Jeremy Lansman, an engineer who helped launch some of the country’s first community radio stations, died Dec. 28 at his home in Grabouw, South Africa. He was 82.
According to his wife, Ineke Buskens, Lansman had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 2009 and died of an infection.
In 1962, Lansman worked with Lorenzo Milam, another central figure in early community radio, to start Seattle’s KRAB, one of the first listener-supported radio stations. They went on to launch KDNA in St. Louis and KBOO in Portland, Ore.
“As much as Lorenzo Milam has been recognized as the champion of community radio in those early days, none of it would have happened without Jeremy because Jeremy actually built the stations,” said Michael Huntsberger, a professor emeritus at Linfield University in Portland, Ore., who has written about the history of community radio.
“He was involved with the start-up of so many stations, not just the ones that he owned, but the ones that he inspired,” Huntsberger said. “He helped people get their stations together in the most practical way. He knew what the engineering was about. He knew what the FCC side of the engineering was. And that was an enormous contribution.”
Nan Rubin, a longtime community media organizer and activist, called Lansman a “mad-scientist engineer” and Milam’s “partner in crime” when Milam died in 2020.
In an interview, she said Lansman was a “tremendous influence” whose “fingerprints and thumbprint were all over” community radio, “physically on many transmitter and power installations and then conceptually on much of the shape of community broadcasting.”
Lansman had an “infectious” personality and “always had this little twinkle in his eye,” Rubin said.
“You could kind of see him dancing around and rubbing his hands in glee every time there was an FCC scheme,” she said.
In a tribute written for Lansman’s 60th birthday, Milam recalled how Lansman made KRAB’s “antique” transmitter workable. Faced with a transmitter that was “forever straying this way and that over the dial,” Milam wrote, “Lansman solved this problem in typical Lansman fashion: he hung a rope in the transmitter room connected in some way to the gee-gaws on the tower. He mounted a sign next to the rope, instructing us to pull on it if the values went below 9.5 or above 10.25.” The fix worked.
Lansman helped Milam found KDNA in 1969. In a 1973 interview, he said that at KDNA he wanted to show “we can do weird things with radio” by broadcasting music that wasn’t being played on other stations. The station also offered a place for people who disagreed to come together and listen to one another, which Lansman called “mass group therapy.”
In 1974, Lansman and Milam wrote a proposed FCC rulemaking that questioned whether religious stations should be eligible for placement on the noncommercial radio band. The petition, which became known as the “Petition Against God,” drew ire from Christians and prompted an overwhelming number of letters to the FCC in opposition.
The FCC denied the petition, yet it posted on its website last year that the “rumor that the FCC has before it a proposal to not issue licenses to religious broadcasters still continues to circulate, nearly 50 years after the Commission denied that request.”
In 1990, Lansman brought KYES-TV, a commercial station in Anchorage, Alaska, to the air “for a fraction of the cost of traditional TV stations, largely because Jeremy did the engineering with little assistance,” said Carol Schatz, then Lansman’s wife, in an email to Current. In 2003, the station became the first Anchorage station to convert to digital “with a used transmitter converted to digital, and parts Jeremy had purchased on eBay,” Schatz said. “The transmitter, then located in our garage, met the FCC requirement, which Jeremy said was easier than asking the FCC for another extension of time to comply.”
Schatz called Lansman “extraordinary” not only for his “engineering expertise, but also his creative approach to solving problems, and his ability to do what was often considered unconventional (especially by other engineers).”
Lansman showed an early interest in radio and as a kid assembled crystal radio kits, a tube radio and an FM receiver, according to Jesse Walker’s book Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, which documented some of Lansman’s work in radio.
As a teenager, Lansman volunteered at KPFA in Berkeley, Calif. He later dropped out of school and worked at a commercial station, which he didn’t enjoy. “Threading tapes into the blinking automation machine made me feel as though I was little more than an automation myself,” he said in Rebels on the Air. At 18, he moved to Hawaii to start a radio station.
“Every one who met him loved and appreciated him. I am happy for him that he is free now; he lived a beautiful life and had a gentle death,” Buskens wrote in a Facebook post that she shared with Current. “… He was a powerhouse, a force of nature with an indomitable will.”
A celebration of Lansman’s life will take place Feb. 15 in Grabouw, Buskens said.
Correction: Not to take anything away from Jeremy, but, in the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that his then-wife, Carol Schatz, was also a co-owner and active partner in KYES operations/management.