had both of them in the studio at one time. Sam Kinison, the screaming comedian and the governor of the state of Ohio the day after he got reelected in 1986. It was a revolving door of rock stars, of governors, of you name it. Anything that was happening in Cleveland was happening in that morning show. We often called it the soundtrack of the city. And it was, it really was. It was, it was, it was– People wanted to get on this show. The advertisers, we were sold out. We were getting five, $600 for a commercial, which is unheard of today.

Joseph Wickens [00:25:06]
That is one of the things I wanted to ask about. I mean, MMS is one of the first radio stations to have marketing directors, if I'm not mistaken. There really wasn't something that was common, I don't think. How did that impact the program? You said selling the, how well you were able to sell–

Ed Ferenc [00:25:26]
They didn't even have to sell it. The phone just kept ringing. We often said that you got the easiest job in the world. Just answer your phone and take the order. No, they didn't have to sell that radio station. It was amazing. They did such a tremendous job promoting it. The guy that was the mastermind of the glory days was John Gorman. John Gorman. In fact, he wrote a book about the Buzzard from his years. He came there in '74 to '86, '87, I think he left. He was there for a 13-year period. And he was a friend of Denny Sanders. Both Denny and John grew up in Boston. Denny came to Cleveland because of MMS. He liked the station, he liked what was going on. And he was the program director, but he needed help to get the station over. And John was not an on-air guy. He was a, he was a statistician, he was a mastermind. And the thing that John was a big stickler about was programming is so darn important. It's just like, you have a product. If I don't have a good product, it's not going to sell, you know, and okay, let's get the product really really good. We got the product really good. Okay, the next part is selling that product. And I often say, McDonald's, they may not have the best hamburger in the world, but they sell an awful lot of them. Why? Because they're marketing geniuses. And that's what MMS became. MMS, 50% was product, 50% was promotion. So they made sure the– Well, it was a great logo. The Buzzard. They adopted the Buzzard. David Helton, who was a local artist at American Greetings, kind of scribbled this. What would be flying over Cleveland in the mid seventies would be a buzzard, because Cleveland, you have to understand, Cleveland was dying. Everybody was leaving. It was the Rust Belt. The river was on fire. There was the Arab oil crisis in '73. There was an economic depression. It was a dying city, and the buzzard was around it. So we adopted the buzzard, but we put a happy face on them, and it worked. It was something that everybody rallied around. It was that people loved the music. They loved the rock. Certainly, they loved World Series of Rock. These were all MMS creations and rock and roll, there was new music coming out every day, and MMS was the vehicle to get that music on the air. We sold more records per capita than any other city in the country, per our population, because when they– When people listened to MMS, they knew they were going to get something good, something new. We would break new artists. Even when the record company told us not to play it because it wasn't supposed to be out. So it had that rebel status to it. And that's what it became, a freight train, pretty much. It really did, because going back to that strong foundation that I talked about, being local, being homegrown, being strong on the product, strong on personality, understanding what was going on in the neighborhoods, relating to it, and having fun. The bottom line is entertainment. We had a fun morning show people. We put people on the show. We had guests, we had jokes. We blew people up. The blow ups were interesting. That was a big feature of the show that started because of the mob wars in Cleveland back in the seventies. There was a Mafia war going on, and cars were blowing up left and right. So we decided, well, let's just blow stuff up on the air. And mostly it was people that girlfriends cheating on them or husbands cheating on their wives. I want to blow them up because I caught them with another woman. But it was a vehicle for people to vent. But it was done in a fun way. That was the beauty of it. It was done in a fun way. And that's what made it so special.

Joseph Wickens [00:29:31]
Some of the other stuff, Go Back to Bed, and the shower bits, those are ones that, when I was doing background for the interview, that really stuck out in my mind. How did the Go Back to Bed bit start? And what was the shower bit? I didn't really get a good description of the shower bit from what I read.

