Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
If this year’s election is similar to those of recent years, most of us on election night will want to know who won and who lost. It’s a time timeless tradition in a democracy and a good one. These days the latest breaking voting results on election night will be covered non-stop by the TV stations and most of the major news networks. This has become the norm over the past 50 years as television became the best place to find those up-to-the-minute results.
In the past two decades, however, the Internet and social media have also come to play a significant role in disseminating the raw numbers from the ballot box. Prior to the technology of TV and the Internet, it was radio that was “king” on election night. This reporter can remember a time in Toledo when at least five radio stations had news departments and actually did live election night results. Now, sadly, that number has dwindled to near zero locally. That’s another topic for another day.
So you might wonder how we got our breaking election results before the days of electronic and digital media? The quick, obvious answer was the local newspaper, but even those early editors knew that voters didn’t want to wait to the next day to learn the results. Hence, they devised some creative ideas on how to best get results to the public at large.
One hundred years ago, at their old building on Jackson Street between Huron and Erie, the Toledo News Bee was where the action happened on election night. Huge crowds of thousands of voters assembled in front of the building where a so called “Stereo-Opticon” projector flashed the latest results on a large canvas screen on the side of the building. And to keep everyone occupied as they waited for the periodic updates, the screen featured movies and newsreels. In 1925, humorist Will Rogers was the favorite.
The News Bee’s effort didn’t stop there. Wanting to reach an even wider area of the city, they worked with the Toledo Trust Bank Company, which used a search light atop its building to flash different sequences of light into the skies over the city to denote a particular result. For example, if the light circled six times in one minute, it meant that a bond issue was going to pass. Other signals were improvised to reveal who won or lost the mayor’s race that year.
Prior to these inventive ways of getting the results to the voters, in the 1890s and earlier, it was common practice for many organizations to hold parties at dance halls or auditoriums where the election results were combined with a mix of entertainment, music and dancing. The election results were announced as soon as someone could race back to the hall from the courthouse with the latest numbers.
By 1900, the results were often sent to these “election parties” by telegraph or telephone. Throughout the Toledo area, these election night dances were common. It seems that every town had several. In 1904, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem (Gloria Steinem’s grandmother), who became the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, held a get together with other ladies (no men invited), and it featured election results, music, and a burlesque on women’s rights.
The local theaters also got into the act. Both live-stage venues and movie theaters made sure they kept their audiences up to date with the results of the day’s voting. The Valentine, The Alhambra, and the Burt Theater did this from about 1900 to the 1930s. So, too, did the Cla-Zel and The Chidester in Bowling Green, and The Majestic in Port Clinton.
The hunger for election results was voracious in those early years of the 20th century. Even local restaurants in Toledo advertised that they too would announce the latest returns to their dinners, even at the risk some may lose their appetites, depending on the results.
Election nights in those years seemed to be festive and celebratory affairs, an affirmation of democracy. Election parties, balls, dances, music events, and numerous carnivals of citizenship were common throughout the Toledo area and the nation. So many people were out on the town watching the results that the train and trolley companies of Toledo put extra cars on the tracks during the night to handle the huge number of travelers. If you couldn’t leave home, telephone operators with the Home Telephone Company in Toledo also gave out election results when people called to ask for them.
But on Nov. 2, 1920, something happened that signaled a change in this robust American electoral tradition. KDKA, one of the first radio stations in the nation, began to broadcast the election results over the air from their location in Pittsburgh, Pa. It was a first and not many people even had radios to hear the broadcast.
Not well known is that in Toledo, using a special wireless receiver installed at the Labor Temple on Adams Street, the assembled crowd at this union venue had the latest results in the hotly contested presidential race between Ohio’s Warren Harding and James Cox. As they say, the rest is history. Harding won in a landslide and so would radio.
Over the next decade, the reach of radio took over as people could get those voting results in the comfort of their own living rooms. The election night rituals began to fade away. Decades later, radio handed over the reins to television and today, we can just look at our phones to learn the election results.
But much more than election results, the rise of modern media changed and continues to change the entire breadth of the American political system and how we are kept informed. But thankfully, what hasn’t changed is the simple need to know who won and who lost on election night.
