Don Dahlman

Don Dahlman

Don Dahlman – 1942

My Dad would have turned 100 tomorrow.  He left us in 2016,  two days before his 98^th birthday. 

“Don Dahlman” — that was how my Dad answered his business phone for forty years.  The phone was pivotal to my Dad’s career; when I think about him at work (as I write sitting at his “executive desk”) I think about Dad with a phone at his ear, getting facts, making decisions, and encouraging, directing and sometimes swearing at his employees (that’s where I learned that particular “art”.)

Don Dahlman was a child of the Great Depression.  Born and raised in Cincinnati, his father was the Sports Editor for the Cincinnati Post. His mother went to work as a real estate agent when the stock market crashed, and while the family lost a lot of their income, they were able to weather the economic storms without too much disruption.

Don was a product of Cincinnati; of Walnut Hills High School and the University of Cincinnati.  He co-opted in the UC Bookstore, and graduated from college in 1941 with a Business Administration Degree. He took a job in advertising with Beau Brummel Ties, but the clouds of World War II were already swirling.  By November he was enlisted in the Army; the December 7^thattack on Pearl Harbor found him on leave in a bar in Atlanta.

The Army got it right – they put Don in finance, making sure the troops were paid.  He was sent to London, running an office in the middle of the Nazi bombing attack called the Blitz.  There, he went on a blind date with an English girl.   They quickly went from strangers to lovers; that’s when Don and his English girl Babs started a lifelong love affair, walking the blacked-out streets of London.

As Don made sure the Army was paid, Babs was a secret operative going in and out of Occupied Europe. Her code name was “Virginia;” Don really never got used to high-level officers coming up to “his girl,” calling her Virginia, and having secretive conversations.  He wasn’t allowed to know.  It wasn’t until years later, when the Official Secrets Act expired, the Babs was able to tell him the extent of her secret life.  Despite this, Don and Babs got married in 1944, moving the wedding date up to avoid the D-Day Invasion.  Their honeymoon was still cut short, Don to go to join the invasion Army, Babs to land in France to work with the Resistance.

After a year of missing each other in France as the war in Europe concluded, Don and Babs were back together in London again.  The decision was made:  Babs would come to America, to Cincinnati, to start a new life with Don.  She would leave the nation of her birth, the nation she defended, for the man she loved.

But she was not “following” Don home.  It was a partnership from the beginning.  When they arrived in Cincinnati, they decided to start a bottling company.  Babs made the “pop,” pouring sugar and syrup into giant mixing vats.  Don marketed, going store-to-store in the truck, stocking them with the “US Bottling Company” product.  A flood of the Ohio River damaged the “plant,” and they soon sold out to bigger bottlers.

Don entered a new industry that would shape all of our lives:  television.  He went to work as a salesman for Crosley Broadcasting’s WLW-T.  In those early television days everything was live, and Don (and Babs from time to time) worked beside future stars like Rod Serling and Ruth Lyons.  When Don wasn’t moving up as quickly as he liked he jumped to a new phase of the industry, syndication.

Syndication is marketing television shows station by station, without using a “network.” While the big three, CBS, NBC and ABC offered a package of programming, syndicators offered individual shows for sale. The biggest innovator of the time was Fred Ziv in Cincinnati.  Ziv developed, and Don sold, iconic shows of the 1950’s and early 60’s: Highway Patrol, Ripcord, Sea Hunt, the Everglades and the Cisco Kid.

Meanwhile, Babs and Don started a family, with three children by 1956.  Don was “on the road” Monday through Friday, and after moving to Detroit in 1961, wanted to find a job that kept him closer to the family.  In 1963 he returned to Crosley, this time as the sales manager and soon station manager of WLW-D in Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton was a booming town in the 1960’s, with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, National Cash Register, Frigidaire and Delco all providing full employment.  As Manager of one of the two TV stations in Dayton, Don and Babs played a major social role in town, even representing Dayton to the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight in Le Mans, France in 1968.

Don believed in “live” television.  When Johnny Gilbert (“tell them what they won, Johnny”) left the mid-day entertainment show for Hollywood, Don and his staff developed a new talk show format. They hired a young newscaster away from the competitor station, Phil Donahue.  They set up a show where Phil would have a studio audience, mostly women (the “homemakers”) and then bring in the newsmakers of the time.  Phil soon discovered that the audience had great questions, and added a phone (“Is the caller there?”)  The Phil Donahue Show was born.

The Donahue Show brought controversy to Dayton, Ohio.  Whether it was atheist Madeline Murray O’Hare, radical anti-war protestor Abbie Hoffman, or the anatomically correct doll, Little Baby Brother; Phil took on issues of the 1960’s.  Don soon got the show on the “sister stations” in Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis and San Antonio; and with his experience in syndication began to push Donahue sales beyond the Midwest.

The Donahue Show was exciting, not only for Don, Babs and the station, but for my sisters and me as well. In the evenings before the morning show, our family room became the place to be.  For example:  one night, late, Mom woke me up, and told me to “bartend” (I was twelve and talented at mixology, they fired me at fourteen when they thought I might try the product) for Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers.  He was a hero of the young; the Brothers had a comedy show on CBS that dared to speak out against the Vietnam War.  The show was ultimately cancelled because of their outspoken opposition.  Tommy spent the evening at our house, and Dad’s sales manager Chuck McFadden and I spent the evening behind the bar, listening to Tommy’s dirty jokes and wondering how his girlfriend’s dress was staying up.

By the early 1970’s, Donahue was bigger than the station.  The show was moved to production in Chicago, and Don and Babs returned to Cincinnati with Don becoming the President of Syndication for the new owner, Multimedia Broadcasting.  Ultimately Dad got the show into 225 markets in the US, and it ran for twenty-six years.   Multimedia Syndications also created and marketed the Sally Jesse Raphael Show, Young People’s Specials, and originated the Jerry Springer Show.

Back in Cincinnati, Don and Babs led a busy social life, with an eclectic group of friends.  Some were Don’s old Cincinnati friends and some were business friends from companies like Proctor and Gamble, but others were from England, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, India, Brazil, and other places around the globe.  Dinners at the Dahlman’s were always interesting, with conversations around the table going on until late at night.  All of the issues of the world were up for discussion – except for religion and “the Queen” (Babs wouldn’t have that.)  And the kids, who had grown up taking part in the discussion, were able to get a world perspective.

Those friends, many younger than Don and Babs, regarded them as a second family.  For some, the Dahlman’s became their surrogate parents.

It was always a partnership, Don and Babs.  It was always a love affair as well, as they lived an active life into their nineties. Mom and Dad taught us how to live and how to love.  And when Mom passed away, five years before Dad, he continued to teach us how to live by his example. Dad began to lose his memories; life has a way of cushioning some of the worst losses.  But while in his business life no one would have described him as “soft;” Dad, even to his last hours, never lost his kindness and courtesy and love.

Two years ago I had the privilege of being able to have a last conversation with my father.  We were able to say we loved each other one last time.  While I was saddened to see him go, it was his time.  And they, Mom and Dad, aren’t really gone at all.  They live on in the memories and lessons and love they taught us all.

Babs and Don Dahlman – 2006