This Voice of America microphone broadcast from Saigon until it fell in 1975.

VOA Museum of Broadcasting

West Chester, Ohio

The Voice of America (VOA) was (and is) a Washington-headquartered network of pro-USA news and entertainment. It was launched during World War II as a way to counter radio propaganda from Hitler.

The VOA Station in Ohio was built to be indestructible.

To send broadcasts all the way to Germany in the 1940s, America needed radio equipment so powerful that it didn't yet exist. There was only one guy who could build it, an industrialist and engineer named Powel Crosley Jr. He lived just outside of Cincinnati, and that's why the VOA's Bethany Relay Station was built there, and why it's now the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting.

"This place was built to take a direct hit from a bomb," said Jack Dominic, the museum's executive director. The industrial building, decommissioned in 1994, had no heat, which would have been superfluous because its interior was baked by its six quarter-million-watt VOA radio transmitters. Designed to be indestructible, the Station easily survived into the 21st century, but its interior 18-inch-thick blast-proof concrete walls made it hard to modify into a civilian-friendly attraction. The work was only completed in January 2025.

Model of the Station's square-mile antenna farm.

The museum is run by volunteers and has no formal connection to the current federal government, which leaves it refreshingly free to cover a range of topics. Chief among them, of course, is its history with the VOA. One of the first exhibits is a Volksempfanger radio from Nazi Germany, designed to receive only pro-Hitler news. Next to it as an "Under-the-Blanket" radio, modified during the Cold War to secretly pick up VOA broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain. Visitors can tour the old VOA operations center (which looks like Mission Control from the NASA moon missions); ponder a model of the Station's square-mile antenna farm; and get a close look at some of the high-voltage hardware that baked Bethany Relay Station technicians in summertime heat year-round.

Voice of America operations center was state-of-the-art in the 1960s.

The VOA was created to counter the Nazi Volksempfanger radio.

Visits are self-guided, but the museum also offers docent-led tours that provide more information. Jack, for example, dismissed the story that birds would explode if they landing on the Station's array of towers and wires, but confirmed that certain car models would "just stop working" if they drove too near to the Station, and that neighborhood home telephones would sometimes erupt in bursts of German or Spanish from VOA broadcasts.

Two rooms in the museum are devoted to the undeservedly forgotten Powel Crosley Jr. His consumer products, some not as noble as his work for the VOA, were diverse and weird. Examples on display include the Icyball, a strange-looking contraption that was sold as a refrigerator with no electricity or moving parts; the Hot Shot, America's first compact sports car; the Read-O, a 1930s machine that could deliver printed news via radio; and the X-er-vac, a quack medical device that Crosley claimed could cure baldness (Crosley was himself mostly bald).

Powel Crosley Jr's Hot Shot, America's first compact sports car.

"It's a suction pump," said Jack of the X-er-vac. "You clamped a helmet with a seal onto your head, and it tried to suck hair up out of your scalp."

Yet another section of the museum is devoted to local television luminaries such as Ruth Lyons, "Cincinnati's First Lady of Broadcasting," and Larry Smith, host of Cartoon Club, with his puppets and miniature castle. There's also a working ham radio station, and a recreated vintage sound effects studio where visitors can operate the simple mechanical gadgets that made believable noises on 1940s radio such as rumbling thunder, creaking doors, and puffing locomotives.

The Crosley Icyball refrigerator needed no electricity.

One unusual aspect of working at the VOA Museum, said Jack, is that tourists sometimes burst into tears. "It happens almost every week; it gets very emotional," said Jack of the crying visitors, who had lived in countries where the Voice of America was their window to the outside world. "They'll say, 'When I was listening in secret in grandma's attic, this is the place where it came from.'"