BOOK REVIEW: CROSLEY Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation -- part 3

Powel Crosley

CROSLEY
Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation

By Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A. Banks

Review by Steve Wright

Together, the brothers Crosley teamed to sell their famous radios to consumers around the globe.

They didn't invent radio, nor were they the first to sell them. But the strived to make radios much less expensive than the others on the market.

Author McClure dubs this Powel's business model of selling to "the masses, not the classes" -- a method of selling under-priced, well-built products and profiting on a high margin of sales.

It is little wonder with this Model T-like business plan, that Powel himself put his formidable public relations and marketing skills toward creating a national image as "the Henry Ford of Radio."

To program those radios, and to have a means of advertising their product over the air waves, the Crosleys created one of the first radio stations in the nation.

WLW, right from the start, became a giant in the industry. Along the way, it launched the careers of the Mills Brothers, Doris Day, Andy Williams, Red Barber and countless others.

To this day, WLW is one of the most powerful and popular AM radio stations in America and it continues to create larger than life on-air personalities.

It also is flagship of the Cincinnati Reds, the team the Crosleys saved during the depression by purchasing the basically bankrupt local team.

When attendance was sagging, Powel fought with baseball's tradition-bound old owners and commissioners and eventually won the right to hold the first-ever night baseball game in 1935.

The brothers Crosley had earlier pioneered another mainstay of pro baseball -- the broadcast of a live game.

The Crosleys owned the Reds for nearly three decades, guiding them to a World Series victory and changing the name to Red Legs during the Cold War intensity of the mid to late 1950s -- when Red sounded a bit too communist to a city that had forced the changing of streets with German names all the way back at WW1.

TOMORROW: Automotive Dreams & Unheralded Legacies

Wright is the author of more than 5,000 published articles on urban life, architecture, public policy, planning and design. He is active in working to make sure universal design, which provides barrier-free access to people with disabilities, is incorporated to the essential and rapidly-evolving practice of sustainability.

RESOUCES:

http://www.crosleybook.com

http://rustymcclure.com/novels/crosleybook.html