103.9 FM WDKX
Rochester, NY
Your #1 Radio for R&B
On air:
Afternoon Drive with
Atu
Listen Online
103.9 WDKX Live Stream
REQUEST A SONG!
Request A Song
Ragan Henry, a Harvard-trained lawyer who built a media empire when it was not fashionable for blacks to own media outlets, has died at age 74. His July 26 death after a long illness went unreported until recent days when friends received a card from his family, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer today (Aug. 8).
There was no funeral, no formal obituary, no announcement. That was the way Ragan A. Henry operated, always quietly, without fanfare, with no attention for himself. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper, he managed to get an Ivy League education and became the first black person to own a network-affiliated television station in America when he bought WHEC in Rochester, N.Y.
In the early 1970s, Henry, along with some partners bought their first radio station -- WAOK-AM in Atlanta and by 1980, owned radio nine stations under the umbrella U.S. Radio. By 1990, Henry was a minority partner in Sheridan Broadcasting and his company owned more than 60 radio stations.
In 1987, U.S. Radio paid a then-whopping $7 million for WXTR-FM, a signal-challenged oldies station planted in the cornfields of Charles County, Md., but targeting Washington, D.C.'s lucrative baby boomer audience. Henry, known for his love of doing a deal, had a reputation for being a tough negotiator but $7 million still seemed like lots of
money for a move-in signal. Just a handful of years before, veteran D.C. broadcasters Bill and Sue Dalton had paid about $1 million for the station and slowly turned it into a cash cow.
Henry was an unknown entity to the market. Dozens of calls to him from The Washington Post went unanswered -- he did not want any attention, he later told a reporter. But he was a polite, even a delightful gentleman, who not only kept the station alive but made it thrive. He sold XTRA104 several years later to the Carlyle Group, a defense contractor
branching out to media ownership, for a stunning $14 million.
Henry, said to be one of the Philadelphia-area's richest African Americans, was generous and was known for his charitable fundraising and philanthropic efforts. The University of Maryland's Library of American Broadcasting named Ragan Henry one of the "First Fifty Giants
of Broadcasting," an honor he shared with such stars as Jack Benny, Bill Cosby, Edward R. Murrow, William S. Paley, and David Sarnoff.
