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.”
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 radio dramas like the 10-hour Babbitt and 30-hour 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.” 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 Parade,” 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.”
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 ‘60s, and ‘70s — in fact, women couldn’t get credit cards apart from their husbands until 1974 — 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.
Her impact lives on at KCRW. Her vision to create Morning Becomes Eclectic to reflect contemporary, eclectic, and new music has made KCRW’s DJs sought after by labels, artists, and music supervisors looking to feature the sound of today. She created Good Food, which remains a force in the food world and lives in new spaces like a wildly successful pie contest. Most powerfully, this eclectic radio format continues to feed the complete cultural life of an interested person — news of the day, debates of ideas, art, artists, food, literature, and film.