One Room, One Person, One Channel: How Roxie Cole Built Dayton’s Public Voice
In 1977, Roxie Cole had an idea and a grant. The idea was that Dayton, Ohio deserved its own place on television. The grant was $39,000 from the Ohio Board of Regents, along with $50,000 worth of black-and-white television equipment. The staff was one person: Cole herself.
She set up in a single room in the basement of Roberts Hall at the United Theological Seminary. On March 1, 1978, the station she had been building went live into cable television homes around Dayton. The organization was called Access-30-Dayton at the time, and it was, by most measures, improbable. Commercial television stations spent millions of dollars on facilities, staff, and equipment. Cole was working out of a seminary basement with gear that was modest by any broadcast standard.
What she built over the next thirteen years was not improbable at all. DATV, as it became known, grew into an award-winning public access station with a board of trustees drawn from across Dayton’s civic life, a growing base of community producers, and a culture that outlasted Cole’s tenure as founding executive director. In 1984, six years after the station went on the air, Roxie Cole received the Dirk Koning–George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication, one of the earliest years of the award.
When a successor executive director was hired decades later, he had once worked for Cole as an operations manager. He described her legacy plainly: her love and passion for DATV still lived in the hearts of the station’s members.
DATV celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2023. It buried a time capsule on its 25th birthday, to be opened in 2078. The station Roxie Cole started in a basement is planning for a hundred-year run.
That is what one person with a grant, a room, and a conviction can build when the conviction is the right one. In the words of the late Roxie Cole "We are the Community!"
Shared by Community Media Voices — The Record