(upbeat music) - And welcome to Forum 360.

It's our program featuring topics with a local outlook, but at a global outlook and a local view.

And I'm your host Bill Steven Saus.

Our guest today is a distinguished journalist and broadcast news person, Neil Zurcher.

He's a local and regional broadcast journalist and he's an author of several books.

And we'll be talking with Neil Zurcher.

Good to have you today, Neil on Forum 360.

- Thank you, Bill, thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

We have a little bit of background that we'd like to catch up.

You were born in 1935, in Lorain County.

Tell us a little bit about your early life and how you got into broadcast.

You were a U.S. Marine for some time, so give us a little background, Neil.

- Well, I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps and I was working in Oberlin and I happened to go into the Oberlin News Tribune.

It was around Christmas time and they were looking for a reporter.

And that's what I had done in the Marine Corps, was learning the public relations.

And so they hired me, for $40 a week.

- Wow.

And for that $40, I was expected to write a column, I was expected to be a photographer, I was expected to be a reporter, and on Thursdays I was expected to deliver the newspaper to all its 5,000 subscribers.

And so it was a busy, busy place to work.

And I learned a lot of lessons about journalism there.

- And then you ended up, another media, radio.

You worked radio in Lorain County.

- Yeah.

I had a few different jobs for a while, but then I went back into the news and I had heard that WEOL, which was the local radio station in the area, was looking for a nighttime reporter.

And so I applied and I got the job.

And so I started out in 1960, I believe it was, at WEOL.

- I think you said in your book, you wrote one of your books, you said you started about 1961 there, and.

- The years go by, pretty much forget which year is which.

- Then you ended up in television and you spent decades with WJW, Channel Eight.

- Yeah, actually what happened was in 1962, I think it was, I started working for WJW TV as a freelance reporter, as well as reporter, full-time, at WEOL.

And so for about five years when I was at WEOL, I also worked for Channel Eight on a part-time basis of when I could sell them the stories.

And in 1967, they hired me full-time as their first street reporter.

Up to that time, all you had was just anchors and they were the only people working there.

And so when they had to have a reporter, they grabbed one of their booth announcers and sent them out.

- Right.

- And I was the first actual full-time street reporter that they hired.

- You've seen everything has changed in television broadcasting.

It started black and white, a lot of activity, black and white, even network television, and then moving into color and videography, as opposed to photography.

What are some of the highlights in your early career, when you made that transition going out on the road?

Not just in the newsroom, but going out on the road and who are some of the influences when you first started to go on assignments?

- Well, on assignments, the local reporters, local anchors are there, of course were Doug Adair and Joel Daly at the time.

- Right.

- And Joel was from Yale University, is where he got his education.

And he taught me a lot, I think, about reporting and things.

Norm Wagy, the news director that hired me, was a great influence on me at the time.

When I first arrived at the station, of course, the Sam Shepphard murder case, the second one, was going on.

- Right.

- So I got that almost immediately.

And after that, we covered all kinds of stories.

I mean, I got to spend the day with Prince Charles of England, who's going to be eventually king.

I got to spend a day with his father, Prince Philip, one time.

- [Bill] Wow.

- We covered presidents, we covered statesmen, we covered just about everybody.

So it was a great learning experience in the 40 years there.

- And then let's look at that Carter, Jimmy Carter administration, leading up to the Ronald Reagan administration.

when they had what they called stagflation.

The economy was to the point where gas prices, as they are this season lately.

- [Neil] Yeah.

- They were pretty high.

So your studio decided that would be an interesting way of talking about, which eventually became the One Tank Trips, that you had that you worked on.

- [Neil] Ah, yes.

- So tell us about the evolution of the One Tank trip concept, in news.

- Well, I was doing regular reporting and just, we had a week-long series called Consumer Reports that week.

Virgil Dominic was the general manager at the time and the news director, and he decided that he wanted me to do a week-long series on places you could go on just a tank of gasoline.

I thought it was kind of a silly idea.

I kept saying, well, yeah, everybody gets a different kind of mileage on their car.

I mean, everybody doesn't drive a little tiny car.

They drive RVs, they drive big cars and Virgil insisted, he wanted to call it a One Tank Trip.

So I agreed and I went out and I put together just five places that I thought were kind of interesting that I'd known about and I'd seen in my travels as a news reporter.

I went over, I think to Ashtabula, and I did something on the train museum they had there.

- I went to Cedar Point, showed that.

We showed what you could do in just a weekend in downtown Cleveland.

And I really didn't think, and even put a lot of effort into it, because at the time I had been doing this for 25 years as a reporter, I was really kind of, I'll be honest, I think I was burned out.

I just kept doing the same stories, the tragedies and things over and over and over.

And this was kind of a relief when I got to go do this week-long series.

So it was kind of fun.