Ed Ferenc [00:29:43]
The Go Back to Bed was, what we did, we made an arrangement with the employer so you could have a day off. We would call up somebody, and you have to understand, it's one of the big, the popular songs, it was a country song at the time, was "Take This Job and Shove It." I mean, Cleveland is a factory town. Not so much today, but we're talking seventies and eighties, and people's blue-collar hard work, okay, you get up. Uhh, I gotta go to work and can't wait to get out and go to the nightclub, go to a bar, go what? Do whatever. Listen to MMS, go to a movie. So what we did, we made an arrangement with employer. If, you know, if we would salute that employer on the show, if they would give that specific person a day off, and it worked. We'd call the employers and said, you know, let 'em know in advance. And then they say, well, Joe Smith, who do you think deserves a day off? Joe, man, he was a hard worker and all this stuff. Let's do that. So we'd get Joe's number, call him up. Joe, what are you doing today? You gotta go to work. No, you don't. [laughs] Boss says you can take the day off. Boom. I mean, it was like, wow. Got a day off – with pay. It was that kind of stuff, that kind of fun stuff where they would have that opportunity to do that. The shower one. I'm trying to think of that one. What?

Joseph Wickens [00:31:15]
You take a shower and be with you in the morning.

Ed Ferenc [00:31:18]
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's theater of the mind. [laughs] Radio is theater of the mind. There's so many things that you can do, but it was just to get people talking. And who would you like to take a shower with? [laughs] So it would be some– And then we'd have the shower sounds. Put the shower sounds on. Oh, how you doing? Oh, hey, don't pick up the soap. [laughs] But it'd be, it would be fun. It was just, it was just using the sound effects and the animation involved. It was just one of the many things that we did. We had the Morning Show Auto Races. That was something that we would compete against other people. We'd have sound effect of a racetrack and who was going to be driving at who would crash and you'd have a prize at the end. Just kind of silly stuff. A lot of it was impromptu, just to get audience participation. People love to be part of something fun. That's what that station was all about. And anytime that they can get away from anything routine, whether it's taking care of the kids, whether it's working on the job, we gave 'em that opportunity to do that. And if they took part in it, they won something. What's wrong with that? You know? It's a good thing.

Joseph Wickens [00:32:36]
Absolutely. You also, you mentioned a little bit ago the World Series of Rock. Some of your personal experiences with that and how it started by the radio station.

Ed Ferenc [00:32:47]
Well, they were looking for, always looking for venues. And at the time it was– Well, it started out, I remember when I, when I first in the early seventies, the main venue was Public Music Hall, and Music Hall on one side and Public Hall on the other. Public Hall would hold maybe seven, 8000. Then they built the Richfield Coliseum, which was in Richfield, of course, and that held about 20,000. It was packed all the time. Led Zeppelin was there in the seventies, and anybody that came through there through the promotion department through MMS with the commercials that were aired, usually nine times out of ten packed the place. A lot of times the artists were looking for a larger venue. And we were thinking that there was an opportunity with the Municipal Stadium. Belkin Production, Jules Belkin, Mike Belkin were actually on the– They started in the late sixties, but they were talking to a lot of bands because it was happening in various parts. There were so-called stadium concerts where they were looking for pretty much a daylong venue where you would get not one or two bands, but maybe four or five bands and get some big names and literally fill that stadium. And that's what we did. And it just so happens that the Indians sucked. There was no World Series ever to be. Well, the last World Series that they won was 1948. They were in 1954. The team sucked. So we just called it the World Series of Rock because that's the only World Series we're gonna have in Cleveland. [laughs] So it's kind of tongue in cheek. So let's call it that. And bingo, we packed it. They, they had Peter Frampton, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, legendary Pink Floyd concert there in 1977, where they flew a plane over the stadium. Yeah. It was short-lived. There were some issues when you're dealing with 80,000. I mean, it went on for several years, but when you have 80,000 people, yeah, you got some. You got some problems and they were, they were amplified by the media, and that's how the media likes to handle stuff. But they didn't call 'em the World Series or, I mean, it was kind of a lull after, after a while. And then they brought, they brought stadium concerts back. They just didn't call 'em the World Series of Rock concerts because I remember being in the stadium in 1989 when the Stones played there, and that was the Steel Wheels concert. And they, it wasn't just, wasn't called World Series of Rock, though, that's all.

