Ruth Seymour, the hard-driving broadcast pioneer who remodeled KCRW right into a public radio powerhouse throughout her 32-year run at what was a sleepy Santa Monica-based station, died Friday. She was 88.
Seymour died after a protracted sickness at her residence in Santa Monica, former KCRW producer/publicity director Sarah Spitz introduced.
The Bronx-born Seymour joined the FM station in 1977 as a marketing consultant and have become common supervisor a couple of months later. Her mission assertion for KCRW was “to matter,” and she or he constructed it to be “singular, idiosyncratic, daring, impartial, sensible and compelling” — six phrases she employed again and again in her fundraising letters and on-air subscription drives.
Throughout her tenure, KCRW turned the West Coast flagship station for Nationwide Public Radio and launched a mixture of information, discuss, music, present affairs and cultural programming that included the signature music present Morning Turns into Eclectic; Which Means L.A.?, hosted by Warren Olney within the wake of the 1992 L.A. riots; Le Present, hosted by Harry Shearer; the political roundtable Left, Proper and Middle; To the Level; and The Politics of Tradition.
“I consider we catch numerous listeners unexpectedly,” she advised the Los Angeles Instances in a 1982 interview. “They tune in for one factor, simply depart the radio on, after which discover themselves wrapped up in one thing they didn’t anticipate.”
By means of the web and fashionable podcasts like The Enterprise, hosted since 2009 by The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters, KCRW gained a powerful nationwide profile and popularity earlier than she retired in February 2010 and was succeeded by her onetime assistant, Jennifer Ferro, now station president.
“Ruth was singular in each approach. She had a robust imaginative and prescient that by no means wavered. There was a spirit in Ruth that nobody else has,” Ferro stated in a press release. “She didn’t simply save NPR or create a brand new format — Ruth took possibilities and made selections as a result of she knew they have been proper. She trusted her intestine. She broke guidelines and pursued excellence in methods that may’t simply be defined. She was a drive of nature.
“Ruth’s legacy lives on at KCRW. She conjures up us to be unique, to host the neatest individuals, probably the most inventive artists and to speak to our viewers with the utmost respect for his or her mind.”
The older of two sisters, Ruth Epstein grew up throughout the road from the Bronx Zoo. Her father was a furrier and her mom a garment employee, and the household didn’t have a phone till she was 15.
She attended Sholem Aleichem People College along with public college after which Metropolis School of New York, the place she studied one-on-one with the famend Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich.
Seymour got here to Los Angeles in 1961 to accompany her husband, the poet Jack Hirschman, who had landed a educating job at UCLA after a stint at Dartmouth College, and she or he was employed because the drama and literary critic on the FM station KPFK. There, she interviewed the likes of Andy Warhol and Anne Sexton.
After freelancing in Europe for station mum or dad Pacifica Radio, she returned to KPFK to function program director in 1971, and she or he produced a star forged studying of chosen scenes from the Watergate tapes with Shearer, Rob Reiner and, as President Nixon, Christopher Visitor.
Nonetheless, she was fired in 1976, a few years after the FBI had raided the station in search of a cassette from Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Military that KPFK had placed on the air.
When Seymour arrived at KCRW, it was owned by the Santa Monica College District, had simply 5 workers and was working out of two transformed school rooms on a playground at John Adams Junior Excessive College.
Seymour changed the oldest transmitter west of the Mississippi with a brand new one in 1979. Additionally that yr, she ran NPR’s new two-hour Morning Version program thrice every weekday beginning at 3 a.m. in a bid to outmaneuver L.A.’s then-leading public station, KUSC. “That approach no one was going to have [the programs] after I didn’t have them,” she stated.
She let Shearer do just about something he wished on his weekly one-hour program.
“Ruth was a towering determine in public radio, embracing a breadth of material and types that, frankly, doesn’t appear potential anymore,” he stated in a press release. “She imagined a listener who was endlessly curious, open to a variety of opinions and music, and labored tirelessly to fulfill that listener. There is not going to be one like her once more.”
Stated Seymour in 1987: “Our viewers at all times understood what we have been attempting to do. From the very starting, we have been thought to be barely demented. Not precisely irresponsible however adventurous, attention-grabbing. And idealistic.”
She would get the station a brand new residence within the basement of the coed actions constructing at Santa Monica School, which licenses KCRW, in 1984. She additionally advocated for passage of a 2008 municipal bond that constructed the station’s first stand-alone constructing, now situated on the campus of SMC’s Middle for Media and Design.
In 1996, Seymour made KCRW the primary station to hold Ira Glass’ This American Life outdoors of its residence base, Chicago’s WBEZ. She additionally did interviews, together with one with poet Allen Ginsberg in 1985.
“My favourite psychological picture of Ruth was throughout the first warfare in Iraq,” NPR particular correspondent Susan Stamberg recalled. “She placed on a radiothon to boost cash to ship NPR correspondents to cowl it (the good Anne Garrels and others). And to make her on-air pitches, she wore camouflage and fight boots! She knew it will be warfare to boost the funds, and she or he dressed for the problem. I cherished and admired her enormously and located her to be a terrific instructor and inspirer.”
The Instances wrote in 1995 that Seymour dominated “with an iron fist … she is famend for attracting and nurturing sensible on-air expertise and for swiftly chopping them free in the event that they step out of line or their Arbitron scores droop.” In 2004, she would fireplace radio persona Sandra Tsing Loh after she stated “fuck” on the air.
“Nicely, you’re not allowed to try this, particularly for those who use it as a verb, which she did, and particularly for those who use it as a verb on Sunday morning in the midst of Weekend Version,” she recalled a couple of years later. (The engineer on responsibility, nevertheless, is meant to switch an expletive with a bleep).
Seymour changed Claude Brodesser-Akner as host of The Enterprise with Masters, who heard from the exec minutes after she had been laid off by NPR throughout the 2008 recession. “She referred to as me earlier than I had even gotten into my automobile,” Masters recalled. “I didn’t know her. She stated, ‘Sweetheart, are they meshuga? Their loss will probably be my acquire.’”
Throughout each Hanukkah from 1979-2007, Seymour hosted the three-hour reside present Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools, which featured Yiddish folks music, songs and tales and a memorial to the Holocaust. “I at all times broadcast this system on Friday evenings so I might bid my listeners a intestine yontif,” she stated in 2010.
Years after she divorced Hirschman, she modified her surname in 1993 to honor her paternal Polish-born great-grandfather, a rabbi.
Survivors embody her daughter, Celia; her sister, Ann, and brother-in-law, Richard; her niece, Jessica; her nephew, Daniel; and cousins Anita and Greg. Her son, David, died at age 25 from lymphoma.
A public memorial service is being deliberate.
This story was initially printed by The Hollywood Reporter.