And the mail started to come in, the phone calls, I couldn't believe the response we got.

And Virgil called me into his office, he goes, I think we've just tapped into something here.

He said let's do it continuously every week - Wow.

- For the next few weeks, so we did.

Month after month, we kept doing a week-long series, and eventually why he just said, hey, this is too good.

We're gonna make this a regular feature, and we did.

And it went on.

I thought it would last six months.

It lasted 35 years.

- Excellent, I mean, I just recall watching your One Tank Trip programs growing up in Northeast Ohio and working in media in Northeast Ohio and so forth.

And as you said, you started in Ashtabula, but you, it's like travel from A to Z.

From Ashtabula to Zanesville and all the way around this state.

And that started you in writing.

I know you wrote for the AAA, the American Automobile Association, puts out their magazines, and as a AAA member, I used to read your articles.

So you got a little bit of print journalism involvement there, and then you started writing the books.

Gray Publishing came to you, Neil, and talk about your development of your One Tank Trip books and some of your other books involved.

And we're gonna talk about the most recent book, which has come out, and it is about some of the real hard news you covered, the Ohio disasters.

But let's talk about how you got started as an author and the books, early books.

- Well, in the early years, the One Tank Trips, we'd get lots of requests from people that wanted to know, where was that trip you took last week or last month?

And so I went to Virgil and I said, we ought put out a booklet of some kind that we could give out free to our viewers.

And so we finally agreed to it and we started publishing this little pamphlet.

Would have maybe a dozen, 20 trips in the thing.

And they became so popular that we'd go out to the sports and travel show every year, and we'd give out 80 to 90,000 of the things.

- [Bill] Wow.

- And it just became just a huge thing.

Well, somewhere along the line, David Gray and Gray & Company Publishers, heard about me.

I don't think he ever watched me on television, he he's pretty much a PBS kind of person, (laughs) but David called me one day, and he said, have you ever thought about doing a book?

And I said, yes, I have, but I just didn't know how to begin it.

He said, let's meet.

So we met that day at a little restaurant on the west side.

And the funny part was I got there first and David came in later.

Neither of us knew what the other one looked like.

And we were sitting side by side at the waitress station, waiting for the other one, when finally he turned at me and he said, are you Neil Zurcher, and I said, yes.

And we finally met.

But it's been a very successful publication with him over the years.

I've now done, I think, nine or 10 books for him.

And most, they've all been about Ohio.

- Excellent.

And in your recent book, the most recent book, it's the Ten Ohio Disasters: Stories of Tragedy and Courage that Should Not be Forgotten, Neil Zurcher, and it just is amazing, the hard news, the tough stories you had to cover.

You received the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gold Circle Award for National Academy of Television Arts and Science, they put out the Emmy Awards.

And you really have been one of the leaders of the Ohio Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

And as an author, we're so glad to have Neil Zurcher with us.

This is Forum 360, our program that features a global outlook, local view.

I'm your host, Bill Steven Saus.

And Neil Zurcher is with us, a broadcast journalist here in Northeast Ohio for years, literally decades, and an author.

So as a veteran journalist, you've had to report some of the toughest stories.

And Neil, in the current days we hear, around the country, school shootings and major problems with the roads and highways, trucks crashing.

And it's just an amazing situation when people have to eyewitness these tragic news stories.

What are some of the ways that you came up with picking your Top Ten, that you put in this book, which is the Ten Ohio Disasters.

- It was kind of serendipitous, I guess.

I was riding on an elephant one day, and this was back in the 1970s, and I had a assignment.

He knew I didn't like animals, and so he always made sure I got all the animal stories.

He just had a weird sense of humor.

And so the Ringing Brothers Circus had come to town and we were going up to the Coliseum.

And they, as a publicity stunt in those days, they would invite local media people to ride their elephants from the train up to the Coliseum.

And so I'm on the back of this elephant and I'm really terrified because I'm 13 feet off the ground, and I'm really not enjoying myself.

And I got to talking, trying to make myself calm down, to the elephant handler, who's walking beside us.

And he happened to bring up the subject.

He said, did you ever hear about the big fire that almost wiped out the Ringling Brothers Circus?

And I said, no, I don't think I have.

And he said, you should look it up.

It'd be a pretty good story.

Well, flash forward to 2017, when I finally retired the second time from Channel Eight.

I was looking for a project and I went through an old reporter's notebook and I suddenly found that comment.

And I thought, well, maybe it's time I looked that story up.

And I did, and I was just amazed.

I mean, that was a terrible, terrible fire.

It happened in 1942.

- [Bill] Right.

The circus came to Cleveland.

It was set up at East 9th and Lakeside.

And they had a menagerie tent that was as big as the Big Top.

But in those days, what they did is, they put paraffin and kerosene on the tent to keep it fireproof, waterproof.