Joseph Wickens [00:35:48]
You mentioned venues and looking for venues. And there was, it seems that there was a pretty strong relationship between the radio station and the Agora. Can you kind of, I guess, elaborate upon that and some of your personal experiences with that through MMS– [inaudible]?

Ed Ferenc [00:36:01]
Well, that's pretty interesting how it happened. And the sad part about it is the guy that put that all together just passed away. Hank LoConti, great guy. He started the Agora in the sixties and he was looking for, he was looking [for] a way to expand. It was a small hall. A lot of local artists went there, and that was their start in Cleveland. But he wanted, you know, typically nightclubs are big on Friday and Saturday nights. What he wanted to do is expand it to more nights of the week. So what he started was the Monday Night at the Agora, and he started Monday night. Who goes to a concert on a Monday night? Well, he started on Monday night. It started happening. And then they added the Coffee Break Concert. Matt the Cat was the midday show host from 10 to 2 and they would get usually somebody that's not real electric or folksy like a, well, we had, one of them was Paul Simon performed, and this is after they broke up with Simon and Garfunkel. They were doing the movie One Trick Pony, and he got him to perform. Harry Chapin was another one. They were more folk-oriented. And that Coffee Break Concert was from like 11 to noon. So it would be middle of the week. It was a Wednesday, and they would have that every Wednesday. It was a lot of work. The guy that can talk about that more is Denny Sanders. Denny Sanders was the producer of that. And it was really, it was, first of all, it was very difficult getting rock stars or performers to get up at 9 in the morning, to prep, to be ready to go on the air at 11. That was the hardest part of that job. But he did it. He did it. Didn't always work perfectly, but he did it. And that was a regular feature. The Coffee Break Concert, that was at the Agora. The Monday Nights at the Agora started taking off and Hank LoConti in his brilliance started Agency Recording Studio and recorded all of this stuff. Much of this has been donated to the Western Reserve Historical Society. One of the legendary Monday Night concerts came in August of 1978, Bruce Springsteen, which was the 10th anniversary of the Agora. And it was supposed to be like a 90 minutes to two-hour concert. It went almost four hours. And it was recorded and MMS played bits and pieces of that. Kid Leo was the emcee. That night, legendary people recorded that concert. Bob Seeger – this is in John Gorman's book – Bob Seger listened to that concert. They set up a network and he was in Detroit. He listened to it in Detroit. There was about six cities that they linked up through some high-tech phone lines. And that concert, that's because it was Bruce Springsteen, that concert aired in like just about six cities. I mean, if that happened today, it would be coast to coast, no question. But it was, it was one for the archives. There's no question about that. That all started through MMS. That was a Monday night. That was a Monday Night show at the Agora. And you know, it once again, it's one of these lines. If you build it, they will come. Good product, good music. Monday night didn't matter. Didn't matter. And eventually that spread to other nights. They didn't have name brands, name-brand artists every night. But there was a lot. They filled in the gaps and they– People eventually said, I got to play the Agora. If I'm coming to Cleveland, I got to play the Agora. And that was their stepping stone to bigger things.

Joseph Wickens [00:39:47]
Another thing that the radio station was sort of instrumental in, or at least contributed greatly, too, was, I guess, lobbying to bring the Rock Hall. What personally did you do? I guess even in your own show in the morning?

