Dr. Know is Jay Gilbert, weekday afternoon deejay on 92.5 FM The Fox. Submit your questions about the city’s peculiarities at drknow@cincinnati magazine.com
DR. KNOW
going cadence sometimes pronounced the station’s call letters as a word. It sounded nice. Maybe Mom and Dad’s decision was sealed during that effect-filled Peter Frampton guitar solo. Lemasters harbors no resentments over her unique first name, finding it to be “a good ice breaker,” though it occasionally requires corrections for those who call her Reba, Megan, or Webster. While living in Louisville, Webn seriously considered naming her newborn daughter after a radio station there but, upon finding the only pronounceable call letters to be WAKY, decided she “just couldn’t do that to her.” A personal note: The Doctor, having spent many years in the employ of WEBN (see our September 2017 issue), hereby declares that whimsical baby-naming does not qualify for even the Top 20 of loony listener behaviors.
Q+ A
You once wrote about the Chatfield Memorial, a small Walnut Hills park that deteriorated after the expansion of Columbia Parkway. Right at that corner, though, I see a boulder with a plaque on it. There’s no way to stop and read it, but could that be a surviving memorial to the Memorial? —STONED STOP
I know you have a background in radio, so please confirm my friend’s claim that a woman exists whose parents named her Webn, after Cincinnati radio station WEBN. If true, what has this person’s life been like with that burden, and just how stoned were these parents? —HOLLOWED BE THY NAME DEAR HOLLOWED:
Webn Lemasters (call her “Weebin”) was born in 1976 and now lives just a few hours from Cincinnati with her young daughter. She acknowledges that her parents were perhaps not entirely free of influential ingredients while filling out her birth certificate. They were fans of Ty Williams, WEBN’s overnight on-air personality, whose easy-
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DEAR STONED:
Your question recalls numerous past columns by the Doctor. In our August issue he bravely solved The Case of the Hard-toRead Plaque in Kenwood. He also, in June 2018, unearthed the secrets of the Chatfield Memorial in Walnut Hills. Your challenge inspires further fearlessness. To get a good look at that boulder at the foot of Kemper Lane, one must park quite a distance away and walk back to it. Or, we suppose, one might park directly in front of it illegally (just mentioning that possibility). We did not find a remaining memento of the Chatfield Memorial. Instead, this is yet another tribute to yet another “beautiful pleasure ground” that vanished after Columbia Parkway became all Way and no Park. This plaque was dedicated ILLUSTR ATIO N S BY L A R S LEE TA RU
