That’s why college is so important.’” Ferenc valued his father’s wisdom and kept up grueling 10-hour days of radio and school to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in communication in 1975. “My dad said, ‘I don’t want you to work as hard as I had to. He began contemplating dropping out of CSU. He submitted an audition tape and soon, Ed “Flash” Ferenc was delivering the news on WMMS.Īt 20 years old, he was already living his dream and making more money than his immigrant father from Czechoslovakia made as a steelworker.

Though working behind the scenes, Ferenc gained a following among WMMS listeners when he’d “flash” into the studio and hand news copy to the show host just as a record was ending. I didn’t want to tell them I’d do it for free.” “I jumped in my Volkswagen Beetle and was there in 10 minutes,” recalls Ferenc. About a year later, the news director from Cleveland radio station WHK called, looking for an intern to write news copy for WHK and its sister FM station WMMS. When the chance to get into real-life radio came as a Cleveland State University student, he jumped at it.Īs a CSU freshman in 1972, Ferenc began working at the campus radio station in Stilwell Hall.

He built his own wireless transmitter, recorded himself and rode his bicycle around his Seven Hills neighborhood, listening to his homemade broadcasts. Rock music was exploding with the talents of Janice Joplin, The Doors and The Beatles, but Ferenc wasn’t content to just listen. Growing up, Ferenc was a self-proclaimed radio junkie. Yet Ed “Flash” Ferenc and Cleveland radio station WMMS created one of the most dynamic and highly rated radio programs in the nation, the Buzzard Morning Zoo. In the mid-1970s, Cleveland seemed like an unlikely place for a revolution in radio.

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