Ed Ferenc [00:39:58]
Yeah. Oh, that's a great story. That's a great story. Yeah, that was– There was some people talking about that in the early, probably the late seventies, early eighties. Hank LoConti of the Agora was one of the people on the ground floor on that one, because he saw what was happening in Cleveland. And there was some discussion around the country that they were going to have a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum. They just didn't know where it was to be located. So the Growth Association, as it was called back then, started putting some feelers out. And MMS was obviously a force to be reckoned with in the community. Milt Maltz, who was the owner, he's the "Mal" of Malrite Broadcasting, was on all the local boards, banks, the Union Club, and all the people that were the movers and shakers of Cleveland. And with MMS's reputation, they figured we should have enough clout to send a message. Then came the USA Today poll. This is an interesting story because USA Today newspaper just came on the market, and it was a flashy newspaper, something different. Those– The first national newspaper that was mainstream. You had your Wall Street Journals and New York Times and stuff like that, but this was a regular daily national newspaper. And they were clever enough to start this 900 line where people would call in for a poll and you'd have to pay like 50 cents. So they saw a nice little revenue generator here. And we were tipped off, we being Jeff and myself, we were tipped off that the following day they were going to have on their USA Today poll, where do you think the Rock Hall should be located? And Cleveland was already being talked about. Cleveland, Memphis, because of Elvis, San Francisco, because of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. New York, obviously Chicago, all the big cities. And I think Miami got thrown in there. Nashville, even though they were a country– All the– There was probably about 15 to 20 cities that were on the list, and you got to vote for them. Well, we got on the morning, we got our copies right away. And at 6:00 a.m. we started hitting them. Hey, papers out. Vote. Give them the number. Vote. Well, being the leader on the block, everybody listened to us in the morning. So all the other radio stations did the same thing. They said, wow, these guys are onto something. We better do what they're doing, otherwise they're going to be left in the dust. So all the stations did. Television came. The tv crews came in and shot video of us promoting it on the show. So it became the top story in the 06:00 and the 11:00 news. Next day, they find out we had like 120,000 phone calls. We blew away every city. Every– I mean, the next one wasn't even close. It was probably 50, 60,000. We virtually humiliated the people at the Rock Hall into picking Cleveland. I mean, it wasn't done. Don't get me wrong. The enthusiasm was there, but the city still had to make a case. And with that poll, they went to New York and they said, look, here's the, here's the radio station. Look what we did. This is the response that they got. Here's the community. This is what we can do if you locate here. And they thought about it, and they weighed it, and they went around and they said, you know, not a bad idea. And it finally materialized. It was in May of 1986. The announcement was made in New York City. In fact, I was on the plane. We were told that it was going to made in New York City. It was myself, Governor Dick Celeste, the mayor at the time, George Voinovich, Mary Rose Oakar, who was a congresswoman at the time. And she was a main player in this. And I'll tell you why. She was– She's Lebanese, Syrian. And one of the people on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board was Ahmet Erdogan. Ahmet was the CEO of Warner Electric Atlanta, WEA Records, which was one of the biggest record companies next to Columbia. He was the head guy. And he was also same ethnic descent. Mary Rose and Ahmet were like bread and butter. I, they really, they just really hung out together and became very good friends. And he came to Cleveland. She showed him around and it was like a marriage made in heaven. They understood what Cleveland was all about. They said, we have to put this Hall of Fame in Cleveland. And that's the story. That's the real story of why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is located here.

Joseph Wickens [00:45:15]
That's tremendous. All that took place in the early to mid eighties?

Ed Ferenc [00:45:22]
Yeah, the Rock Hall part started in early eighties.

Joseph Wickens [00:45:28]
And that was at the height of your shows, you said. You said that was–

Ed Ferenc [00:45:30]
Yeah, the show peaked– The show, yeah, the show really– We beat Gary Dee in the early eighties. We beat him. It was probably '81 or '82, we became number one, and we stayed number one for probably twelve years until Howard Stern came in. But that was a long time to be number one. It's tough to get to be number one. It's even tougher to hold onto it. And we were able to hold it for a very, very long period despite what happened. John Gorman left in '86, '87, and the wheels started coming off. We had program directors almost every year a different person. The music started changing and eventually the station was sold and then sold again and sold again. And like I said, the wheels came off. We were number one in the early eighties. We peaked, I think it was the fall Book of Book, meaning the ratings book, of 1986, which came out in January of '87. We had a 20.4 share in the morning. And from there we dangled with eighteens and nineteens for a couple of years. We tried to beat that 20.4. Couldn't do it. I have to tell you this, though. That 20.4, that was twelve-plus listeners. Twelve, from age twelve on up, everybody. Our key demo was young people, male, primarily, 18 to 24. And if you extrapolate the numbers from that, I saw the rating book. It's kind of funny. For people 18 to 24, we had 56% of the Cleveland audience. [laughs] 56% of 18 to 24 year olds listening to one radio station in the morning. That was us. [laughs]

Joseph Wickens [00:47:29]
What kind of celebrity outside the station did you enjoy then? Because you mentioned that a lot of times radio is sort of theater of the mind, so a lot of times there's not a lot of visibility there. What kind of celebrity did you enjoy personally?