Well, it wasn't fireproof, obviously.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- That caught fire at about 11 o'clock the second day they were in their run.

And it was just terrible.

It burned and killed animals, just dozens of them.

In fact, many of their elephants were burned and had to be destroyed.

Tigers were killed, it was just a horrible, horrible thing.

Well, a group of elephants broke loose from the circus tent, there, as the tent was burning.

And they're running down Lakeside Avenue.

- [Bill] Wow.

- And there was a man in town by the name of Henry Cook, who was the Director of Patriotic Affairs.

He was a World War I veteran, and he was standing on the steps of City Hall.

And he suddenly saw these elephants coming down Lakeside, and he said to himself, that's gonna cause an awful traffic jam.

Somebody ought to do something about it.

And then he thought, well, there's nobody here, I guess I'm going to have to.

And he ran out into the street, pulled a whistle he'd been carrying since World War I, out of his pocket, put it in his mouth, blew the whistle, put his hand up and yelled, stop.

The elephants stopped.

- [Bill] Wow.

- And then they gathered all around him in a circle and he really didn't know what to do then, because he didn't know anything about handling elephants.

But they were friendly.

They were sniffing.

And he started talking to them, as he said, as a Dutch uncle.

And I guess a Dutch uncle was a person that just knows everything and talks to you.

And he talked to them and talked to them 'til the circus personnel caught up.

And of course they led the elephants away.

And somebody asked them, why did they respond to him?

And they said they were looking for a friendly face.

(laughs) And they found Henry.

Wonderful man, wonderful story.

And it just kind of prompted the whole idea of why maybe I should write a book.

- And you've picked some other stories in that book, in this book, about the Ten Disasters in Ohio.

One was the, in 1974, you fanned out from Cleveland headed south with your camera crew to cover the Gallipolis, Ohio, where the Silver Bridge collapsed.

- Yeah, I was not at the Silver Bridge collapse.

- You were just reporting about it, right?

- No, I was in Cleveland when it happened.

I asked to go, but they said that was a network story and that we should stay here.

I was just interested in it.

I was always fascinated with, just this bridge suddenly collapsing.

It was Christmas time in 1967, and the bridge was loaded with people Christmas shopping, on their way home.

- [Bill] Right.

- Between Sisterville, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, when the bridge just the bridge just suddenly collapsed into the Ohio River.

And it took like, 45 trucks and cars with it.

And all these people were killed and it was just terrible.

And at the time, I remember, I never felt safe going over a bridge after that.

And so for years I wondered about how did that happen?

And then that was why I picked that one disaster that I wanted to look into.

And we did, we researched it.

And we talked to some of the authors of other publications.

And I caught up with one man who was a radio reporter that was there that night.

And he became, himself was an interesting story, his name was Ron Akers.

And he was working for the CBS affiliate in Morgantown, West Virginia.

And he reported all night long on the disaster.

He related some of the stories that he heard that night.

Ron himself, after the disaster was over with and was so impressed by what state patrolman did down there, that he went into Ohio and became a state trooper.

- [Bill] Wow.

And he worked as a state trooper for eight years.

Then he decided he wanted to become a medical doctor, but they told him he was too old to go back to school.

So he went to school and became a chiropractor.

- [Bill] Wow.

- After practicing that for a few years and he decided again, he wanted to become a medical doctor.

So he again, went back to reporting in Iowa to put himself through medical school.

And he finally did it, he became an MD, and today he's retired, but he worked in Cleveland, Tennessee has as medical doctor for many years.

- [Bill] Wow.

- But he has a wonderful story that he tells.

- That's one of the human interest stories that I've noticed in this book you've written.

Also the Xenia, which is Green County, near Dayton, the Xenia tornado.

Now tornadoes are always a problem here in Ohio, in the Midwest.

You did cover that story for WJW, right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I spent all night there.

I remember that very well.

I was in Medina that evening, in August of 1974, or April, 1974, when the tornado hit.

And there was a lot of damage up here, too, and some storm damage related.

And we were covering that when we got the call about Xenia had just been destroyed.

And so I went immediately down to Xenia.

It took us a couple hours to get there.

But we spent the whole night there and it was just incredibly, the damage, I've never seen anything like it before.

And the main stories that I came up with out of that one was the untold stories.

I mean, this is 35, 40, 50 years later, and you're still hearing new stories that nobody's ever told before.

One of 'em happened to be from a state trooper that I interviewed down there.

Gary Taylor was a young trooper.

He was stationed in Xenia at the time.

He was standing, they had just built a brand new, State Patrol post on Route 68, south of Xenia.

And he saw the storm coming.

He was outside the Patrol Post.

- [Bill] Right.

- And headed towards where his family lived, in Xenia.

So he jumped in the patrol car and he took off, trying to beat the storm, into Xenia.

