COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – “Ten! … Nine! … Eight!”
The date was July 3, and NBC4 – or WCMH, as it was primarily known at the time – was live on air at the 1983 Red, White & BOOM! But this night wasn’t just about fireworks, it was about a different way the sky would be lit up and the way it helped to show how Columbus’ Downtown skyline could glow in the generations to come.
News Anchor Doug Adair was there, joined for the first time on WCMH by his co-anchor and wife, Mona Scott. Both had come to Columbus that year from Cleveland, where Adair was impressed with how the Terminal Tower had been lit. And he thought Columbus’ LeVeque Tower should appear the same. He mentioned it during Newswatch 4. He went and spoke to Katherine LeVeque, the tower’s owner. Plans were put in motion, LeVeque signed off on a one-night promotion, and the first of two weird yet wonderful connections that decade between the skyscraper and WCMH coalesced on the eve of Independence Day.
“I was talking with some people last spring, and I happened to mention that you have a building here that looks very much like the Terminal Tower. When it was lighted at night a few years ago, it changed the whole feeling about downtown,” Adair told Columbus Monthly magazine. “So I thought, ‘Why not do that here?’”
And what better time than when more people are Downtown than any other night of the year. Red, White & BOOM! started in 1981, and just two years later, it was believed some 350,000 had gathered along the banks of the Scioto River for food, live music from the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and, of course, fireworks. With Adair and Scott joined on stage by LeVeque herself, the countdown was on, not for the fireworks to start, but for the culmination of “Light Up the LeVeque.”
“Seven! … Six! … Five!”
Today, when people look up at the LeVeque after dark, they see a tower arrayed in lights that were put in place within the past decade. An all-LED display, they were part of a project overseen by architect Sam Rosenthal of Schooley Caldwell. He said the lights are controlled by a basement computer that sends signals to receivers on the 34th, 38th, 39th and 42nd floors and can make the lights appear in multiple color combinations. He can change them on his phone. They usually shine a warm white but can be altered for special occasions: pink in May for the Komen Race for the Cure, rainbow lighting in June for Pride Month and – for Red, White & BOOM! and throughout July – red, white and blue. The current lights replaced a 1989 installation.
“Prior to installing the LED lights, the tower lights were changed only monthly due to the cost and manual labor involved,” said Lea Smith of Lawyers Development Corp., who works with Rosenthal and the LeVeque’s current consortium of owners. “We purchased special order gels (plastic film sheets) that were manually attached to each exterior light fixture that generally took up to two days to apply.
“Now, we can change them in minutes to light for just an hour – or minute, really.”
That previous generation of lighting featured high-pressure sodium bulbs. Tinting them required working through small service doors more than 30 stories above the intersection of Broad and Front streets. But it was work you could occasionally see, and not just for light gels. In 1987, for example, there was the time that WCMH put a giant inflatable gorilla on the outside of the LeVeque.
“Four! … Thr–”
OK, let’s pause the countdown for a moment. We have to talk about the Rax gorilla.
Measuring 70 feet tall and weighing 2,900 pounds, it was the other big connection in the 1980s between WCMH and the LeVeque Tower. Undoubtedly, it was designed to make people wonder if what they were seeing was real. In Columbus, it was.
The gorilla was brought to town before a WCMH airing of the 1954 movie “Gorilla at Large,” a promotion that came from the people at Rax restaurants. Rax had Ohio roots, and its first modern incarnation, with its signature roast beef sandwiches, opened in Columbus in 1977. By the time of the chain’s peak in the mid-’80s, there were 500 locations in 38 states. Rax sponsored a five-city tour of the inflatable gorilla (which at one time had perched on New York’s Empire State Building, just like King Kong), with the other stops in Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Cincinnati. The movie featured future Perry Mason actor Raymond Burr, future Mrs. Robinson actor Anne Bancroft and, in a coincidence with the name of the future Columbus restaurateur, lead actor Cameron Mitchell. It was an early attempt at 3-D movie-making, and if you wanted glasses to watch the movie on your home console television, you had to get them at a Rax.
The inflatable was bunched together, bound in ropes and brought by elevator to the 33rd floor of the LeVeque. It was then shoved out onto a ledge and the head hoisted up to the 46th floor by a winch. The idea was to inflate the gorilla the morning of Monday, Nov. 23 ahead of the airing that Friday, the night after Thanksgiving. But the weather had other ideas, and the gorilla was left draped over the exterior of the tower all day as high winds prevented its inflation. But early on Tuesday, the gorilla came to life, emblazoned with the logos of Channel 4 and Rax. You could see it everywhere. It was easy to, because it was daylight.
“Three! … Two! … One!”
The symphony provided the drumroll. The crowd provided the countdown. The energy was everywhere.
But the electricity was not. The LeVeque remained dark.
“It may take a couple of minutes,” Adair said over nervous applause and a concluding fanfare from the orchestra. “Some of these lights are of a different nature, and they have to warm up. … C’mon. C’mon, lights.”
Spotlights began sweeping the tower from street level, prompting more applause.
“They’ll get better as the night goes on,” Adair said.
But they never really did. The tower lights came on after several minutes. Rosenthal said that’s typical of high pressure sodium bulbs. Regarding the 1989 lighting he replaced, he said, “It took about 5-10 minutes to be full-on, but since the lights came on around sunset, it wasn't too apparent, and they were full strength by the time it was dark.” In other words, perhaps a countdown wasn’t the way to go. As for Adair after his monthslong campaign, it’s hard to tell how much the moment left him feeling like zero. He died in 2019 at age 89. Looking back later in 1983, he told Columbus Monthly, “The lights at the top came on fine, but there were floodlights that were supposed to come on, too. And they didn't. … Needless to say, the lighting company did not get paid.” Yet the moment never dimmed his prospects professionally. With Scott now beside him on the anchor desk, they soared to becoming the top news team in Columbus.
Although the LeVeque remains part of NBC4’s coverage every year of Red, White & BOOM!, it’s possible the two were never connected quite as closely in the collective Columbus memory as those two times that decade: the lights that never turned on, the gorilla that stopped a city cold. And like the latter promotion, which came together the day after it was originally scheduled, lights eventually came to the LeVeque Tower, too. By 1989, with newer Downtown towers lighting up at night, Katherine LeVeque joined in, and that August, the switch was flipped on the installation that stayed in place until Rosenthal oversaw his 21st-century upgrade. Look up tonight, and you can see it still.
For Adair, LeVeque and for everyone in Columbus, in the end, they all saw the lights.
