Sydney Thornbury
Close friend
Sydney Thornbury
In the early days of KCRW’s development, an interviewer asked Ruth what the station’s “mission” was. She immediately fired back “To matter.” There was in this response the kind of fearless independence and ability to cut to the chase that were Ruth’s hallmarks. Her “larger than life’” reputation. But it also revealed two other fundamental traits of this complex woman—a commitment to exploring the “big” questions around life and art (i.e., programming that “matters”), and also a deeply practical streak (i.e., If you don’t matter to your subscribers, they won’t donate).
Ruth grew up across from the Bronx Zoo in New York, falling asleep at night to the wild sounds of lions and chimpanzees. Her parents, Jack and Sylvia Epstein were Jewish immigrants who had come to America from different parts of Eastern Europe when they were each still in their teens. Her mother had fled Poland in order to avoid being prosecuted in court for slapping a police officer who tried to extort three dozen eggs from her market stall, after she had already paid the requisite bribe to another officer. Clearly fearless independence and a practical streak ran in the family.
Jack and Sylvia met at New York’s New School for Social Research, which offered college level courses to new immigrants. They learned English and studied American Literature and History. By day they worked with their hands in the garment industry, and in the evenings they went to night school, lectures and concerts. They were part of a dynamic working class, engaged in lively kitchen table debates with their friends about the new world unfolding around them, and why it mattered. They were also active in the Workman’s Circle, an American Jewish non-profit organization that helped immigrants adapt to life in America, as well as promoted Jewish education and community. Ruth was born into this dynamic environment in 1935. Her sister Ann followed 11 years later.
By all accounts, Ruth was the apple of her father’s eye. Weekly family outings to the famed New York City Library instilled a life-long love of reading.
As a child, Ruth lost herself in books— particularly devouring Nancy Drew mysteries, piecing the clues together in her own personal challenge to solve the mystery before Nancy did. She usually succeeded.
Ruth was an incredibly bright child and excelled at school. In addition to her normal schooling, she also studied Yiddish and Yiddish Culture at the folk school Sholom Aleichem, and later she studied with renowned Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich at CCNY for an additional three hours a day after school. A serious student, she graduated high school at the age of 16.
In March 1953, a few weeks after her 18th birthday, tragedy struck Ruth’s life for the first time when her mother told her that her father was killed in an auto accident. It would be six more years before Ruth discovered, by accident, that her father had committed suicide. He had suffered from depression for most of his life. Although Ruth said she immediately forgave him, the pain of this loss and betrayal must have been nearly unbearable. Yet it was a pain she buried deeply throughout her life, rarely, if ever, discussing it with anyone.
Eight weeks after her father’s passing, Ruth was introduced to her future husband, the poet Jack Hirschman. They were introduced by a mutual friend, the writer Judith Rossner (Waiting for Mr. Goodbar), on the campus of CCNY. Ruth fell deeply in love with Jack and they were married on Christmas day the next year, apparently having been told it was a good day for Jews to marry since hall rentals were cheap.
Ruth was a young mother. In 1956 when she was 21 and living in Indiana where Jack was working on his PhD, she gave birth to David. Two years later in 1958 Celia was born. From Indiana, the family moved to Dartmouth, New Hampshire, where Jack taught English and Ruth, in addition to raising the children, enjoyed the novel role of playing the “Jewish bohemian professor’s wife” in this most waspy and remote of Ivy League colleges. She famously decorated their house in tapestries and boho rugs and directed avant-garde theater productions.
From Dartmouth they moved to Los Angeles. In 1961, while Jack taught at UCLA, Ruth took her first radio job – as the Drama & Literature Director at Pacifica’s Public Radio station, KPFK-FM. She produced programs on Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Andy Warhol and John Cage, among others.
Sydney & Ruth
Ruth said no one got out of the sixties undamaged, and she spoke from an experienced vantage point. During the countercultural period known as the “sixties” (roughly 1963 to 1974), Ruth, Jack and the children were regularly at its epicenter. In 1964, the family moved to Europe as part of a UCLA writing fellowship which would enable Jack to publish work as a poet. They initially moved to London where they knew people, and quickly became part of the city’s avant-garde and underground art scene as it was transitioning from the Beats to the Hippies, influenced heavily by the escalation of the Vietnam war. They attended and participated in some of the most seminal happenings of those years—including the famous Beat Poetry event at the Royal Albert Hall and the infamous “Be In” Roundhouse art show in London.
From London they moved to Paris, where their friends included Anais Nin, Julian Beck (of the Living Theatre), and Allen Ginsberg. Jack wrote, the children were sent to yet another set of new schools (in French), and Ruth filed stories and sent reel-to-reel tapes back to KPFK for broadcast.
Eventually, they ended up on the Greek island of Hydra, where they bonded with Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen, her son Axel and a few other Americans. The group of English-speaking fathers taught the children every day, as there were no English-speaking schools. Hydra was an idyllic paradise, with no cars, no electricity and a reputation for hard working but hedonistic artists.
