Bob Claster
As soon as I heard KCRW, I was in love. I befriended someone who worked there, who advised me to try out for a forthcoming job opening. She explained that the process had a foregone conclusion, but that it would get me "in the system." Sure enough, I got called within a month to fill in for someone who was on vacation. His vacation kept getting extended, so I became part of the family.
Once that stint ended, I had decided I wanted Ruth's job someday. (I had been the GM of my college station.) I needed a reason to be there regularly apart from joining the volunteer ranks, so while my background was primarily in music, I came up with the idea of presenting comedy on the radio weekly. Ruth was the first to admit that comedy was a language she did not speak, but she let Will decide, and apart from his regular reminders that I should feature more Jimmy Durante (!?), he was on board, and I was on KCRW for most of the '80s. I was in an enviable position there, since Ruth didn't get comedy, and the show wasn't music and so didn't fall under the purview of the Music Director, so I pretty much got left alone for a decade on the air. The best thing I can say about Ruth is that, when it was all over, and I tried to get a book published of the interviews I'd conducted on the air, she gave me her blessing and told me I was welcome to the material. And when I told her that I'd be posting MP3s of many of my KCRW shows on my website, again, she just wished me luck.
But Ruth's lack of a sense of humor was the stuff of legend. I didn't fully understand what that phrase meant until I got to know Ruth. Once, Tom Strother (production manager) and I had just finished a tricky edit on something, and were in a giddy mood. Ruth picked that moment to open the door to the production studio where we were working, and Tom, kidding around, said "Don't come in! We're naked and there's 2 feet of water on the floor!" Ruth slowly closed the door and left. Once, Nicola Lubitsch, who at the time was wrangling premiums for a pledge drive, told Ruth, "I've got a great travel package! Two weeks in wartorn Kosovo." (It may have been Serbia or Bosnia... I don't recall.) Ruth hit the ceiling and said "I can't send a listener there! They'll get shot! That's a terrible idea!" Never for a moment realizing that Nicola was just making a joke.
After a while, it became clear that Ruth wasn't going anywhere, and I had a young family to support, so I moved over into the world of television. But I loved so much about KCRW and my time there, and my audience there, and my colleagues there, and over them all, the towering figure of Ruth. As they used to say in the Reader's Digest, "My most unforgettable character."