Ed Ferenc [00:47:38]
Well, part of that was remedied. Malrite started Channel 19 in 1985. I think it was Milt Maltz, which eventually got him out of radio. He started, he got the frequency, and we were involved in a lot of their promotions. We did what we called marathon weekends. And Channel 19 didn't have a news department. It was a UHF station, reruns, no original programming, but it was still a station that was on the up and up, kind of like MMS was. And eventually he added news. And look at it today. I mean, it's– He ended up selling that for a really good buck. But they did some Twilight Zone marathons, M.A.S.H., stuff like that, and they got us to– We pre-recorded like Big Chuck and Little John, stuff like that, where we would host it for two, three hours on a Saturday afternoon. So we started getting visibility that way. PM Magazine was another vehicle from Channel 8, and PM Magazine was exactly what it was. It was a magazine-type format for taking after the news. It ran from 7:30 to 8:00 and what it was fun things happening in Cleveland. One of the big events was Riverfest. And they'd have a three-day river party down in the Flats, and we'd do some shtick with some bars and stuff like that. Or, oh, they'd send us to Geauga Lake or Cedar Point to ride roller coasters, and that's what we did. But they were recorded, so we got visibility that way. And we– So we did some television. We did a lot of appearances, too. We spoke at high schools. We had a partnership with Channel 3 in communications at John Carroll University. We did things on– In fact, Jim Donovan was doing stuff with us. A lot of the Channel 3 personalities we had an alliance with. And we did nightclubs. Oh, my gosh, we did– Well, Jeff and I had three nightclubs. The first one was Monopolies and Lorain in '79 and '80. And then in the mid eighties, well, we did the Old Mining Company, which is now a Saddle Ranch or something, but it was at Broadview. I'm sorry, Pearl and Brookpark. But we were there for two years on a Friday night, just having fun with listeners. Then we eventually had a place in the Flats called Noisemakers, Jeff and Flash's Noisemakers. And then we had a place in North Ridgeville called Cadillac Beach. So these are all areas where we were in the, you know, having fun with our listeners. So we were very– Being radio. We were very, very visible. People knew who we looked like at a point. And we still joke, though. We still had faces for radio, we probably still do, just older faces today.

Joseph Wickens [00:50:49]
One thing that I'm interested about is, as the station sort of took off, it did have that foundation of a very Cleveland State sort of flavor to it.

Ed Ferenc [00:50:58]
Yeah.

Joseph Wickens [00:50:59]
When Cleveland State got its FM station after you all, I guess, departed, was there any kind of relationship there? Was there at all, really, or what did that happen with that?

Ed Ferenc [00:51:10]
You know, I think throughout the years there were people that contacted us from the radio station. I've been interviewed by people over there, and I had heard that we left a legacy. I had heard that they said, wow, did you know this is where Jeff and Flash started, actually Flash, anyway, or Leo? And that it was a lot of homegrown talent came out of there, but there really wasn't that much communication with the station. It was– And I think part of that has to do with it. Washington. It wasn't really a structured class or anything. It was a part-time activity, and it wasn't even embraced by the university at the time. It was just like, oh, let those kids play their music in that corner. It was kind of treated as such. They let us go. I think that that's probably what contributed to the success. It was very what we call freeform. It maybe because it wasn't a structured class. That's what made it so special, and that's what made MMS special, because a lot of that was carried over. It was everybody. We often would take records home and say, wow, this song sounds pretty good. I think the listeners would like it. That kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore. You don't break music like that anymore. Eventually, it became structured, but I– Much of that freeform creativity was carried over from Cleveland State without question.

Joseph Wickens [00:52:51]
I want to ask just a few questions about sort of radio and Cleveland in general. Why is Cleveland such a great radio city? Why is the population so receptive to that medium of better payment?

