I happened to be listening to Paul Zehnder on his “Talk Back” WOHI radio show on the day he fell off his chair in the studio and couldn’t get up. In ill health and near the end of both career and life, he kept talking, asking for somebody, anybody, to come help him.

Zehnder was news director for WOHI-AM 1490 from the mid-1960s until about 2000. He’s one of the zany characters who will figure large in Rob Pratte’s presentation on WOHI history later this year for the East Liverpool Historical Society.

The on-air personalities that listeners got to know included Barbara Jones, Bill Holden, Jerry Graham, John Rambo, Jim Martin, and Rob Pratte himself, who slid over to KDKA-AM and still works there. He’s their utility infielder, doing his own shows and filling in on everyone else’s.

Air personalities often doubled as sales reps. Bob Birbeck was notable in sales.

Community people took the microphone for weekly shows and high school sports, adding zest and flavor that helped make stations like WOHI an organic asset to their small communities.

Leo Lawrence, an insurance agent, did a weekly gardening show. Stu Wilson, with a radio background and a distinctive voice, broadcast a two-hour Wellsville show. He operated a small Ohio River towboat, and died in a fall from it. Attorney Mike Kapp, whose practice included negotiating contracts for city fire and police unions, did an “ask the lawyer” show.

The Rev. Bob Gray, who came to town as a Boy Scout executive and founded Campground Community Church, hosted a Sunday evening show of live country music from the WOHI studio that Joe Coons built on Sixth Street. Aughinbaugh recalls those shows as logistical nightmares, but people loved them, lining up to get in.

Minister Frank Higgenbotham’s Chester church bought an airtime slot after Zehnder’s show for a daily Christian message. WOHI staff hauled broadcast equipment into St. Aloysius Catholic Church every Christmas Eve to broadcast mass.

WOHI and its FM sister station broadcast high school football and basketball, and hosted a weekly football show from Sturgis House. Frank “Digger” Dawson said they were careful not to schedule rival East Liverpool and Beaver Local players on the same show to avoid incidental damage to the former funeral home where gangster Pretty Boy Floyd was laid out.

Craig Burbick was among part-time announcers working under sports/radio full-timers Dave Horger and later Rob Pratte. Horger, not much out of high school, started at WOHI as an afternoon music DJ. He became radio voice of the Bowling Green University Falcons.

Digger remembers broadcast part-timers in the football press box including Jimmy Lowery, Jerry Stovall, and George Laneve, who once adopted the on-air name “Tony Lane.” In one memorable interview with star Potter QB Bob Mackall, Mackall couldn’t remember that and kept calling him “George.”

Aughinbaugh said WOHI first broadcast Dec. 1, 1949. Joe Coons was an early owner, and 10 years later added sister FM station WRTS, playing country music. The call letters changed, WELA and WOGI among them. Businessman Frank Mangano brought the stations from Coons in 1971. Bernie Brobst was running LeRoy Jewelers when Mangano, skilled at spotting talent, hired him as station manager. Tony Renda was another. Aughinbaugh started as a sales rep in 1972 and became general manager in 1984. “Frank bought some other stations which I oversaw, two in Hazelton, Pa., and one in Warren, Ohio,” Ron said.

WOHI and other radio stations formerly owned by Mangano are now part of the large Forever Media Inc. group of stations. Ron, semi-retired, still works for the group.

Jim Martin worked for another station when Ron recruited him because his personality fit WOHI’s popular Swap Shop, a daily one-hour show with people calling in with items to buy, sell or trade. Callers continually violated the rules, phoning in too often or trying to sell forbidden items like cars, guns and animals. Jim’s patience was strained but never broken. I wrote a column in 1990 suggesting creative ways to help Jim by cracking down on “Swap Shop criminals.”

“Jim would take almost 100 calls in a show. He wrote down every number and when people would call in asking for a number he would give it to them. They loved him for that,” Ron said.

Years later, when Martin worked for a station out in Ohio, “he would call people here out of the blue, just to say hello,” Ron said. I had the pleasure to get a couple calls from Jim. Sadly, he died in the COVID pandemic.

Paul Zehnder was opinionated, blunt, and had a short fuse on his Talk Back opinion show, traits which won fans and as many critics. He was tireless and objective in his news reporting, however, earning a stack of awards for broadcast excellence from the Associated Press and stringing for the Vindicator and other regional newspapers.

“We did a lot of local news back then,” Ron said. “It was a 24-hour, seven days a week job, and Paul worked his tail off. People loved to hate him but he had respect.”

Paul’s son Jeff Zehnder, a retired city firefighter, said people still stop him on the street to talk about his father. “My dad was a piece of work,” he said. One time Paul, a pilot, flew over East Liverpool in a seaplane with Joe Coons and Barbara Jones, broadcasting as they went. As a boy, Jeff recalls walking the city beat (police, fire, court) with his dad, then having breakfast at the Elite (pronounced ‘E-lite’) Diner, a greasy spoon at Sixth and Jackson.

I was a young news staffer for The Review in the 1980s. Every weekday morning legendary Review reporter Bob Popp, coffee thermos on his desk, pen in one hand and lit cigarillo in the other, listened to Zehnder’s morning news on a little transistor radio to make sure he hadn’t missed a story. Bob worked the city beat for an unparalleled 41 years.

Paul Zehnder died from congestive heart failure in 2001, not too long after falling off his chair in the studio. He was an original, as so many on WOHI were.

When Rob Pratte does his WOHI bit, I’d like to hear how he talked the cemetery in Beaver, Pa., into advertising on blowtorch KDKA. Whoever heard of a cemetery advertising on radio?