[msb-alumni] Lorenzo Wilson Milam, 86, a Guru of Community Radio and Disability Advocate, died on July 19, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2020 17:36:09 -0400
BlankThe book mentioned in this article, "Rebels on the Air: An Alternative
History
of Radio in America" by Jesse Walker, (2001). is available on Bookshare:
Synopsis
Boring DJs who never shut up, and who don't even pick their own records. The
same
hits, over and over. A constant stream of annoying commercials. How did radio
get so
dull? Not by accident, contends journalist and historian Jesse Walker. For
decades,
government and big business have colluded to monopolize the airwaves, stamping
out
competition, reducing variety, and silencing dissident voices. And yet, in the
face
of such pressure, an alternative radio tradition has tenaciously survived.
Rebels on
the Air explores these overlooked chapters in American radio, revealing the
legal
barriers established broadcasters have erected to ensure their dominance. Using
lively anecdotes drawn from firsthand interviews, Walker chronicles the story
of the
unsung heroes of American radio who, despite those barriers, carved out spaces
for
themselves in the spectrum, sometimes legally and sometimes not. Walker's
engaging,
meticulous account is the first comprehensive history of alternative radio in
the
United States. From the unlicensed amateurs who invented broadcasting to the
community radio movement of the 1960s and 1970s, from the early days of FM to
today's
micro radio movement, Walker lays bare the hidden history of broadcasting.
Above all,
Rebels on the Air is the story of the pirate broadcasters who shook up radio in
the
1990sand of the new sorts of radio we can expect in the next century, as the
microbroadcasters crossbreed with the even newer field of Internet broadcasting.
Lorenzo Wilson Milam, 86, a Guru of Community Radio. By Richard Sandomir.
He helped start noncommercial stations in the 1960's and '70's, offering an
eclectic
mix of music and talk. His goal: to change the world.
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.
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.
"What's wrong with commercial radio?" Mr. Milam said in a 1967 interview on
"'Mike
Wallace at Large," a CBS News radio program. "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.
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 the Pacifica 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
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, said in an interview. "He had this fantasy that he would
change the
world with it."
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.
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 a rehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Ga., 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."
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 in 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" (1986) and
wrote
passionately about disabilities in "The Cripple Liberation Front" and "Cripzen:
A
Manual for Survival" (1993).
In later years, his polio returned.
"All disabled people know fear," Mr. Milam told New Mobility, 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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