People

James Lee Mathes, 73, and Fred Burgess, 64

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Two public broadcasters active in southern California during the 1960s and 1970s, James Lee Mathes and Fred Burgess, retired to Kansas together in the 1980s. They died within seven months in 2007. James Lee Mathes
James Lee Mathes, 73, a pioneer in public TV at KCET and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, died March 27 [2007] in his home state, Kansas. He had pancreatic cancer. Mathes worked on such KCET projects as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series and an eight-nation simulcast, as well as fundraising and general administration.

People

Ex-NBC news exec will manage WNET

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Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News until 16 months ago, will succeed William Baker as president and c.e.o. of New York’s WNET. Shapiro, 48, a 25-year veteran of network news who ran NBC’s Dateline before heading NBC’s global news operations, will assume one of Baker’s titles next month, serving for a year as president while Baker remains c.e.o. Baker will relinquish the chief exec role next February, becoming president emeritus. The board of Educational Broadcasting Corp., licensee of both WNET and WLIW in Long Island, unanimously approved the transition plan on Jan. 18, ending a year-long executive recruitment process that began as a search to replace Paula Kerger, former c.o.o., who left WNET to become PBS president last March. “As we did the search I realized that, ultimately, this person has to be capable of replacing me,” said Baker.

People

Paths to pubradio stardom: drifting, struggling and on a beeline

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Lisa A. Phillips has just started appearing in bookstores to promote her newly published Public Radio Behind the Voices (CDS Books, 334 pages), which profiles 43 national program hosts and other stars. To be ready in case she’s interviewed, Phillips has virtually memorized her book. Quick! Who had accountants for fathers? She ticks them off: Ira Glass, Michael Feldman and Bob Edwards.

People

Orozco gives small station big-league news presence

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Lance Orozco is one of Southern California’s most honored and recognized journalists. Yet he doesn’t work for the Los Angeles Times or a commercial megastation. Orozco has instead landed dozens of awards from area press groups by making an unlikely news powerhouse out of tiny KCLU-FM in Thousand Oaks, a Ventura County suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The station employs just four full-time staffers but has won a flood of praise for the extensive local coverage spearheaded by Orozco, its news director and reporting dynamo. Last month the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and Nevada awarded KCLU and Orozco nine of its Mark Twain Awards, including one naming him Radio Reporter of the Year.

People

Democrats suggest ex-Sen. Pryor for one of the two CPB Board vacancies

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The Senate Democratic leadership has asked the White House to appoint a Senate alumnus, David H. Pryor of Arkansas, to one of the two vacancies on the nine-seat CPB Board. The former senator is dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Pryor would fill a long-vacant seat reserved for a non-Republican under a provision of the Public Broadcasting Act that requires the CPB Board to be bipartisan. The Bush administration refused to nominate an earlier Democratic candidate for the seat, media studies professor Chon Noriega. The other vacant seat probably would be filled by a Republican.

Obituaries

Julia Child quenched our hunger for learning — and living

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In the days before her 92nd birthday, Julia Child had been suffering kidney failure, according to her niece, Philadelphia Cousins. On Thursday, Aug. 12, “in her characteristically decisive way, she removed her oxygen mask, declined to go to the hospital and closed her eyes.” The public TV host who introduced America to fine cooking died in her sleep the next morning in her home in Montecito, Calif. “Julia Child let the hot air out of not only high cuisine but also public broadcasting,” said Scott Simon the next day on NPR.

People

Frugal Gourmet Jeff Smith dies

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Jeff Smith, a popular advocate for simple and multicultural cooking on public TV, died in his sleep July 7 [2004] in Seattle. He was 65 and suffered from heart disease. The Frugal Gourmet, hosted by the white-bearded Methodist chaplain in a striped apron, aired on PBS from 1983 to 1997, making Smith a top chef on the network after Julia Child had established cooking as a staple for public TV. Smith virtually disappeared from public view in the late 1990s after a number of men accused him of sexually abusing them when they were teenagers.

People

Obituary: Larry Hall, 74, advocate for independent producers

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A leading advocate for independent producers and openness in the governance of public broadcasting, Laurence S. Hall died Feb. 21 [2004] after a recurrence of cancer, according to one of his sons, Ole Hall. He was 74. Hall was one of “the three Larrys” — the others being Lawrence Daressa and Lawrence Sapadin — who were among the leaders of the 1980s movement to secure a role for independent producers in public TV. If there was one person responsible for that “modest miracle of legislation,” Daressa said recently, it was Hall.

People

Alistair Cooke, 95

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Just five weeks after filing his last Letter from America for the BBC, Alistair Cooke died March 30 [2004] at his home in Manhattan. He was 95 and had heart disease. Cooke had delivered the Letter for 58 years, far exceeding his 26 years as a U.S. correspondent for Britain’s Guardian newspaper or the mere 22 years he hosted Masterpiece Theatre.

People

Grammy academy salutes McPartland for ‘timeless legacy’ of music

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The Recording Academy presented a 2004 Trustees Award to jazz pianist and public radio host Marian McPartland. The award recognizes “music people who have made the greatest impact on our culture,” said Neil Portnow, president of the Academy. “Their outstanding accomplishments and passion for their craft have created a timeless legacy that has positively affected multiple generations and will continue to influence generations to come.” Through her public radio series Piano Jazz, McPartland has introduced generations of listeners to the genre. The series, which received a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, celebrates its 25th anniversary this spring.

