The Whole World Is Listening: WHAS Radio Coverage of the 1937 Ohio River Flood

Fire patrol boats operating south of Broadway are ordered immediately to Third and Breckinridge! All available boats are needed there at once!…Milk is needed for nine babies at missing persons bureau at 1010 South Third Street…power boat, please deliver…Urgent! Fifty refugees must be moved immediately by boat from 1023 West Madison Street! This is imperative!

It was, in retrospect, often as tedious as it was historic. The tree-hugging, temper-flaring histrionics that sometimes accompany modern storm coverage were nowhere on display here. There was no time, no inclination, no instinct for grandstanding. Nor was there the technical ability. “Today, media relies a lot on the sound bites and interviews,” said Mike Martini of Cincinnati’s Media Heritage broadcast archive and museum. “They really didn’t have the technology at that time to do a lot of the sound bites, so they might talk for three or four minutes without taking a breath.” And even that proved a challenge. WHAS announcer Foster Brooks delivered one report while dangling from a telephone pole, the swollen Ohio raging beneath him.

Station secretary Catherine Steele’s situation was “precarious” as well; she was breathing fumes from gasoline heaters, with nearby stacks of paper creating a perpetual fire hazard. Typhoid shots were ordered for those hardy enough to remain on duty. “The people were calling for help, asking for boats to be sent and asking advice,” Steele remembered in a 1957 flood anniversary program. “One woman, I will never forget her, she says ‘Lady, my husband is out of town and I have five children! What do you think I should do?’…Everything happened so fast, and the water came up so fast.”

Engineer Carl Nielsen remembered “going to the Sears store on Broadway with the store manager and rowing up and down the aisles trying to locate battery radios, dry cell batteries, and storage batteries….It dawned on us that some of the workers at the studio would need winter clothes to keep warm, since we had no heat in the building.” Even after discovering some of their own homes were completely underwater (“I left the window open,” cracked one technician), the Louisville staffers never wavered. “They made the difference,” said Rick Bell, author of The Great Flood of 1937: Rising Waters, Soaring Spirits. “They were literally directing relief crews and rescue crews to individual houses. Day and night, over and over, you heard these messages.”

The emergency broadcasts continued, in an urgent but near-hypnotic monotone drone, for 1871⁄2 uninterrupted hours over WHAS alone. “Seven people marooned on house top on Lower River Road…can’t hold out much longer!…City Hall calling. 50 children marooned at church. Get them out immediately!” The station later estimated that 115,000 separate flood bulletins had been broadcast into remote areas via loudspeakers on trucks and even airplanes, and rebroadcast on other stations around the country and on the BBC in England.

Relief donations arrived from as far away as France and Belgium. Broadcasters in the United States rushed donated equipment to the flood zone, competition now completely abandoned. Stations in Nashville and Indianapolis joined Lexington and Covington, Ky., on the “Volunteer Inter-City Network for Flood Relief,” sharing information and technical facilities. Powerhouse WSM in Nashville surrendered its frequency and transmitter to WHAS after the last electricity flickered and failed in Louisville. Days earlier, the stations had been cutthroat archrivals; now, a single, precious telephone line to Nashville was all that prevented Louisville disappearing from the air. WSM’s own on-air request for refugee information produced 15,000 responses.

Ham radio operators from Memphis to Paducah to Baltimore sent word on evacuees’ fates (“W9CXG, Paducah, Kentucky, calling WREC shortwave”) to any possible receiver. With the Ohio now an astonishing 38 feet above flood stage in parts of the valley, evacuation and devastation created 200,000 refugees in Louisville alone, and smaller river communities such as Paducah, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., were completely empty. The flood saga had become a nationwide sensation. By January 27, the NBC network had broadcast some 70 emergency reports, including this one from Peter Grant of WLW:

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