Ed Ferenc [00:53:03]
Well, I don't know if it's as great as– It's certainly not as great as it used to be. I think radio is great, because I've been– This is 41 years that I've been involved in radio, 41 going on 42, and 41 actually on the air. I've been fortunate to keep it alive primarily because of that foundation again and keeping my name out there. People still remember. I work at the Justice Center. I've been here for 14 years. And when I start, I answer my phone on an elevator, and there'll be a lot of jurors the elevator. And all of a sudden, somebody will tap me on the back and they'll say, thanks for the great radio, because they hear the voice. The voice is very, very– Brings back a lot of memories. People love to bring back memories because they remember when radio was good, when it was strong. Radio has changed so much to the point– What I don't like about it is the lack of localism. And that's primarily– There's one thing that happened that many people are not familiar with, and it's the 1996 Telecommunications Act. And if you google that, you will find out that that paved the way for what has happened in broadcasting, not just in radio, but in TV, in Internet and all that stuff. It consolidated the so-called mom and pop radio stations, which was MMS are an anomaly. There's a few today, there's a few left of small owners, but they're now all corporate conglomerates. Clear Channel owns, my God, 1,000 radio stations. They own six or seven in one market. That never used to be the case. So you have different formats, all under one roof, and they found ways to trim staff. You got people, really, there's maybe one program director for three stations now, and the music's all picked out of another city. It's very computerized, it's very corporate, and there's just a few shows. John Lanigan was able to stay on after us, and God bless him, he put together, he copied a lot of what we did. If you listen to his show, I mean, it became pretty much the Buzzard Morning Zoo. He had several characters. They all played roles. It's still like that today. Even with Mark Nolan there. A lot of that formula, if you want to call it that, is still there. There's a lot of active fun, participation, interviews, you name it. And I don't think that that's good is gonna disappear. It's just that there's less of it. That's all. There's another thing that's happened in radio, and the sad part is what they do is voice track. Voice track is when a personality will come in and do a four-hour show in 30 minutes. The music is all pre-selected. And what that person will do will be, will sit down, know what the music is, and just lay down the tracks of what's going to happen in the next four hours. So that person that you're hearing on the air today is not even in the studio, or they could be in another city. And that's the way the broadcasters have found a way to cut costs. So when you call that radio station, there's nobody there. It's a point and click board op who's making a minimum wage and playing that. You want the weather? Well, here's so and so from Channel 3 with the weather. You play a promo. This is what's coming up. Hey, you know, take part in this event, blah, blah, blah, buy one, get one free, that kind of thing. It's all in, it's all done digitally in the computer. So it's, it's, it's, it's automation. That's exactly what it is. And MMS dev would never be able– The MMS that I grew up with would never be able to thrive under an environment like that. You just– It can't be possible.

Joseph Wickens [00:57:08]
I was going to ask sort of a question, but it sort of was answered. Satellite radio, I guess.

Ed Ferenc [00:57:13]
Yeah.

Joseph Wickens [00:57:13]
What is that?

Ed Ferenc [00:57:15]
Well, it's funny you, funny you mention that too, because Leo is, is on the satellite. He's doing a show, actually. His old time slides, like 3 to 6 in the afternoon. There's a few folks. Nancy Alden, who used to be at WDOK, does a show, I believe hers is from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They do a couple different satellite shows. Some of the people from MTV in the eighties are on satellite radio today. It's another vehicle. What has happened? And this is all part of what I was telling you before about the Telecommunications Act. There's a lot of venues out there for broadcasting. The Internet has changed everything, absolutely everything. And it is very difficult. I mean, we used to have three TV stations, channels 3, 5, and 8, and maybe a UHF station, a channel 25, and that was it. Not the case anymore. You have hundreds of channels and you don't have to even watch them live anymore. You can just get it on demand. So that is, that has made it more difficult for somebody to actually dominate in a market because there's so many choices out there. And satellite is just one of– I mean, it's a paid, it's a pay-per-view type of thing. How is it doing? It's, it's okay. It's formatted too. I listened to it. My wife and I were driving to Niagara Falls last year and it's a– One thing that bothers me about the radio today is the repetition in some of the classic rock stations and this is honest, God's truth. They play 300 to 350 songs 24/7 in seven days, say in a week. Their playlist is 300 songs in one week. Now you got 24 hours a day that doesn't, you're going to get repetition out of that kind of thing. So you will hear– It's funny because we heard the same music set on satellite radio. Satellite radio is doing the same thing. We heard the same music set driving the Niagara Falls as we heard coming back. It was like, okay, how many times are you gonna play Roundabout by Yes? It's like we heard this Moody Blues song already. There's a, there's more than one song that they came out with, but that's, that goes back to what I said. It's this corporate structure and this formatting that. It's a safe way– It's a safe way of holding on to the, the numbers that they can, that they can sell. I guess. I think that's the bottom line.