People

Coonrod’s plan works: Cox will head CPB

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Kathleen A. Cox will step up from chief operating officer of CPB, becoming the corporation’s first woman president July 1 [2004]. Robert T. Coonrod, president since 1997, said he recognized her as a good successor four years ago and groomed her for the job. The CPB Board announced Cox’s promotion Jan. 27. Coonrod will work with her at CPB until October and says he wants to find a new job after that.

People

WETA founder Elizabeth Campbell dies at 101

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Elizabeth Campbell, founder of WETA in Washington, D.C., and a pioneer of educational television in the U.S., died Jan. 9 [2004] in Arlington, Va., after suffering from respiratory problems.

People

‘Piano Jazz’ host Marian McPartland, a dame at jazz crossroads

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Piano Jazz hits its silver anniversary in April, a landmark that surprises nobody more than venerated host and pianist Marian McPartland. “It’s kind of amazing that we’ve managed to be on the air for 25 years and no end in sight,” she says with a laugh. “I sort of envisioned doing it for a few months, or at the most a year. It never occurred to me that people would like it as much as they do.” Today it ranks among public radio’s most popular music programs, airing on 241 stations and reaching almost 400,000 listeners a week.

People

Yankee pitchman, former GBH pres David Ives dies at 84

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David Otis Ives cultivated an eccentric Yankee image as a WGBH pitchman that endeared him to New England audiences and helped fuel the Boston station’s emergence as a national production powerhouse. His enthusiasm for the station seemed boundless as he demonstrated pledge premiums, performed songs and skits, and even rode an elephant on camera. Ives

Beneath the madcap persona, WGBH’s fourth president was a stickler for good grammar, deportment and intellectual rigor — standards he set with “great humor and grace,” recalled Brigid Sullivan, VP of children’s, educational and interactive media. Ives, 84, died May 16 after becoming ill while visiting family in San Francisco. Henry Becton, who succeeded Ives as president in 1984, called Ives “a national leader, a Boston institution and a wise and generous mentor.

People

Julia Child’s place in the Smithsonian

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Julia Child’s kitchen is now in the nation’s attic, the Smithsonian Institution’s history museum on the Mall, inserted into a miscellaneous area behind the north escalators on the first floor, past the artificial heart, Bakelite radios and Carol Burnett’s charwoman costume. Visitors last week intently watched excerpts from her many pubTV cooking shows compiled for the 2000 pledge special Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom. (At one point she advises people to eat the green stuff in lobsters, which she claims is just delicious.) Last fall Smithsonian curators crated up her big, rectangular kitchen in her former home in Cambridge, Mass. They meticulously reassembled it at the museum behind clear plastic shields, complete with pans on pegboards, countertops raised 2 inches for the 6-foot tall cook, and the pipe along the ceiling where TV crews hung lights. “I wish I could come in and turn everything on — it looks exactly right,” Child said at the opening of the exhibit Aug.

People

Hull pursues personal history, 72 years ago in Rapid City

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Now that he’s retiring, Ron Hull has time to find out who he is. Not that he or anyone else in public TV is uncertain on that point. Hull is one of the field’s most prominent advocates for good programs and a memorable character who flips his tie over his shoulder when he gets excited, which is often. He worked most of 47 years at the University of Nebraska’s public TV network, leaving periodically and coming back again to its program side, which he tended while Jack McBride built the transmitters, the relationships and an array of ambitious projects based in Lincoln. Hull is retiring from half-time work at the university this month, but his to-do list is full: dedicating a study center for Nebraska author Mari Sandoz at Chadron State College, raising a million bucks for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Commission celebration in 2004, and tracking down who his parents were.

People
Stanford Calderwood

Series founder Stanford Calderwood dies

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Stanford Calderwood, who served only a few months as president of WGBH, Boston, but initiated one of its most enduring franchises, Masterpiece Theatre, died May 9 [2002]. He was 81. Calderwood brought together costume dramas from British TV producers with a long-term underwriter, Mobil Corp.—a formula that defines the series today, more than three decades after it went on the air in January 1971. He served in World War II before entering journalism and becoming a marketing exec for Polaroid Corp., based in Cambridge, Mass. After putting Polaroid money behind Julia Child and other WGBH projects, he succeeded Hartford Gunn as president of the station.

People

Bill McCarter, chief exec of independent-minded WTTW/WFMT, Chicago

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Bill McCarter, who headed Chicago’s WTTW for 27 years before retiring in 1998, died of complications from cancer April 21. He was 81. Newton Minow, a former FCC chair and WTTW trustee, recruited McCarter from WETA in Washington, D.C., to run WTTW in 1972. “I have a very high opinion and respect for Bill,” Minow once said. “He is everything you could want in a person, a broadcaster and leader.

Obituaries

Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, succumbed to brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden died at his home in Rockville, Md., with his wife and two daughters
close by. He had been diagnosed with the disease in December 2000.