WHAS Crusade for Children

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The WHAS Crusade for Children is an annual telethon broadcast by WHAS-TV and WHAS (AM) Radio in Louisville, Kentucky. The telethon benefits a wide range of children's charities throughout Kentucky and southern Indiana.

The Crusade was begun in 1954, in large part through the efforts of Barry Bingham Sr., the patriarch of the family that owned the stations and The Courier-Journal newspaper together. (WHAS-TV is currently under the ownership of Tegna, Inc.—spun off in 2015 from Gannett Company, which still owns the Courier-Journal — while WHAS Radio is now owned by iHeartMedia) The first telethon was telecast from the Memorial Auditorium, and featured actor Pat O'Brien as the celebrity guest. Contributions on the first telethon totaled more than $156,000.

The 2022 telethon, the 69th of the series, was broadcast on June 5-6 and raised $5,133,684.69, up slightly from the 2021 telethon. ^[1]

The total does not include bequests, which go into a special endowment set up in 2004 that is used to pay the expenses of the Crusade organization so that 100 percent of all monies collected by the public go directly to children's special needs, a practice that the Crusade promotes in many of its promotions. The record tote board total for the Crusade, not including bequests, was more than $6 million (2004, the 50th edition).

The Crusade has become a major local institution. For months before the telethon broadcast each June, grass-roots collection efforts are held throughout the area—from "pickle jars" at restaurants, to bingo games, to benefit concerts and hundreds of similar events.

In the early days of television, local telethons were quite common. In recent years, most local telethons gave way to well-produced national telethons such as the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, but many of those have since fallen by the wayside while the Crusade rolls on. The Crusade for Children may be an anachronism, but a hugely successful one. It is by far the most successful local telethon in America, by almost any measure, though its outreach has grown well past the Louisville metro area. It is second in longevity only to a local telethon in Green Bay, Wisconsin on WBAY-TV that benefits those with cerebral palsy; that telethon was first produced in March 1954, seven months before the first Crusade for Children.

The Crusade broadcast is normally held on the first weekend of June each year, beginning on Saturday afternoon and ending sometime on Sunday night (in past years, it occasionally even into the wee hours of Monday). In 2020, the Crusade was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic to August 8–9, with most of the broadcast done in large or outdoor venues to facilitate social distancing. The telethon resumed its traditional dates in 2021.^[1]