Joseph Wickens [00:59:50]
Okay, last question I have about general. Generally this might be a chicken with the egg. Who benefited more from who would the radio benefit from rock and Cleveland or rock from radio?

Ed Ferenc [01:00:03]
Oh boy, that's a tough one. Yeah, well, radio was the vehicle for rock because I mean, okay, if you take radio out of the equation, your only way of finding it would be just somebody. Word of mouth that there was a band in town or in another city to go to. What radio did, radio was the amplifier, for lack of a better term. If there was something happening, they made it louder and more people were able to access it. And what made now today, getting back to what I just said, that would be difficult, especially for new music because there's a lot of good music out there that's not getting the treatment they should from radio because of the structure of radio today. But if you go back to the fifties, Bill Haley in the comments, you go back to the Beatles. How did we hear about them through the radio. I told you about that transistor radio that I listened to back in the sixties. I had that glued. I went to bed with it. I had an earphone in my, my parents were fumin' but I would go to bed with that transistor radio and wake up in the morning with it. But that was the vehicle and that's what made it so successful and it. The quality what had happened? The quality just got better. And that was the birth of FM radio, because it all started on AM, and we didn't care what it sounded like. It was just cool and happening. But then F the FM band was opened up for a lot of what was on the FM band. It's not like it wasn't there before. It was there. They just simulcast a lot of the stuff on there. But then there was opportunity by the owners to say, well, maybe we can do different things on the FM band. And that's when the music started taking off and the. The depth of the music. Stereo. You had stereo. There used to be a time when I bought it, I had a choice between a Mono album, Monroe, or stereo. There was a time, but then it became all stereo. There was no such thing as a Mono album anymore, but it just, the quality got better and why. And that was your vehicle for as far as the popularity of the bands. I mean, they heard about it, and then MTV, you know, tv came in. MTV came in the early eighties, and they. When that really took, a lot of us were kind of laughing about that and thinking, oh, my God, is that going to kill radio? And I don't think it didn't kill it. I think it aided it. It just made it more popular because we had. Radio had the flexibility that tv didn't have. It was more cutting edge. You can go, because tv, the MTV stuff, was still cut and paste. It was cutting. There's not everything. Not everything would be able to get on tv as you can on radio. And radio. Radio just had that, you know, you can track a whole album. You couldn't do that with MTV. But to answer your question, it is a tough answer, though, but rock and roll certainly would not be the industry that it became without radio. Radio. Radio was where it happened.

Joseph Wickens [01:03:32]
My last question then, the reason I'm here is for Cleveland State's 50th anniversary, and I just want to ask, what stands out from you most, from your experiences with the university, your time attending? And since then, too, if you'd like.

