NY Times, August 9, 2020
Lorenzo Wilson Milam, Guru of Community Radio, Is Dead at 86
He helped start noncommercial stations in the 1960s and ’70s, offering
an eclectic mix of music and talk. His goal: to change the world.
Lorenzo Wilson Milam in the studios of KRAB, the noncommercial Seattle
FM station he helped start in 1962.
Lorenzo Wilson Milam in the studios of KRAB, the noncommercial Seattle
FM station he helped start in 1962.Credit...via KRAB archive
Richard Sandomir <https://www.nytimes.com/by/richard-sandomir>
ByRichard Sandomir <https://www.nytimes.com/by/richard-sandomir>
* Aug. 7, 2020
*
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Lorenzo Wilson Milam, who devoted much of his life to building
noncommercial radio stations with eclectic fusions of music, talk and
public affairs, died on July 19 at his home in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.
He was 86.
Charles Reinsch, a former manager of KRAB-FM in Seattle, Mr. Milam’s
first station, announced the death. Mr. Milam moved full time to Mexico
from San Diego after having several strokes in 2017.
He also struggled with the effects of polio, which he had contracted as
a teenager, and which led him to use crutches and leg braces for much of
his life and a wheelchair later on.
Mr. Milam loathed commercial radio stations, which he saw as purveyors
of mindless junk. With KRAB and about a dozen other stations that he
helped start in the 1960s and ’70s, he created a freewheeling, esoteric
vision of commercial-free community radio as the voice of the people it
served.
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He wanted his stations to have inexperienced contributors, both on and
off the air. He encouraged locals to help him program the stations and
contribute a few dollars to keep these shoestring operations open.
ImageMr. Milam in 1968. “He was so excited about radio,” a colleague
said, “and truly believed in it.”
Mr. Milam in 1968. “He was so excited about radio,” a colleague said,
“and truly believed in it.”Credit...Mary Randlett, via KRAB archives
“What’s wrong with commercial radio?” Mr. Milam said in a1967 interview
on “Mike Wallace at Large,” a CBS News radio program
<http://www.krabarchive.com/player/1967-00-00-mike-wallace-at-large.html>.
“They play material that will be accepted by the masses. I say, ‘To hell
with the masses.’” He added, “We play things that aren’t commonly
accepted because no one else will put it on the air.”
KRAB’s on-air menu featured ethnic and classical music, readings
(poetry, newspaper articles, children’s books, histories and scientific
journals), commentary (some of it rantings by radicals on both the left
and right), panel discussions, radio plays, interviews and programming
produced by local groups, among them a fringe White Citizens’ Council.
Mr. Milam did not want a poem or piece of music diminished by the sound
of an announcer breaking in at the end. To let listeners absorb the
intensity of what they had just heard, he sometimes let as many as 10
minutes of silence pass before another program began.
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The silences — which on a commercial station would have been filled at
least partly by ads — were an element of Mr. Milam’s noncommercial policy.
“Broadcast time is too valuable to be sold,” he said on the Wallace
program. “I think it should be given away — and I think it should be
given away with a rose.”
Mr. Milam was not the architect of noncommercial radio. The first such
station was said to be KPFA-FM in Berkeley, Calif., founded in 1949 by
Lewis Hill, who also established thePacifica
<https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pacifica-Radio#ref1185554>Foundation,
its parent organization. Mr. Milam volunteered at KPFA in the late 1950s
while he was taking graduate courses at the University of California,
Berkeley.
“If Lew Hill fathered the movement, Lorenzo Milam reared it,”Jesse
Walker
<https://reason.com/2020/07/23/the-death-of-a-radio-pioneer/>wrote in
“Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America” (2001).
Mr. Milam left KRAB in the late 1960s and helped start commercial-free
stations in St. Louis, San Francisco, Dallas, Portland, Ore., Los Gatos,
Calif., and elsewhere. KRAB went off the air in 1984.
“He was so excited about radio and truly believed in it,” Mr.
Reinsch,who is also KRAB’s archivist
<http://www.krabarchive.com/krab-audio-archive-main-menu.html>, said in
an interview. “He had this fantasy that he would change the world with it.”
Image
Mr. Milam’s successes at KRAB and elsewhere led him to write a
whimsically titled radio handbook.
