Ruth Seymour, a public media lion who transformed KCRW-FM (89.9) from a struggling signal in Santa Monica into one of the most successful public radio stations in the country, has died. She was 88.
A statement announcing her death said Seymour died at her home in Santa Monica on Friday after a long illness.
Under Seymour's pioneering guidance, KCRW provided the soundtrack to life in Southern California and a backdrop to countless commutes with a potent programming mix of news, music and talk that shaped Los Angeles culture as much as covered it.
Some of those programs included “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” “To the Point” and the groundbreaking “Which Way, L.A.?,” a news program that in particular served as a kind of daily therapy session for a city struggling to regain its footing after the civil unrest that followed four white police officers acquitted in 1992 in the videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King.
“L.A. is a better place for Ruth having lived and worked in it,” said Bill Davis, president emeritus of Southern California Public Radio. “The world will be a less interesting place without Ruth in it.”
In a 2010 interview with Los Angeles Magazine to mark her retirement, Seymour called her station “singular, idiosyncratic, daring, independent, smart, and compelling.”
All words that could have described Seymour herself.
From her earliest years in Los Angeles radio, Seymour recognized that having the ear of Angelenos and Southern California listeners was both a privilege — and an opportunity. She had a shrewd sense of what listeners wanted and where the industry was headed, all qualities that served her well as she elevated KCRW to the National Public Radio flagship outlet in Southern California, and the envy of public radio stations nationwide.
She considered “Which Way, L.A.?” to be a “crowning achievement,” said her daughter, Celia Hirschman. “My mother was very proud of that… she sought to raise the discussion to a higher level.”
The host of that show, veteran broadcast journalist Warren Olney, said Seymour was "the smartest, most creative, most challenging and demanding person I ever worked with in almost 60 years of broadcasting." He added that sometimes Seymour could be "cranky and distant" and noted that some called her ```the iron whim," but those changes of mind mostly validated her predictions, built audience and gained respect for the station."
He said the idea for "Which Way, LA?" grew from Seymour's belief that "a major lesson of the disturbance was that LA’s myriad voices weren’t being listened to seriously."
And she wanted to change that.
Seymour was also a resonating voice on the Southern California media landscape — and that voice was all Bronx.
Listeners were no match for it. Seymour was adept at coaxing — or was it hectoring? — listeners to reach into their pockets during pledge drives. At one point, with Seymour at the wheel, the beachy Santa Monica station ranked third — behind urban heavyweights Boston and Chicago — in terms of membership dues raised for National Public Radio.
“She was a monster” at fundraising, said an admiring Nick Harcourt, handpicked by Seymour to become KCRW’s music director and an on-air presenter for the signature show, “Morning Becomes Eclectic.” “She was just so good at it, getting money out of the news audience.”
She was successful, he said, because listeners understood and believed in Seymour’s commitment to public radio’s mission.
Her early life in the Bronx
It’s no surprise where Seymour was born — the Bronx, as Ruth Epstein.
There, she attended public school and her education was supplemented with language and literature classes in Yiddish, fueling a love that would last a lifetime.
When profiled in 1995 by the L.A. Times, she recalled that her Russian-Polish immigrant parents were working-class and deeply intellectual, exposing her to “an extraordinary world of ideas, literature and politics.”
She attended City College of New York, married and became Ruth Hirschman, had two children, and came to L.A. when her husband was hired at UCLA. She talked her way into a job in public radio at KPFK, working as a drama and literary critic and worked her way up the ranks — and into the spotlight.
The station’s manager, who was also her boss, Will Lewis, was later jailed in 1974 for refusing to give the FBI tapes left at the station by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, turning KPFK and its management into counterculture celebrities.
Early days at KCRW
Upheaval at KPFK led to Seymour’s departure in 1976, paving the way for her hiring at KCRW in 1977. Then, the station was located inside a middle school classroom in Santa Monica and had the oldest transmitter west of the Mississippi.
“There was no place to go but up,” Seymour would say.
She would move the station to Santa Monica College, and go on to become one of the first programmers to embrace eclectic music and carve out an audience niche for it, Davis said, calling the decision “incredibly influential.” And KCRW was “one of the first [public radio] stations in the country to sign up for “Morning Edition,” making other stations take notice, he added. KCRW was also the first station to carry “This American Life” outside of its home base in Chicago.
Seymour had a saying, Harcourt recalled, quoting it: “If you only worry about the listeners you have, they are the only ones you will have.”
Embracing eclectic music
Harcourt said that philosophy meant that even though Seymour “didn’t really understand the music I played” on “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” with its genre busting playlists and emerging world music, Seymour knew she wasn’t the show’s intended audience.
“She understood that it brought in a younger, highly-engaged audience, including decision makers in the entertainment industry,” Harcourt said. “And that was what was making the station a must listen in a demo that had money, and would support the station financially.”
And younger music listeners who were curious might stay for the news as well.
Keeping the Yiddish language and culture was a cause close to Seymour’s heart. (So was honoring family. When she divorced, she took the surname Seymour, in honor of her Polish-born great-grandfather, a rabbi.)
'Not one phone call came in'
When she noticed in the 70s that there were little radio options for Jews like her. So in December of 1978 she had an idea. She created and hosting “Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools,” a joyous and colorful show that dove deep into Jewish culture, drawing from short stories, and Yiddish folk music and other touchstones familiar to those who might feel left out in a world dominated by Christmas trees.
But during that three-hour programming experiment in December the phones stayed deadly silent. “Not one phone call came in,” Seymour would later write in a history on the show. “I assumed — all of us there, that day, assumed — that we had lost the audience.”
But lo and behold, when the show ended, “The phones began to ring. And ring. And ring. They rang for hours,” she recalled. It was as if the lag was due to rapt listeners who couldn’t pull themselves away from the programming to pick up the phone.
Instead of a colossal failure, Seymour had a hit on her hands.
Celia Hirschman said her mother delighted in creating an entirely new show for Hanukkah each year thereafter.
By the time she announced her decision to step down in 2009, after nearly 30 years at KCRW, the station was in a period of transition. Ratings were struggling, as they were in many other outlets amid the ever-shifting media landscape.
As she told the Times: “It’s going to be a new era. Time to begin without me.”
There was no immediate information about services, although a memorial is expected to be held in her beloved city of Santa Monica.
“There was no one else like Ruth,” Davis said. “She was an absolute force in the history of public media in Los Angeles and the history of public radio in the country.”