Ruth gave an interview to the LA Times in 1987 where she reflected on her time in Hydra, and again we see that combination of the search for meaning, for what matters, but also that cut-to-the-chase practicality:
Ruth: You must remember this was a time in American history, actually world history, where all of us were very serious about finding out what truth, what meaning there was to living our lives.
LAT: What did you discover about the meaning of life?
Ruth: That you don’t have to search for it in the isolation of a small Greek island that has no electricity and about 30 highly charged, demented people running around stark naked from all over the world.
A fascinating milieu to be a part of, an incredible period of political unrest, cultural upheaval and alternative lifestyles to live through, but not without its costs. Especially to marriages, children and livelihoods. By the time the family re-settled in America, taking a house in Venice, California, the marriage was severely fractured and the children, now 10 and 12, needed a stability that poetry alone could not support. Ruth took up the slack, working for the state as a social worker, where she put artist friends on the dole.
It’s hard to believe now, but during their marriage Ruth felt that it was only Jack who was the bright light, the gifted one in the relationship. She felt her talents paled in comparison. In those initial heady years, she willingly accepted living in the shadow of his genius. But by 1971 when she took a job again at KPFK, this time in a larger role as the Program Director, she began to discover and grow confident in her own genius and abilities.
By the time she and Jack divorced in 1973, Ruth had begun to produce a series of programs for KPFK that focused on the great artists, thought leaders and actions of the 20th century, themes that would run throughout her radio career. These programs included features on Anne Sexton, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, the Yom Kippur war, Palestine, Bloody Sunday, The growth (or lack of) feminism in Israel, and infamously, The SLA and the LAPD. (In 1974, The SLA left the famous Patty Hearst “Tania” communique on cassette tape inside Celia’s mattress, which was stored at the station’s dumpster waiting for removal. Station manager Will Lewis would go to jail for refusing to hand over the original cassette to protect the source of the communique).
In 1977, Ruth took over as General Manager of Santa Monica’s College-based public radio station KCRW, the job that would come to define her career. Because KCRW has become so iconic and its eclectic mix of news, music, art and commentary de rigueur, it’s easy to forget how ground-breaking Ruth’s original vision actually was. Nothing like that was on the radio in 1977.
The storied tale of the little radio station in a Junior High bungalow that was broadcasting Santa Monica City Council meetings and Junior College Basketball games until Ruth built it into one of the most influential radio stations in the world, is true. But the process of creating KCRW is as fascinating as the end result.
Ruth’s genius was in building the station the way a theater director would devise a piece of theater. She fearlessly experimented and then watched how it landed with her audience.
If they liked it, it stayed. If they didn’t, it got cut (usually without ceremony, sometimes without tact), and transformed into something else. In her farewell essay to her annual Chanukah program, “Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools” (which ran from 1978 to 2006), she describes the experience of the first show, serving as an example of the power of her approach:
“We are building a new kind of radio station and trying different kinds of ideas. We are full of dreams and plans and hope. We are fearless. After all, we have little to lose. The notion of presenting a 3-hour program celebrating ‘Yiddishkeit’ and anchoring it to the secular holiday of Chanukah didn't seem very promising, even to me. But I wanted to do it anyway.
“We began the broadcast at noon. I spoke in Yiddish and translated into English. I played music and tapes of stories by Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. As the afternoon wore on and the day grew darker, the phones stayed silent. In the hours that passed, not one phone call came in. I assumed—all of us there, that day, assumed— that we had lost the audience. Oh well, I thought, it was only an experiment. Next year, we'll do something else.
Gary Stewart, Will Thornbury, Sydney, Theola Selah, Ruth
“The program ended and All Things Considered came on the air. The phones began to ring. And ring. And ring. They rang for hours. The three-hour program became an instant Chanukah hit, serving a bilingual mix of folk music, Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, old Second Avenue songs and a memorial tribute to Holocaust victims.”
Years later, the Jewish Journal noted, “Ruth Seymour probably introduced more people to an appreciation of Jewish stories and music than any other Los Angeles media figure.”
Like all great directors, Ruth knew how to put together the right ensemble. She attracted the best people – often taking a chance on someone before they even realized their own abilities. Because she was of their world, she knew how to get the best out of artists (until she didn’t). The list of careers and shows launched on KCRW is now legendary: Ira Glass’s This American Life; Harry Shearer’s Le Show; Morning Becomes Eclectic (Isabel Holt, Tom Schnabel, Chris Douridas, Nic Harcourt); Warren Olney’s Which Way, L.A.? and To the Point, Elvis Mitchell’s The Treatment, Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm. And so on and so on.
Ruth didn’t do all of this alone—she brought over Will Lewis from KPFK to consult for the station with her. They worked together on KCRW for 30 years. In addition, she had a wonderful team of producers, engineers and station staff. But it was always Ruth’s creative vision and entrepreneurial spirit directing the show.
Yet this larger than life personality was incredibly private, and strove for a low public profile outside of work. Which wasn’t easy with THAT VOICE. Despite over 50 years as an Angeleno, Ruth never escaped her native Bronx accent. And several times a year during subscription drives, Los Angeles’s rush hour-trapped commuters couldn’t escape it either. If you wanted to listen to All Things Considered while you were stuck in traffic, you were going to have to listen to Ruth as well.
