We learn that 7,500 of Dayton’s 10,000 population are homeless. We learn that 75% of the city is underwater…entire city blocks of homes have been swept down the river and will never be found. The city of Dayton, Kentucky, is absolutely without clothing and bedding….The Spears Hospital at Dayton had 100 patients at the time the flood reached Dayton’s streets…they were taken to the Dayton, Kentucky, high school. In this school in the last few days, we learn that a dozen babies have been born and several operations performed….Churches are overflowing with Dayton’s refugees. There is plenty of food available, but no water. Dayton, Kentucky needs water, clothing and bedding at once. Cincinnati’s chief worry tonight is water—water for drinking purposes and for fighting fires….A big fire now in this area might prove a major catastrophe. Cincinnati remains on an emergency holiday basis. No business was transacted today for a third successive day…this holiday will continue until the city can put its house in order.

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Inevitably, there were also moments of humor. Surviving photographs from the station show that male WHAS staffers never abandoned their suits and ties for work, even at the height of the crisis. They simply accessorized with hip-waders and galoshes. A Louisville rabbi broadcast to the world barefoot and wrapped in a pink blanket, after his boat capsized en route to the station, drenching his clothes. A WHAS staffer snapping “Boy! Boy!” to get an assistant’s attention later discovered the “boy” was a top company executive, old enough to be her father, but nevertheless pliantly obeying the orders of his “boss.”

WKRC, Cincinnati, broadcaster (and later WLW mainstay) Ruth Lyons recounted losing seven pounds running up and down stairs, sleeping atop a desk with telephone phone books for pillows and “bathing” in two gallons of clean water she’d managed to collect in a hotel bathtub. It didn’t matter. “We realized this was the greatest crisis that Cincinnati had ever faced,” she recalled. “We felt this was the thing that we must do.” The most notorious incident came on January 28, when network commentator Floyd Gibbons, broadcasting CBS’ Your True Adventure program direct from WKRC, caused a nationwide panic by ignoring his script and instead enacting a ludicrous melodrama in which the radio station was destroyed, flood waters pouring into the studio and drowning switchboard operators at their posts. Thousands with loved ones in the Ohio Valley were not amused.

That the anecdote recalls similar alarmist falsehoods in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath—rapes and murders in the Superdome; hundreds of corpses at a New Orleans high school—is no isolated coincidence. “There were all of these really erroneous national news reports that 900 bodies were seen floating,” said author Bell of the 1937 flood. “None of that happened.” In fact, the flood had become one of the first examples of the “bigfoot”: national anchors “parachuting” into a big story and creating a presence at the scene, but often lacking the sources and perhaps desire to separate fact from rumor. “It was a pivotal event,” said Mike Martini, and one that influenced radio journalism’s development in other ways. Broadcasters “realized they’re not in direct competition with newspapers, but rather they augment the newspapers. They provide immediacy.”

Indeed, a seesaw battle for news supremacy had raged between print and broadcast media for most of the 1930s, with radio timidly ceding the advantage in almost every case. The networks at one point even allowed wire services to ration how much copy they could air, and when. But with power failures and distribution breakdowns knocking flood-region newspapers almost completely out of commission, and with thousands of lives quite literally resting upon their performance, local radio broadcasters simply ignored the previous constructs and did what they believed necessary. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the networks followed their lead.

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