Clive Wilkinson
Architect, KCRW’s current building
A few people in your life make a big impact. Ruth was one of those people.
I never took radio seriously until I experienced KCRW. Something about the patchwork quilt of news, opinion, journalism, public affairs, music, food, live performance, and that certain je ne sais quoi, seemed to wrap its arms around a listener and become something much more than radio. Not an entertaining companion exactly, but more an entertaining community that did not take itself too seriously, but none the less really addressed the human world full on. You could tune in anytime and get a different slice of reality presented to you. It brought radio to life. You wanted to listen.
Ruth, Clive & Jennifer
Behind this really was Ruth. One smallish person who was much larger than life.
It takes a singular vision to produce this variety of experience wrapped up in a 24-hour radio broadcast, working against the grain of traditional radio programming. Curiously, Ruth claimed that she had not the time for vision. The future could take care of itself – she knew the present needed all her attention.
When she announced her retirement, she said: “At this moment, I’m not thinking about after. You’re supposed to have plans—it’s just not been my experience in life that’s the way I operate. I’m just trying to handle the present.” Ruth didn’t need to develop a vision—it was pre-baked in her. Her family background had molded her critical thinking. She said the following in an email in 2009 after a discussion about the impacts of the 4th screen, the then-new smart phone.
“I find myself thinking about our conversation about the great seducer of our time—the Internet. While KCRW certainly lives online and can extend what it does online to other places around the world—the web is just a platform, another device like an FM receiver, to transmit by.
“To posit a premise that somehow we are creating a new society, a new kind of person, because of the advent of this technology, is a mistake that's been made before.
“I come from parents who truly believed when they were in their 20's that they were creating ‘new socialist man.’ While this seems absurd today—it was a belief held by billions of people around the world for a long time. In China, it only disappeared from the scene with the death of Mao.
“But you can go back and read the Greek tragedies and find that man has not changed. Or the Bible for that matter.
“So I would ask that we be wary of futurologists. Only that which is tethered to reality is worth serious consideration.”
At the same time as dismissing utopian socialistic aspirations, Ruth saw her work as encompassing a massive social cause of sharing the broad spectrum of current public knowledge, culture and community concerns over radio.
Her time at KCRW from 1976 onwards is legendary, broadcasting from the challenging conditions of a basement studio on the SMC campus that offered inadequate facilities to say the least. When our firm won the project for designing a new building for KCRW, we held visioning sessions with KCRW senior staff to evolve a program for the new building. All they asked for was a kitchen sink with hot and cold water, and maybe a window to see the sky. Miracles had indeed come out of adversity, but Ruth had made acquiring and funding proper new facilities for the station her last great crusade, which she achieved before retiring in 2010.
I miss her presence, but I miss her so much less, since her personality and transformative work in changing the airwaves remains so powerfully and continuously present in the cultural evolution of radio today.