Mr. Milam’s successes at KRAB and elsewhere led him to write a
whimsically titled radio handbook.
Lorenzo Wilson Milam was born on Aug. 2, 1933, in Jacksonville, Fla. His
father, Robert, was a lawyer and real estate investor. His mother,
Meriel, was a homemaker.
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Mr. Milam was stricken with polio in 1952, after his first year at Yale.
His sister, who was also named Meriel, also contracted the disease and
died a few months later, leaving him with memories that he excavated in
his book “The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues” (1984).
“The iron maiden continues to pump dead lungs for over an hour before
the night nurse discovers the drowned creature, gray froth on blue
lips,” he wrote. “My sister, who never did anyone any harm, who only
wished joy for those around her, now lies ice and bone, the good spirit
fled from her.”
Mr. Milam learned to use a wheelchair at a Jacksonville hospital. He was
also treated at arehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Ga
<https://www.exploregeorgia.org/warm-springs/general/historic-sites-trails-tours/roosevelt-warm-springs-institute-for-rehabilitation>.,
founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He studied English literature at Haverford College in Pennsylvania,
where he struggled to navigate the campus on crutches. He graduated in
1957 and worked at a Philadelphia television before moving to Berkeley.
In 1959 he decided he wanted to return east to start a community station
in Washington. His goal for it was lofty: He wanted it to help avoid
World War III.
Mr. Milam envisioned influencing government policymakers and generals
with vigorous foreign policy debates and a documentary program on the
hazards of nuclear radiation.
“After a few months of this, they would be saying to themselves, ‘We
must be idiots to think that war is the answer to our problems,’” he was
quoted as saying in “Rebels on the Air.”
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But he was unable to get a license from the Federal Communications
Commission after informing the agency that the station would be
Pacifica-like.
“I filed the application, and it took me over a year of sad waiting to
find out that Pacifica was considered to be a front for the Communist
Party,”he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette i
<https://www.post-gazette.com/local/east/2014/04/24/WYEP-turns-40/stories/201404100009>n
2014.
Mr. Milam turned his attention to Seattle and received a license for
KRAB in 1962. His successes there and elsewhere led him to write the
whimsically titled “Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio
Station for the Community” (1975).
But the failure in 1977 of a Dallas station that he had started with
partners, KCHU-FM, after operating for just two years, led him to back
away from community radio.
Over the next 40 years, he focused on writing and editing. He published
The Fessenden Review, a literary journal, and RALPH: The Review of Arts,
Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, an online book review magazine.
He described his career in“The Radio Papers: From KRAB to KCHU”
<http://www.krabarchive.com/pdf/the-radio-papers-lorenzo-milam-1986.pdf>(1986)
and wrote passionately about disabilities in “The Cripple Liberation
Front” and “Cripzen: A Manual for Survival” (1993).
Image
Mr. Milam, right, was long gone from KRAB but returned for its last
night on the air, on April 15, 1984. With him were Bob West, left, a
program host, and Phil Bannon, a board operator and announcer.
Mr. Milam, right, was long gone from KRAB but returned for its last
night on the air, on April 15, 1984. With him were Bob West, left, a
program host, and Phil Bannon, a board operator and
announcer.Credit...Paul Dorpat
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In later years, his polio returned.
“All disabled people know fear,”Mr. Milam told New Mobility
<https://www.newmobility.com/2000/09/lorenzo-milam-surviving-geezerhood/>,
a magazine for wheelchair users, in 2000. “We know that we’re very
vulnerable. We know we’re going to get more and more disabled and we’re
going to get more and more dependent and we’re probably going to get
more and more scared.”
“How do we handle being an old, scared geezer?” he asked.
He is survived by a daughter, Kevin; a grandchild; a sister, Patricia;
and a brother, Robert. His marriage to Clare Marx ended in divorce.
KRAB came to define Mr. Milam’s sense of mission. Having been thwarted
in his first efforts to start a station, he turned KRAB into a
centerpiece of listener-supported radio.
“It took me from being a loser poet and failed Washington, D.C.,
broadcaster to being something of value for my society and my culture,”
he wrote in “The Radio Papers.” “It took me from vague hopes of good
programming in 1959 to a purveyor of what is and can be the best in
men’s souls.”
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