Ruth Seymour Dies: Groundbreaking Longtime KCRW General Manager Was 88

Tom Tapp
·2-min read

Ruth Seymour, the longtime leader of Santa Monica-based public radio station KCRW died Friday, station president Jennifer Ferro confirmed to Deadline. She was 88.

Seymour was at the from station 1977 to 2010. In that time she transformed it from a quality radio outlet run out of a junior high school classroom to one of the most influential NPR stations in the country produced in a state of the art studio at Santa Monica College.

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Seymour initially came on as a consultant and became General Manager in 1978. Her ascension to a management role roughly coincided with the station moving to a powerful new transmitter, which greatly expanded its reach.

At about the same time, National Public Radio launched Morning Edition. Seymour decided to make a morning block of the 2-hour show, running it three times 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. The move helped KCRW become a mainstay in many Angelenos’ lives.

“That way nobody was going to have [the programs] when I didn’t have them,” she recalled.

Seymour was possibly most familiar to listeners from her presence on the station’s on-air pledge drives. In 1995, she propelled the outlet to a then-breathtaking $1 million pledge drive. Those efforts were critical after the passing of Prop 13, which limited property taxes and forced KCRW 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.

“Those actions saved the station financially and allowed it to grow and thrive,” observed Ferro.

Nationally, Seymour raised the station’s profile and importance by helping raise funds for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered in 1985 and for NPR itself in 1991. She also was active in the effort to simplify licensing arrangements around the podcasting of radio stations’ programs.

“KCRW and NPR grew up together and Ruth knew that public radio stations were the owners of the national organization,” Ferro recalled. “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.”

Friend to poets like Allen Ginsberg and artists like Leonard Cohen, Seymour brought literary sensibility to KCRW. Under her watch, it 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 its history, according to Ferro.

Each year at Hannukah she hosted Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools, a lively Yiddish music program. She was also a sometime host of The Poltics of Culture.

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