Voice of America Museum

When I wrote previously after first hearing about the work-in-progress that is called the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting, I knew that the museum itself was in its very early stages. It is housed in the old Bethany Relay Station building on Tylersville Road north of Cincinnati. The building itself was described as a rabbit warren of rooms at various levels. And the museum was not open yet--it only opens to the public one Saturday each month for three hours, and it didn't open last month due to vacation schedules.

So it wasn't until last Saturday, September 20 that I finally got a chance to visit the museum building. We didn't arrive until nearly 3:00 PM, two hours after the official opening time, and we knew the doors were due to close at 4:00. I expected that hardly anyone would be there, given the fact that the museum is more of a promise than a fact at this point, and also due to the fact that it was a beautiful late-summer Saturday afternoon and many folks probably had something else on their minds than the history of broadcasting through the WWII and Cold War eras. I was wrong, and we were not the only people there. Our tour, guided by a volunteer, started with a couple other visitors, and we all saw a 20-minute video describing the history of the Voice of America project. Following the video we were free to wander through the three major parts of the museum, which are devoted to the Voice of America organization, the history of wireless communication, and the "media heritage" of early radio in Cincinnati, primarily Crosley Radio and the WLW network.

It was easy to get lost in nostalgia in the Media Heritage portion of the space. There were picture and posters of famous personalities who got their start in Cincinnati radio, like the world-famous Doris Day, or who appeared here early in their career, like Andy Williams who was the youngest of four singing Williams Brothers while in high school. I was reminded of the early television program Midwestern Hayride that I saw in my youth, but which apparently had started as radio and as traveling road shows. Several of the exhibits we saw are looking a little ragged--more money is desperately needed for this museum--but a lot of the content is being captured on an active website. The site offers broadcasts of classic radio programs and a blog about the history of broadcasting from the Golden Age of radio to the early days of television, covering the people and stations that made history. Also noted are several archives available only in-person and on-site, chief among them the Frederic W. Ziv collection, consisting of over 15,000 items related to the person who pioneered television syndication, starting with programs including The Cisco Kid, I Led Three Lives, and Bat Masterson.

The self-guided part of our tour continued with stops in the Gray History of Wireless Museum. memorabilia and artifacts collected by Jack Gray, a long-time employee of the Crosley Radio stations, who started collecting in 1930. There was  lot of old equipment that I didn't understand, but it gave me a similar feeling to what I experience when I walk through old computer museums and see floppy disks and memory boards and punched card systems. It is important to be reminded from time to time of the beginnings of a particular technology.

I still want to learn more about the Voice of America program and its history, but that may have to wait until funding comes through to improve the museum and its collections. An ambitious master plan is in place.

In the meantime, the Voice of America continues to broadcast throughout the world, even though the Bethany Relay Station closed a decade ago. You can read or listen to VOA world news at http://www.voanews.com and news is broadcast daily in a slew of languages to people in Eastern and Central Europe, Eurasia, Central Asia, East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America. English language broadcasts go worldwide, as does a "Learning English" version.

I know a few people who have learned or improved their English, and learned about the U.S., by listening to Voice of America broadcasts. That was several decades ago, but apparently it is still happening.