Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey Learned Business At Family Station

Lew Dickey

When radio broadcaster Paul W. Smith worked in Toledo in the 1970s, there was a boy who cut the grass at the radio station.

“I used to see this young man mowing when I walked from the parking lot to the station back then," the current WJR broadcaster tels The Toledo Blade. “I’d always tell him he was doing a good job but that he didn’t want to do that all his life, and he’d say ‘No, sir.’”

Mr. Smith said he is glad he was nice to that young man, Lewis Dickey, Jr., who in 1997 was a co-founder of Cumulus Broadcasting, which is now the second-largest radio company in the country.

In 2011, Mr. Dickey called Mr. Smith at WJR and told him Cumulus had completed a deal with Citadel Broadcasting Corp. to acquire more than 100 stations, including the Detroit AM radio powerhouse. That boy with the mower was now Paul W. Smith’s boss.

Among the first stations acquired by Cumulus in 1997 were six Toledo stations that had been part of Midwestern Broadcasting, which was started by Lewis Dickey, Sr.

It was the elder Mr. Dickey, who died Nov. 28, who made sure his children learned the radio business from the bottom up at the family-owned stations in Toledo.

“We had to mow the lawn, do production, sales … everything,” recalls Mr. Dickey, Jr., who was chief executive officer of Midwestern Broadcasting before founding Cumulus.

“Toledo feels like home,” he said. “It’s like your children — you’re not supposed to have favorites, but I’ve known the Toledo stations longest. They’re special.”

The company that Mr. Dickey founded in 1997 now owns and operates more than 450 stations in 89 U.S. markets as well as a radio network serving more than 10,000 stations nationwide.

Mr. Dickey, 51, is focused on growing Cumulus Broadcasting even further by making it an important source of content for radio and other means of delivering audio material.

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