By Greg Hoard, Photos by Ventre Photo Illustration

She was the queen of Rock N’ Roll in Cincinnati, the woman behind the misty, whispery voice that awakened the city each day and helped catapult WEBN to the zenith of FM radio.

Today, Robin Wood reigns over an entirely different realm, one filled with beauty, color, creativity and flowers – every where there are flowers, and the music in the background, well, it’s not Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers or AC/DC, it’s Chopin and Mozart. In her second career, Robin Wood is a picture of peace and contentment, trimming flowers, talking with clients and her designers, all the while offering a smile that comes from some deep store of satisfaction.

After 25 years in radio and television, she began Robin Wood Flowers at the kitchen table of her home in Mt. Lookout. That was in the fall of 2001. Last December, the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce named Robin Wood Flowers “Woman-Owned Business of the Year.”

She’s been featured by More Magazine and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She’s traveled a long way from “Frog Mountain” and “The Dawn Patrol,” but, then again, maybe not. “I always loved dirt,” she says.

When she was a little girl, she would go with her mother, Sally, to the rose garden at Ault Park. “We always went after dark,” Wood says. “She would take her scissors and snip a few roses, and I was always scared to death she would get caught and have to go to jail, and I would never see her again. Today, I view it as pruning.”

On weekends, Sally Wood would take Robin with her to Normale’s Greenhouse. “I loved it,” she says. “I would run up and down the aisles, looking at all the flowers and plants. I would just get lost in the aisles.”

Her nanny, Cordie, took her to farms in Kentucky to pick fruit. “Cordie was way into gardening. We would pick apples in the fall and peaches in the summer, and green beans,” Robin says. “Cordie was like my surrogate mom. She would take me to Findlay Market, when it was just Findlay Market, rows and rows of booths – just a wonderful place – as it is now.”

She never lost her love of flowers and gardening, life just took her in another direction. In 1968, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. “It was a pretty free-wheeling time,” she said, “and a lot was going on at Wisconsin. I really didn’t have my eye on a degree and there was no one to say, ‘Hey, you really need to focus.’”

She took classes in drama and creative writing. She delved – as so many did in the late 1960s – into philosophy. “I took art classes,” she says, “lots of art classes. I loved color and design and painting, but I realized I was not an artist and I didn’t want to teach art. Then, I thought, ‘Damn, what am I gonna do?’”

A few months later, she found herself back home in Cincinnati working at the check-in counter at Williams YMCA in East Walnut Hills. WEBN was five years old and was gaining more and more purchase on an audience that was ready for much more than Top-40 music offered on AM outlets. When an opening occurred in the traffic department (scheduling commercials), her father, Frank Wood, offered her the position. “He said, ‘Would you like to try this?’ My brother, ‘Bo’ said, ‘Wait, do you know how hard it is to fire a family member?’ Gee thanks, ‘Bo’.’ That’s how it started.”

About the time Robin was growing bored with commercial traffic, Shillito’s Department Stores wanted a female voice-over for their commercials. “And someone said, ‘Here, read this.’ I did and it got some attention,” she recalls. “Then others started asking me to do voice-over work.”

Next came work on the air, substituting for those who were on vacation. In 1975, Denton Marr, tired of getting up at 4 a.m., moved to the midday shift and Robin was given the morning show. “Today,” she says, “the morning show is everything, not back then. It was no big deal because FM radio was just coming into cars. It wasn’t universal equipment. Most of our listeners were at night, listening at home on their stereos. FM radio was not standard equipment in cars. I know! It sounds so stone-age at this point.”

With Craig Kopp handling the news and Rick Byrd doing sports and entertainment, Robin Wood worked the morning show for 10 years. When she wasn’t on the air, making personal appearances at every rock joint in the Tri-state area or doing commercials, she was at home taking shelter from the rollicking, no-holds-barred world of FM radio and Rock N’ Roll.

“I always had flowers on fire escapes or was plowing up back yards,” she said.

By 1985, FM radio was changing and so was Robin’s world. She was married and expecting her first child, Sadie. While Robin was headed toward maternity leave, Eddie Fingers was hired by WEBN. He was young, wild and unfettered. She was classic, beautiful and elusive. Everyone wanted to know Robin. They were an immediate hit. “The Dawn Patrol” was born and was instantly successful.