Ed Ferenc [01:03:47]
Right. I figured we'd get to that sooner or later. Well, you know what? I came from very traditional parents, conservative parents, and I have to be honest with you. When I got into radio and I was working full-time, part of me said, the heck with this. I wanted to quit and just, and just enjoy it because I was making good money, and I was just a kid. I was making– My dad was a steel worker. I was making more money than my dad made. And everybody's scratching their head and I said, this is great, and wow. And the parents were saying, no, you should– This is not going to last. You're going to be moving from city to city. You should have stuck with engineering. You should have gone into law. The same old things that parents would tell their kid because they obviously want the best for their kids. But I stuck it out, and I was working full-time, and I went to school full-time, and I did it all in four years. I started in '71, I graduated in '75. There was one year – it was my junior year – I had to do some catch-up because when I switched my major, I lost a little ground. And there was one year, I took 20 hours of credits. I was loaded. And you know what? It was the best year. I pulled a three-six average that year. It was– And it's just part of me, you know, when you're, when you're loaded with challenges, you perform up to your challenge. And some people, I mean, everybody has a breaking point, but I thrived on it. And I was up early in the morning. I got up at 4:00 a.m. I told you that show started when I first started working. It wasn't a show. I was working part-time, 5 to 8, and then I take a 9:00 class at Cleveland State. So that first year – that was my sophomore year, when I was a junior, sophomore, junior, going there – that's when I started. I went to 16 hours and I worked. I took night classes. So I would be up in the morning at 4. I'd work from like 5 to 1, and I'd grab a 2 or 3:00 class. And if I had to, I'll take a class 6 to 8 and then go to bed, and then bingo. And that's the kind of day I had. It was pretty crap. Could I do that again? I don't think so. I mean, keep in mind I was 20 years old, and you got to find time to study in between there. But I really, I drove to it. I wanted to finish on time. I wanted to prove to my parents that, yeah, you know, my sister graduated from college, their son's going to graduate from college, too. And it worked out. It worked out. I had some great teachers there. And in fact, I almost ended up in grad school. I took English as a second major. I had a communication, but I almost had a second major in English. I loved literature. I loved poetry. We had some great teachers there, literary criticism. And I got into that. To this day, I credit that for writing skills. I became a newsman when I started at WHK. And the funny part about it, my biggest problem was short. I had, as you write a term paper, you gotta write a lot of stuff, you know, at least 15, 20, 30 pages. And my problem, when I went into broadcasting, Washington, you don't do that. You got to write a story in three sentences. So I had to be brief. I had a challenge there because when I had to go into term paper mode, I had to switch over. And then in the morning, I had to be brief. In the afternoon, I had to be lengthy. It was like, wow, there was a big dynamic there. But I credit Cleveland State without question for developing writing skills and keeping me focused on that and well-read. And I did– Once I graduated, I did enter grad school with an English major. I didn't finish it. I couldn't. At that time, MMS was exploding. I had no time in my hand. There was appearances all the time. There was no way I was going to be able to write a hundred-page term paper and do all that other stuff. But I did get my degree. I got a bachelor's in communication, 1975. I'm real proud of it. And I've done stuff with the school over the years. In fact, back in the late nineties, we started Flashpoint Communications. This is after MMS, after WTAM. I spent a couple years in talk radio, and I'm still doing talk radio. I just do it for a specialized audience now for a union audience. But we started a pr advertising consulting firm called Flashpoint Communications. Cleveland State was one of the clients. They were doing some marketing outreach, and I had some people from the administration come on the show, and we did like a half hour show on why people should go to Cleveland State University. And I said, well, I'll tell you why. I'm one reason. So it was good. So over the years, I've had great, great relationships, great communication with them. A lot of the judges that I work with here at the Muni Court all went to the Cleveland Marshall College of Law. Great law school. One of my daughters almost went. She changed her– She changed her mind. I was hoping that she would go, but she may change, too. I don't know. But great school. Affordable. Not as affordable as when I went there, but gas used to be thirty cents a gallon, too, so those days are long gone. But that being said, you know what the coolest thing is, too, is seeing how that university has grown. It really is– I record my labor union show now at 65th and Carnegie. The station used to be over there at 27th and St. Clair, and I work in Muni Court. So I take Carnegie over to Prospect and come down that way. And I see all that Euclid Commons area. And I mean, wow, there's people actually living on campus. I mean, I mean, when I went, there was maybe two people that lived on campus. Today I don't know how many, but my God, that's cool. And my daughters, I had three daughters that went to Ohio State, and it's going in that direction. Ohio State's like that. There's a vibrant area there on campus if you go down High Street, and it's good to see that kind of thing, it's really good. And university plays a big role. And I have Cleveland State University professors on my radio show. I had one on two weeks ago, a sociologist that – Kleidman, I believe his name was – public sociologist is his term. And he's involved in this Building One Ohio project, which deals with getting all the regional mayors together to talk about regional form of government. So it's an asset. There's no question. It's an asset. And it's great. I mean, I'm proud when I say I went to Cleveland State because it definitely, along with MMS, made a pretty good foundation for me.

Joseph Wickens [01:11:03]
Thank you.

Ed Ferenc [01:11:04]
You're welcome.