Roger learned enough about his father’s blue-collar struggles to know he wanted no part of them. “All I wanted to do was to make enough money, so I’d never have to live the life my father lived,” he once said. Roger also vowed never to let others dominate him. After landing a job on a highway crew digging ditches along Ohio Route 45 at the age of seventeen, Roger had his first try on the jackhammer. “He told me to put it against my belly and just pull the trigger,” he recalled of the foreman. The jackhammer lurched, catapulting him onto his back. He lay in the mud, dazed. He wanted to attack the man, but recognized that “he’d kill me if I tried anything.”
“Why’d you do that?” Roger yelled at him. He remembered the response for many years.
“I ain’t your mama, boy,” the man said.
One day, in the spring of Roger’s senior year of high school, his father pulled him aside. “Where are you going?” he asked. Roger thought it was a strange question. He was sitting in the living room, not going anywhere. “You can’t live here. You’re eighteen. You’re on your own. You have to make a life now.… If you get somebody pregnant, don’t bring them home. I’m not paying for it.”
Around this time, Roger had received an acceptance letter from Ohio University in Athens. He wanted to go, but there were no prospects for a scholarship, as his brother had to Oberlin. His father said he was not prepared to pay for his education. He suggested he join the military or get a job at Packard.
“I can put your name up at the shop, try to get you a job.”
Roger was furious and did not speak to his dad for two months, but, looking back, Roger called it “the best thing he ever did for me.”
Perhaps to spite his father, Roger enrolled in college. He may have been ambivalent about academics, but he would never allow himself to end up like his father.
Later that summer, Roger arrived in Athens, a small city tucked into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, for the beginning of his freshman year. The campus, with its stately redbrick buildings and manicured quads overlooking the Hocking River, a tributary of the Ohio, had the pastoral feel of an East Coast college. “It felt like a picture-perfect postcard of the Eisenhower years. You felt like there was a fort around the city,” Arthur Nolletti, a classmate, recalled. Students went for hayrides in the fall and caroled at Christmas.
The Cold War was a campus preoccupation, while civil rights were viewed skeptically. During Ailes’s sophomore year, the OU Post criticized a civil rights march down College Street, in which a mere eighty people participated. “If you are scared of the truth, don’t read this editorial!” it read. “Equality is not a one-way proposition. With equality goes responsibility and obligation. There are negroes who have shown that they are not ready to accept this obligation.… Just remember one thing White Man—you’re the minority in this here bigoted world of ours. And you’re becoming a smaller minority with the passing of each day.”
The handbook distributed to Roger’s class encouraged students to conform to social convention. “The ‘big man on campus’ will want a dark suit and sport coats,” the manual stated. “The co-ed will want sweaters and skirts, bobby sox and saddles, and Sunday ensembles.” The guiding principle was modesty. “Individualism is encouraged at OU, so long as it is within University rules,” it stated. “Put your best foot forward at OU. Leave your family skeletons in the closet.” A caption in the 1959 yearbook below a photo of a boy and girl standing in a bowling lane noted, “he instructs and she listens.” In December 1959, a group of three hundred students protested against the Beats.
When Ailes arrived on campus, he did not know what he wanted to study, but he was sure about one thing. He wanted to join the military, just as Doug Webster, his best friend from Warren, had done. Roger signed up for the Air Force ROTC and stayed with the program for two years, but his health was an issue. “What I really wanted to do was fly fighter planes.… But my eyesight and other physical problems made the government in their wisdom not allow me to have an expensive aircraft,” he later said. In a certain sense, the closest he came was playing the bossy Private Irwin Blanchard in the university’s stage production of No Time for Sergeants.
Just as in high school, Ailes had little interest in classes. “I was hammered all the time,” he recalled. “I skipped a lot of classes, finally got an F. The dean brought me in, said ‘We have to keep you because it’s a state school, but we only have to keep you one more semester.’ ” But he found new direction when, on a lark, he applied for an on-air position at WOUB, the college radio station, during his freshman year. At the time, Ohio University was a pioneer in college broadcasting, one of only a handful of colleges in the country with a student-run radio and television station. Ailes’s starting position was reading news headlines on a program called Radio Digest. He then hosted the Yawn Patrol, a morning variety show, with his friend Don Hylkema. Vincent Jukes, a stout, imperious man who ran the radio department, imposed rigid rules on his young broadcasters, insisting he approve all music played on air. Rock and roll records were expressly forbidden, but Ailes proved adept at skirting Jukes’s authority. One day, he concocted a plan with Hylkema to slip a Bobby Darin record by him. “We took the record to him to get it okayed,” Hylkema recalled. “The two of us talked and distracted him through the whole thing.”
With his acting experience, Ailes was a natural broadcaster. Archie Greer, the thirty-seven-year-old faculty adviser for the station, spotted his talent. Unlike Jukes, Greer had a friendly disposition and was an enthusiastic mentor. “Archie was probably the first person to have confidence in me and say, ‘You can do things,’ ” Ailes said. By the end of his sophomore year, Greer promoted Ailes to station manager, a position normally assigned to seniors. Ailes was soon selected to join the Alpha Epsilon Rho radio and television society for his performance in broadcasting. Even as an underclassman, Ailes seemed older and more imposing than the other students. “We were sort of afraid of him, because he was the boss,” Mike Adams, who entered OU in 1960, recalled.
The radio studio became Ailes’s home. To concentrate on broadcasting, Ailes decided to major in fine arts. When school was in session, he never seemed to leave the basement of the speech building, except to grab a bite to eat at Blackmore’s up the street. He was often the first person to arrive at 6:00 a.m. to turn on the transmitter. During one summer, instead of going home, he took a job earning $1.10 an hour at the Athens commercial station WATH.
Despite the hours he spent in the tight-knit radio community, Ailes was an elusive figure. Without telling his classmates, he moonlighted as a rock and roll DJ under the pseudonym Dick Summers at WMPO, a radio station twenty-five miles south in Middleport, Ohio. “He didn’t let anyone get close to him,” Don Hylkema recalled. “He never talked about himself as an individual or things he felt or thought about. It was strange.… Everyone knew Roger, but they didn’t know anything about him.” His political convictions, if he had them, were unclear, even as he led the station during the 1960 election cycle. “He did not display any sign of extreme right-wing politics,” Don Swaim, the WOUB special events director, recalled. Ailes refrained from discussing his hemophilia with most people. “I remember when he told me,” said classmate Bill Klokow. “We were pulling music in the library. He said it was serious. At that time, he didn’t know how long he was going to live.”
Ailes’s temper flared when he did not get what he wanted. “Control was extremely important to him,” Hylkema recalled. Robert Jr. linked this trait to his medical condition. “The thing is about hemophiliacs, they’re risk takers,” he said. “They tend to deny their illness. They don’t want to be special. They fight against it, and here’s the thing: they become aggressive in their behavior.”