Bloomington-Normal’s first female disc jockey
With almost no public notice until a delayed obituary appeared, Ann Holub died in Bloomington on March 8, 2023. To Baby Boomers who wore braces on their teeth, the Holub name was familiar. Ann’s father, Dr. John Holub, was one of the Twin Cities’ best known dentists and orthodontists in the fifties and sixties.
The Holub family – Dr. John, wife Vivian, and daughters Ann and Ruth, lived in Bloomington’s South Hill neighborhood at 1109 South Main Street. By today’s standards it would be considered an unpretentious location for a dentist to live. Joan Ann Holub was a 1955 graduate of University High School but she always used her middle name, not her first.
She attended college at Lindenwood in St. Louis, Illinois Wesleyan University and Northwestern University at Evanston. Her first profession was medical technology, a line of work she eventually abandoned for the less-financially secure jobs offered by radio stations,
A medical technologist is often the person called on to draw patients’ blood in a doctor’s office, clinic or hospital, and later to perform the lab work in search of signs of poor health. They are smart people and the job requires training and state certification.
But Ann had always felt the call of the microphone and sought to be a journalist. So she made a career change, went to broadcasting school and found herself on the radio at WEIC in Charleston.
The Charleston job lasted until a position opened at WJBC in Bloomington in 1972. When she was hired there, she made history as the first female disc jockey in the Twin Cities. Along with playing records, she also wrote and delivered news on the air. One of the men on the air staff objected to women reading the sportscasts, but she sometimes found a way to work in a mention of the Chicago Cubs.
“Ann was like more than a few radio people,” recalls former WJBC morning personality and co-worker Don Munson in a recent email: “bubbly on the air, reserved, quiet and a bit introverted off the air… she produced a friendly upbeat music show, clearly loving the 45’s she was spinning.”
In later years she talked with your editor of the fun she had broadcasting in her own home town. But eventually she packed her professional bags and took a job at WIRL Radio in Peoria. It was a Top 40 format station in the seventies, and Ann is still remembered as one of the air staff in a Wikipedia article. Of the nineteen WIRL announcers mentioned, Ann Holub stands out as the only woman.
In time, Ann returned home and sold real estate for several years. She also emerged as a great golfer but not as good, she would say, as her mother Vivian. However during the golf season, both Ann and Vivian would appear at or near the top of the leader boards of local women’s golf tournaments.
Ann beat cancer in the early nineties, but the treatment damaged her kidneys and her health began a slow decline. She began dialysis in November of 2022 but in the end she died of COVID, according to her obituary. She was 86 years old.
The Holub family is buried together at Park Hill Cemetery: Dr. John, with Vivian, Ann, and her sister Ruth (also a COVID victim). Ann Holub’s last putt is long since sunk, and her last real estate deal long since closed. Half a century after she first hit local airwaves, Don Munson writes: “She had voice, enthusiasm and timing to land a job in a larger market than B-N but she never seemed to aspire to that. We were glad to have her on JBC in the 1970s!”
While Ann Holub was a trailblazer, at least one notable woman held sway at WJBC a decade earlier. Flo Armstrong co-hosted a daily one-hour program with newcomer Lanny Larason. They focused on talk and interviews but they weren’t disc jockeys. Larason eventually went to a station in Boston and Mrs. Armstrong later hosted a show on the old WIOK, which later became WAKC before it went off the air for good.