He could see this enormous tornado moving on the town.

He got so close that it picked part of his car off the ground and put it back on.

- Right.

- He realized he was getting too close to the storm, so he decided he detour it through downtown Xenia, which had just been hit.

And he was driving up and down these side streets trying to avoid trees and buildings that were moved into the middle of the street.

And he suddenly saw a man being robbed, of all things, in the middle of a tornado.

So he stopped his car, jumped out, frightened off the robber, who was, it was a looter going in this man's pocket.

- [Bill] Right.

- Ran to the victim.

The victim was unconscious laying in a pool of blood, there.

Had a head injury.

So he ran back to his car, got a compression bandage, came back, put the bandage on the man, stayed with him while he waited for an ambulance to get there.

Got the man into an ambulance and took off to try to find his family.

He had to see if they were safe.

Got to his home, and it was destroyed.

His heart was in his mouth, running through the backyards, trying to get to the home.

He finally found his wife and two daughters in the front yard.

They had been trapped in the basement, but they had been rescued by a neighbor.

But what a horrible, horrible.

- Well, it was amazing reading that.

And even, there was a Barberton native, who was Sergeant Debevec, - Right.

- Who was stationed down there with him.

He later came up back home to Summit County and also worked in Cuyahoga County with the state troopers.

And he noticed this, he'd never seen anything, like that tornado cloud and the devastation of downtown Xenia, which is a county seat of a suburban county near Dayton.

Then bringing it up, a little this way was in 1978, the whole state of Ohio suffered one of the snowstorms of the century.

And tell us a little bit about your covering the 1978 blizzard.

That's a amazing story.

- Well, the blizzard of '78 obviously, was the biggest blizzard to probably ever hit Ohio.

I mean, it was the only time the Ohio Turnpike had ever been closed down completely, all the way across, from Indiana to Pennsylvania.

- Right.

- And we're out trying to work in it.

And it was just incredible.

I was told to get down onto Brookpark Road, near the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, that they heard that there were people were stranded in their cars and that Cleveland police were down there trying to get 'em out.

So I went down with a photography crew and we got onto Rocky River Drive, approaching Brookpark Road.

And you just couldn't go any further.

We could see a police car ahead of us.

They had the lime green Cleveland police cars at the time.

So they were pretty easy to see even through the snow.

- [Bill] Wow.

- So I told my crew to stay in the car.

I would wade through the snow, up to the police car, to see if they had any victims nearby, or what they were trying to do.

And as soon as I got outta the car and walked 30 feet away from it, the wind kicked up and I was suddenly in a whiteout.

And I had no idea where I was.

I was trying to walk on a straight line, but apparently, I turned somehow and I ended up walking off the curb.

I knew I was in grass, but pretty soon I was in snow up to my waist, and I suddenly realized that I was well off the highway.

And I had no idea where I was.

And I couldn't see anything.

Everything was just a world of white.

And I really, literally thought I was gonna die out there because I thought, if I fall down, nobody's gonna find me.

- Right.

- Then I heard a siren and I kept listening and I started walking towards it.

And my one photographer had gone up to the police car when I didn't return and told them that I was lost in the snow.

And so they blew their siren.

They were blowing their horn.

And I finally, following that, I got back to it.

They literally saved my life that day.

But I remember trying to get to work that morning.

It was snowing so hard and blowing so hard.

80 to 90 mile an hour winds were taking out some of the windows in the Federal Building, downtown.

They were falling on East 9th Street, so you couldn't drive down that street.

Everything was just incredible.

- [Bill] Wow.

- And you just couldn't move to do anything.

- I remember that myself.

I was University of Akron, taking some grad courses in broadcasting with the radio station there.

And my news director, Bob Tayek, who later went to Cleveland, I said, Bob, I can't leave.

My car is gonna be abandoned at the studio at the university.

And he said, well, come over at my house.

He was recently married and Bob and Maria, let me walk over to his apartment in downtown Akron.

I recall that, and all broadcasters and journalists were struggling to get the news out.

Obviously, the National Guard was involved.

Governor Rhodes called a major disaster.

But that's the tragedy and the courage that you write about in the notorious disasters of Ohio.

We've got about a minute left, and I want to urge people, if they go to their bookstores or go online to look up Neil Zurcher's books, you can share some of the stories and you'll get a vicarious understanding as to what it's like to be a reporter going on the road.

And his One Tank Trip programs that he would produce at WJW, are so classic.

And if you wanna learn about travel in Ohio and the surrounding states, definitely find a book by Neil Zurcher.

Neil, thank you.

In the last 10 seconds, I want to thank you and your family out in Bay Village.

I hope that you and Bonnie continue to keep people reading and enjoying.

Thank you, Neil.

- Thank you so much, Bill.

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