From: Beaver_Fever@live.com   
      
   from an email I received:   
      
      
   Remembering Ruth Seymour, KCRW Founder and Public Radio Pioneer   
      
   KCRW founder Ruth Seymour died on Friday, Dec. 22, 2023 at the age of 88.   
      
   My first paid role at KCRW was as Ruth’s assistant. Soon after, Ruth   
   elevated me to Assistant General Manager and I worked closely with her for   
   over 16 years. There wasn’t a decision, thought, or argument that she   
   didn’t share with me. She didn’t    
   realize it at the time but she gave me a front-row seat into the work of a   
   true original.   
      
   It’s difficult to quantify how much of a pioneer Ruth Seymour was in her   
   life. Expressed through the platform of KCRW, Ruth made an enormous impact on   
   Los Angeles through her singular drive for KCRW to “be important.â€�   
      
   She did nothing conventionally and nothing she created was a reaction to   
   anything. She created KCRW by the sheer force of her intellect and interest.   
   It was not her interest to gain the most listeners, nor to win any awards,   
   which she didn’t care about,   
    but to be an intellectual force for arts, culture, and smart ideas. She   
   wanted to start the conversation, not just contribute to it.   
      
   Friend to poets like Allen Ginsberg and artists like Leonard Cohen, Ruth was   
   always true to art. She had the highest intellectual standards which is why   
   KCRW aired 10-hour radio dramas like Babbitt and Ulysses. She created Jewish   
   Short Stories From    
   Eastern Europe and Beyond in two audio collections that featured contemporary   
   actors reading the work of Jewish authors like Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth,   
   and Isaac Bashevis Singer. KCRW sold more of those collections than anything   
   else in our history.   
      
   Ruth embodied the concept of being “culturally Jewish.â€� She was not   
   religious, but her devotion to Yiddishkeit could be heard every Hannukah for   
   28 years with a three-hour radio program she hosted called Philosophers,   
   Fiddlers and Fools. She called    
   it the “2nd Avenue Hit Paradeâ€� which included the songs she heard growing   
   up amongst Russian and Polish immigrants in her neighborhood in the Bronx.    
      
   She said it best, “I wanted to do this program as an act of love and   
   respect, an homage to a culture and its people—my people—to their   
   indomitable spirit, their irrepressible humor and inventiveness, their   
   capacity for wonder, endurance and faith.†  
   �   
      
   In fact, she said everything best. Never one to prepare for a speech or for a   
   live radio interview, yet able to ask the right question and turn the poignant   
   phrase, it was clear that Ruth was at an intellectual level above so many.  No   
   one could beat    
   Ruth at an argument.    
      
   She described her family this way: “My parents had come from different parts   
   of Eastern Europe, before they were 20. They met at New York's New School for   
   Social Research, which offered college-level courses to new immigrants. They   
   read American    
   literature and history; they went to lectures and concerts. They attended   
   school at night; by day they worked with their hands. They were part of a   
   dynamic working class. Their friends engaged in lively political debates   
   around our kitchen table.â€�    
      
   This argumentative discourse of her youth compelled her to never be silenced   
   and never back down. Outspoken and fearless women leaders were rare in the   
   â€˜60s, and ‘70s — in fact, women couldn’t get credit cards apart from   
   their husbands until 1974    
   â€” which is why her accomplishments are so remarkable.     
      
   When she came to KCRW in 1977, she found herself building the station in a   
   junior high classroom right off the playground. After the passing of Prop 13,   
   the landmark California proposition that limited property taxes, KCRW was   
   forced to find its own    
   funding. She held KCRW’s first fund drives and made a deal with the City of   
   Santa Monica to broadcast its City Council meetings in exchange for a grant.   
   Soon after, our crafty broadcast engineer found a way to extend our signal   
   past Robertson Blvd. Now    
   KCRW could be heard across Los Angeles. Those actions saved the station   
   financially and allowed it to grow and thrive.   
      
   There were no equals to KCRW in the public radio system. Her on-air schedule   
   consisted of news from NPR followed by three hours of contemporary music (not   
   classical, jazz, or folk like most public stations). She’d go to a newsstand   
   every day and read    
   articles from the New York Times, word for word, on the air at noon because   
   Angelenos couldn’t easily get that paper. She discovered people who matched   
   her intellect at dinners or parties and gave them on air shows on journalism,   
   literature, film, art,    
   theater, travel, dance, or music.    
      
   She knew how to build a brand. In fact, she chose every t-shirt design. They   
   were almost always close replicas of Picasso, Matisse, or Russian futurist   
   posters.    
      
   Los Angeles had a reputation at that time for being the land of hippies and   
   frivolous entertainment. KCRW was the beacon for all things smart, important,   
   and rigorous. If you had ideas that pushed the discourse of Los Angeles or the   
   country, you would    
   end up on KCRW.   
      
   KCRW and NPR grew up together and Ruth knew that public radio stations were   
   the owners of the national organization. She was a champion of journalism and   
   NPR. When NPR nearly went bankrupt in 1983, Ruth rallied other public radio   
   stations to raise funds    
   to save the network.   
      
   She was fiercely outspoken in the public radio system and while never on the   
   board of NPR, had outsized influence on its direction and programming choices.   
   She is famously known for being the first station outside of Chicago to take   
   Ira Glass’ This    
   American Life, after urging him to change his original name of the show to   
   something more appealing.    
      
   The attribute I admired the most about Ruth was her inability to let others   
   create doubt in herself. She operated as if she didn’t care what anyone else   
   thought and her decisions and ideas were pure because of it. She would   
   identify a program’s    
   faults almost instantly and cancel or change it with speed. She always knew   
   she was right. And that kind of courage only comes from a leader who knows she   
   knows.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)