Frank Browning
NPR LA Bureau chief and reporter
The first time I met Ruth after I’d been hired as bureau chief at NPR’s new LA studio, she smiled and told me directly: “I don’t do standard public radio classical. We run a Rock ’n’ Roll station.”
I never fully understood why I got hired at NPR, having zilch radio experience, but why not?
Ruth grew up in the arts and idea world of the South Bronx. She studied Yiddish literature and theater and she never cleaned up her accent or hid her Polish Ashkenazi roots. She wanted to know who was this Kentucky San Franciscan, cruising into her California Southland turf? “We’ll get to know each other,” she told me as we finished our coffee midday in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the middle school that was home to the bare-bones KCRW station. We were both strangers in the desert.
Ruth gave no quarter and took no quarter in the 40 years we knew each other. For me LA, the nation’s second largest metropolis, was a flat, open, car-clogged mystery. For Ruth it was the chance she’d been waiting for after leaving her theater critic post at the often shrill-left Pacifica Group. People, including a few of my friends, either loved Ruth or loathed her, and a fair number of even those she’d fired without notice, still came back to loving her even though they were never re-hired, either at Pacifica or KCRW.
A child of the Bronx Ruth was tough, growing up under the tutelage of her Polish immigrant parents, who had escaped Europe in time to avoid the fate of the Jews who stayed. Her ex-husband, the Beat poet Jack Hirschman, was a steadfast member of the same left Workmen’s Circle, though he became an apologist for Joseph Stalin.
Ruth never went Right. She had no patience for rigid minds neither of the Left or the Right. Ruth was about using her brains, her style and her wit to win the game. When, once during a phone call in the dark times of Trump, she chastised me for my tone of defeatism. “You hate America,” she lectured me. “If you want to change it, you have to love it for all its flaws.” I remained silent. We hung up quietly.
Another time several years earlier she told me about her experience at one of NPR’s periodic emergency meetings when her dear Hollywood friend Frank Mankiewicz, of the film making Mankiewiczes, ran the network. When Ruth circled the conference table, lecturing them in her high Bronx tones, they were speechless. “All these nice mid-western guys had never seen a woman dressed in tailored black walking around the conference table in five-inch heels”—after which she retired to an ante-room to receive those who wished to speak and accept counsel from the sorceress of Santa Monica. In public she was respectful of her colleagues, though privately she dismissed most of them as gornicht, or clueless.
Time took its toll on Ruth. She required help to walk around Santa Monica, and she grew more and more silent. She’d had her years as the most significant radio person in LA and one of the most important players in the NPR network. She’d said what she had the energy to say, and had little patience any more for the Meshuggeneh babblers who didn’t care to listen.