With Robin away and nudged by management, Fingers took the “Dawn Patrol” to new, loose ground. Little was off limits. When Robin returned, her view of the world had changed. She was a mother and a wife. “I was changing and so was radio,” she said. “In the beginning it was so creative…It was fun. It was cool. It was hip. It was unexpected. And it was a cultural thing, not just the music.

“Then, as it became more formulaic and more successful, it became a little smutty, more than a little smutty, and it wasn’t so much fun.”

Eighteen months after Sadie’s birth, her second daughter, Libby, arrived. Robin Wood was nearing 40. She cherished her time with her family and with her flowers. “I kind of became the foil for Eddie and Bob “The Producer” (Berry), the voice of reason to their outrageousness – the role playing thing, It was fine and it was amusing, but it just got a little less amusing. It was like, ‘Oh, wow! We have to step over the edge even more so.’ I wasn’t living that kind of life, and I didn’t feel like I fit the part.”

In 1994, she left WEBN and moved to The Point (now, Fox 92.5).  Then came a stint at WKRC-AM, where she was partnered with veteran broadcaster Jerry Thomas. It was oil and water – an impossible mix – and the least enjoyable time in her radio career.

She became ill and thought about quitting. But, she was under contract, she had two children in school and she was making good money. She was shackled by, “You know, the golden handcuffs.” So, she braced herself and went back to work. “I said, ‘Here I am. I’m not quitting. Move me where you want, but I’m not going away,’” she says.

She was miserable, thinking most of the time about here next landing strip, something that would make her happy.

After leaving WKRC radio, she spent three years at WKRC-TV “doing little quirky stories, feature stories and people stories. It was fun and the people were very good to me…Then, toward the end of my contract, they asked me if I was ready to become a real reporter. I said, ‘You mean like covering bank robberies and car chases?’ They said, ‘Exactly.’ I said, ‘Nothing could be farther from my personality. Uh, noooo!’ I said, ‘Bye!’ and I was so ready to go.”

She had worked in the media for 25 years. “It seemed like 200,” she says. But what was next? “I had never done anything except work in the media.” She was determined to do something she wanted to do.

“I had always wanted a big farm,” she said. “But I never got a big farm because I always had to work so early in the morning and I couldn’t do the traveling.” She thought about landscaping.

“I couldn’t be a landscaper,” she said. “It was a lot of work. It’s a lot or training. It’s a lot of schlepping. Then it just came to me. I think I’ll garden indoors and I was very determined.”

She took a course in floral arrangement at the Civic Gardens Center. She bought flowers and studied them. “I learned about them,” she said. “I started selling them at cost to my friends so I could have the leftovers.”

Her kitchen was festooned with flowers, bright displays and failed experiments. As she became more confident and creative, she started taking arrangements to businesses throughout the city as an introduction to her craft and the service she provided. “We still do that,” she says. “We wanted them to see what we do, that we were different from other flower shops.”

Nothing at Robin Wood Flowers is “off the rack,” or pre-designed. Her patrons suggest colors or a price range and leave the rest to the designers.

“I’m not sure exactly what we did in those first few years. It was kind of a blur,” she says. “We just kept plugging away, getting involved with it. If someone asked us to do something, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll do it. Garden clubs, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’ll do it.’ We just kept working. It was a lot of fun.’”

Six months after starting her business in her kitchen, she moved to her shop on Dana Avenue. This is the place where her staff happily cuts and designs each day’s work. This is the place where Handel, not Humble Pie, plays on the radio; where Lucy, the dog, comes to greet customers, and where Robin Wood goes at life – a second time around.

Every morning she rises early and goes to see the wholesalers on Dalton Street. “I love the hunting and the gathering, going to the wholesalers and picking out the day’s flowers, coming back here and saying, ‘Here’s our palette for the day,’” she says. “I don’t wish away the years I had in radio and TV. I think you learn a lot from even the bad experiences. You gain confidence from tough times. If you plow through them, you learn you can deal with anything.

“I am grateful for all that stuff. But I wish I could have had 10 more years of this, because I think I could have done so much more with it. I am very happy with it all. I make a living. I have fun everyday. My best friends work here. What more could you ask?”