50 YEARS OF CINCINNATI RADIO BY MIKE MARTINI

50 Years of Cincinnati Radio Celebrated in 

Martini Book

Local radio history aficionado Mike Martini will host a book signing for Cincinnati Radio on Saturday, Dec. 10 in the Media Heritage exhibit room at the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting in West Chester.

Martini is producer and announcer at WMKV in Cincinnati and author of the 128-page history of the first 50 years of Cincinnati radio. The signing for Cincinnati Radio (ArcadiaPublishing, $21.95) is in conjunction with VOA museum tours at the facility on Saturday. The VOA museum building will close after Dec. 10 for a few months for roof replacement and other building restoration.

Guided museum tours will also be held Saturday, Dec. 10 from 1 to 4 p.m. at the VOA building, 8070 Tylersville Road in West Chester. Suggested tour donations are $5 for adults and $1 for children under 12.

Cincinnati Radio celebrates the first 50 years of Cincinnati radio in words and images. With more than 245 photographs, many never previously published, the book examines the famous and the forgotten. Martini has drawn upon more than 200 oral history interviews to provide the narratives that accompany the photographs.

“Cincinnati Radio will provide hours of memories for those who experienced  local broadcast history firsthand and introduce new generations to an era when radio was all ‘live’ and the primary source of news and entertainment for our nation during the 20th century,” said Martini.

Martini has been an award-winning radio announcer and producer in greater Cincinnati for 25 years, and worked at WARM98, WLW, WWEZ, WSCH, and WVXU. He is a former adjunct professor of broadcast writing at Xavier University and is co-founder and president of Media Heritage, Inc., a not-for-profit archive of Cincinnati’s radio and television history.   A native Cincinnatian, he and his wife, Sue, live on a 70-acre Indiana farm with their four boys.

Media Heritage is dedicated to preserving, restoring and presenting the history of radio, television, film and print—especially that of the greater Cincinnati area.

The National VOA Museum of Broadcasting consists of exhibits featuring the Voice of America at the VOA-Bethany station; Media Heritage’s Greater Cincinnati Museum of Broadcast History; the Gray History of Wireless Museum; and the West Chester Amateur Radio Assn.

The radio group restored the original VOA-Bethany control room, which will be the location of the club’s amateur ham radio station WC8VOA.  The group will continue to communicate with other shortwave radio amateurs around the world from that station on a regular basis.

For more information about the VOA museums, go towww.voamuseum.org.