Whether you loved or loathed the pledge drives or the number of times Ruth told the DJ to “stop the music” so she could ask the audience if they were “listening on someone else’s dime,” it can’t be denied that Ruth re-defined on air public radio fundraising. And not just for KCRW, but for all of NPR.
She raised millions for the station and the network. Her entrepreneurial flair, sense of the theatrical and just simple refusal to take no for an answer made Ruth, and KCRW, into a fundraising powerhouse.
So much so that in the 1980s and 1990s, when NPR News ran out of funding, Ruth ran special fundraising drives to keep the nascent network alive, to keep Weekend All Things Considered on the air, and to pay for reporters and engineers to cover the Gulf wars. And she backed those efforts up with trips to Washington to lobby congressional leaders against budget cuts.
Years of being in the artistic vanguard gave Ruth a sixth sense for spotting the next trend. In addition to this skill and her deep practicality, Ruth developed an astonishing head for business – one that drove innovation and constantly kept KCRW ahead of the pack. Long before most media were investing in their online presence, Ruth doubled down, investing early and sizably in KCRW’s website and live streaming.
As a result, KCRW had the largest online public radio station presence with audio and video in the US. In the early 2000’s, KCRW posted some of the first-ever podcasts. (This was particularly ironic, since Ruth didn’t even know how to work an iPhone at the time.) At the World Wide Developers Conference where Steve Jobs introduced the iPod from the stage, he played and excerpt from Elvis’ Mitchell’s The Treatment, saying, “This is what a podcast should sound like.” KCRW online was well on its way.
And when record labels demanded contractual rights for every song streamed, Ruth led the discussion and advocated for a streamlined blanket license system, eliminating massive amounts of paperwork and cost.
Ruth had a fierce reputation, often controversial. She didn’t suffer fools, wasn’t afraid to voice her opinions or to lead from the front. Ruth believed that her job was to make decisions based on what was best for the station, not what was best (or easiest) for her, or for anyone else. She saw the station as something bigger than any one person, something that they all worked in service to.
Sydney & Ruth
Yet in the myriad of articles written about her (usually quite critical), it’s interesting how rarely anyone ever discusses Ruth’s achievements within the context of women’s roles at the time.
It’s not that some of the criticism of Ruth’s leadership style wasn’t valid. She could be vexing and tactless for sure. But one has to wonder if she would have received half the criticism she did had she been a man.
In 1982, Ruth lost 25-year-old David to Lymphoma. David’s illness and death were profoundly painful for both Ruth and Celia, leaving a grief that would mark both of them in different ways for the rest of their lives. Ruth would spend each anniversary of David’s death on her own, walking on the beach and then spending time going through photos and cracking open the door to a grief that she carried constantly within her, but managed to keep hidden from the rest of the world.
In 1993, after being divorced from Jack for 20 years, Ruth decided to change her last name. As she wrote in her essay for the station’s program guide, “My married name was my public identity. I used it on the radio; it appeared in newspapers and magazines. I wore it out in the world like an overcoat I’d borrowed. The time to return it has arrived.”
Ruth explained that she took poetic license in Anglicizing the name of her paternal great-grandfather—Reb Simcha of Pultysk, a Rabbi and Talmudic scholar in Poland so revered by his congregations that two towns fought over the right to bury him—to Seymour. The story, so dramatic, could have come straight off the pages of a book by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Ruth retired from KCRW in 2010 at the age of 75. The station that had once been in a junior high bungalow, was now housed in a purpose-built building designed by Clive Wilkinson, funded by a bond from the city of Santa Monica. The Getty hosted a retirement celebration that was a who’s who of LA’s cultural world. Ruth extemporaneously gave what she considered the best speech of her career.
When a person has had such a big career, it’s easy to think that’s all they were. But Ruth was so much more than just KCRW.
Ironically, she didn’t even listen to KCRW in the house or car - she listened to KUSC because she loved classical music. She loved to travel. She loved art and museums. And, of course, to read, always to read. It seemed particularly cruel, that for someone whose life was so centered on art and literature that she should battle macular degeneration for most of her adult life, and finally go blind from it.
She loved great food, great hats and The New York Times. She loved ideas and would forever question someone on something she didn’t know about until she understood it. She loved her walks on the beach, the Farmers Market, her cat Sasha, and her beloved roses, which she endlessly tried to keep from developing powdery mildew in the foggy beach air of her rent-controlled house on Fraser Ave. She loved her daughter Celia deeply, and she loved those closest to her, even if the expression of that love was complicated and sometimes difficult to comprehend for the ones on the receiving end. But the love was there. And she was loved back. Ruth was generous and adventurous and above all, she loved life.
It wasn’t that Ruth was larger than life. It’s that she wanted life to be as big and as rich as it could possibly be. More than most, she knew that you only had one shot. And she wanted hers to matter. It did.
