March 21, 1952

[Floyd R. Turbo]

As night fell on Friday, March 21, 1952, a large crowd gathered in anticipation outside the Cleveland Arena, spilling out onto Euclid Avenue. It was hours before the event that local disc jockey Alan Freed had been touting on the radio for weeks, and those gathered were getting more unruly by the second. Teenagers and young adults jostled for position for a chance to get inside the arena and out on the dance floor.

There had been no advance notice of the event in any of the city’s three newspapers, except for a small item in The Plain Dealer. The musical acts to perform at the dance — a lineup that included Varetta Dillard, The Dominoes and Paul Williams — weren’t even widely known at the time. But somewhere along the way, Freed’s imaginatively titled Moondog Coronation Ball had tapped into something that even he couldn’t contain.

The man formerly known as Albert Freed had first become interested in radio a little more than a decade earlier, while attending Ohio State University in the early 1940s. Once he saw the radio station on campus, “that was it,” he later recalled in a 1957 interview with Pageant Magazine, after he had become one of the most famous disc jockeys in America. “I was gone.”

After growing up in Salem, Ohio, Freed started out working for WKST, a radio station across the state line in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where he did a little bit of everything. From there, he went to WKBN in Youngstown, where he did news and sports. He stayed in Youngstown for a couple years before ending up at WAKR in Akron, which afforded him his first opportunity as a disc jockey.

https://www.ohiomagazine.com/ohio-life/article/cleveland-alan-freed-and-the-world-s-first-rock-concert