Topey Schwarzenbach
KCRW Volunteer
Of course, like many, I first knew Ruth’s voice over the radio; her urgent, passionate voice: disentangled, disambiguated, disembodied.
Upon returning to Venice in 1981, my first task was to find the closest NPR station, KCRW. In architecture, NPR is all but mandatory. While finishing a project, we would often listen to all three cycles of Bob Edwards’ Morning Edition on KCRW. What we knew wasn’t broad, but we learned it in triplicate.
Feeling a debt, I volunteered, answering phones in the basement Friday afternoons. I (always) sort of felt like Carl Bernstein on his first day at the Washington Post; watching Ruth manage, urge, and really whip KCRW into shape, into the terrific radio station it was becoming.
At mid-day then, she was still reading the New York Times on air. There was Tom Schnabel’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, and Joe Frank’s Work in Progress.
What Ruth was doing seemed contradictory: simultaneously Inventing the future while reviving the past; a role for sound in the late 20th Century; reinterpreting the concept of radio broadcasting; understanding how to propel it into the drive-time universe that is Los Angeles in the 21st Century.
I may have learned how to write at KCRW. Ruth asked me to write promos for Castaway’s Choice. It was like Wordle, or haiku: “Give me 100 words (e.g., on Bobby Short) by the end of Friday; Monday at the latest;” a cultural education as well as a writing lesson. Research. Edit. Write. 100 words. Find a hook. If a newspaper runs it, you win!
I left the station in the early 90’s, but I’ve never forgotten my experience within the KCRW community.
A few years after I left, a friend and colleague of mine took her own life. Seemingly from nowhere Ruth appeared, to give me a very concerned pep talk, sharing with me the story and impact of her own father’s suicide; the confusion and mystery lurking therein. She recommended a book: William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Her honesty, openness and passion remain with me.
Basically, who does that? Senses a need and knows what to do? Apparently Ruth Hirschman Seymour. She may or may not have always been right; but she always seemed to move towards a challenge.
It’s funny, I keep thinking if I were far enough out in space, I could probably catch up with her again. Her caring, impassioned, urgent, disentangled voice. It’s still in my head.
