WHAS Crusade for Children

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 2016 telethon, the 63rd of the series, raised $5,465,933.47 as the broadcast went off the air Sunday evening. 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. The record tote board total for the Crusade, not including bequests, was more than $6 million (2004, the 50th edition). Since its founding, the Crusade has raised more than $160 million for local children's special needs.

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.

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