Toledo Radio Reunion Voices Gratitude To Exec

Toledo Blade photo

Tuesday night’s gathering of longtime local disc jockeys was to be an “informal Toledo radio reunion” of friends, former colleagues, and casual acquaintances of Peter Cavanaugh.

It’s only fitting, reports The Toledo Blade, the reunion turned into a celebration of this former Toledo radio broadcasting executive, the one who brought them together this night at Manhattan’s Restaurant in Uptown, and for many, the man who gave them their first big industry opportunity.

Mark Benson, a radio veteran of more than three decades who handles mornings on classic rock station WXKR-FM, 94.5, said it was Mr. Cavanaugh’s appearance at a radio conference for college students in 1985 that got him “fired up about doing radio.”

Five years later, it was Mr. Cavanaugh, then-executive vice president and chief operating officer of Reams Broadcasting when it owned WIOT-FM, 104.7, and WCWA-AM, 1230, who paired Mr. Benson with a Flint radio talent he’d never met, Jeff Lamb.

The duo successfully anchored WIOT’s mornings as Jeff and Mark, “The Dawnbusters,” in the early 1990s. “He saw [the chemistry] . It was just one of those things that worked,” Mr. Benson said. “I don’t think I’d be doing mornings without him.

Mr. Cavanaugh started in radio in 1957 at the age of 16 in his hometown of Syracuse, N.Y., where he met his wife of 49 years, Eileen. He worked in Utica, N.Y.; Des Moines, and Flint before settling in Toledo. He’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Now 71, Mr. Cavanaugh is a private broadcast consultant and writer for McClatchy Newspapers and lives in Oakhurst, Calif.

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