Current (https://current.org/category/people/page/86/)
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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at CPB, died of brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden
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.
Jon might say that his prime legacy is this television station. What Jim Day and Jon Rice created from nothing more than a dream is an enviable monument. He loved KQED without reservation. He loved it with a passion that didn’t waver for 47 years.
Jonathan C. Rice, the storied program director and co-founder of KQED-TV in San Francisco, died July 22 [2001] at the age of 85. He succumbed at his home in the city after a long illness.
The 100 hours that made Glen Jones famous started and ended with a dream. To be precise, they started with “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and ended with a wistful ballad, Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream.” In between, Jones, who hosts a weekly show on WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., weathered extreme fatigue and, if his feat is verified, broke the Guinness world’s record for most continuous hours of deejaying. Actually, “broke” is not strong enough — he spun records and interviewed guests for a whole extra day longer than the former record of 73 hours and 33 minutes, set last September by a British deejay. [The publishers of The Guinness Book of World Records verified the record later in the year, according to WFMU.]
His marathon featured a comprehensive mix of American pop music, everything from classic rock to big band to show tunes.
With this year’s Edward R. Murrow Award, CPB not only honored Richard
H. Madden as key leader in public radio, but also affirmed a set of
ideas closely identified with him, which he helped move from the edge
to the center of thinking in the field. During Madden’s three decades in the field, and especially his 18 years
at CPB, public radio had overcome its earlier aversion to ratings data,
allowed numbers to enter its objectives and learned how to build a focused
format and a larger, appreciative audience. “We’re not a ‘smaller is better’ enterprise anymore, and none of us
can think with that mindset,” Madden said in his acceptance speech May
17 during the Public Radio Conference in Seattle. NPR President Kevin Klose reported supporting evidence during the conference — that
public radio’s weekly full-day cumulative audience had doubled in a decade, from 13.9 million in 1990 to 29.5 million in 2000. CPB did not readily select one its own v.p. of radio for the 25th annual
Murrow Award.
“In the beginning, we were really not political radicals. But we were radicals for the medium of radio.”
… David Isay, along with a growing number of gifted documentary-makers, are now experiencing the satisfaction of creating serious inquiries into contemporary events and, especially, human nature….
James T. Yee, former executive director of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) died March 17 in Piedmont, Calif., after an 18-month battle with cancer. He was 53. The former producer and community organizer headed ITVS for seven of its 10 years, 1994-2000. He fought off numerous budget cuts for the CPB-funded service, while building connections between public TV and his constituency of independent producers. Before joining ITVS, Yee co-founded and served as first executive director of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, helping to raise the profile of Asian-Americans in TV and film.
. . . And the way she couples spur-of-the-moment decision-making and openness to change with highly principled management has prompted some to call her the “Lady of the Iron Whim,” one of her many nicknames. She is not afraid to make enemies, or even fire longtime volunteers, if it helps keep the schedule fresh. . . .
All of these years, Diane Rehm’s voice: the vehicle for ordinary sentences she enunciates so emphatically that they carry their utmost weight. But creaky on the edges, hitting snags. It’s a voice reliably there at midmorning on her NPR talk show, familiar; listeners love it. Except for the inevitable detractors, who say they find Rehm grating, or schoolmarmish. Love or hate that voice, it’s illuminating to learn that a physical problem contributes to Rehm’s on-air distinctiveness.
Chief Operating Officer Bob Ottenhoff is leaving the No. 2 position at PBS after eight years working for Ervin Duggan and the previous president, Bruce Christensen.
News of the change, already circulating in heavy rotation at the PBS Annual Meeting when Duggan announced it during the June 6 opening session, mystified station executives and even some PBS Board members. It added a new story element to what one former board member called “a range of colossally uninformed mispeculation” that Duggan was either (a) confidently moving ahead, (b) soon to lose his own job, or (c) both. High-ranking board members said nothing. Beth Wolfe, PBS’s chief financial officer since 1988, will take oversight of Ottenhoff’s departments, with the new title of chief administrative officer.
When the NPR-distributed program Piano Jazz had its 20th anniversary in 1999, Current Contributing Editor David Stewart wrote this profile of the program and its host. Marian McPartland is the host of the longest-running jazz program in the history of network radio. Her Piano Jazz has also enjoyed the longest run of any entertainment series on NPR. In March 1998, she celebrated her 80th birthday on stage at New York’s Town Hall. Billy Taylor, himself the host of an NPR jazz series, Billy Taylor’s Jazz from the Kennedy Center, kept up the musical action as a parade of Marian’s friends came to perform and wish her well: pianists Tommy Flanagan, Jacky Terrasson and Ray Bryant, bassists Christian McBride and Bill Crow, drummers Joe Morello, Grady Tate and Lewis Nash, and trumpeter Harry (“Sweets”) Edison, among others.
Henry Hampton, the visionary filmmaker who documented the history of the civil rights movement with the landmark PBS series Eyes on the Prize, died Nov. 22 [1998]. He was 58. Hampton recovered from lung cancer some nine years ago, but complications from the treatment that sent the disease into remission claimed his life. The official cause of his death was myelodysplasia, a bone-marrow disease.
Masterpiece Theatre was a relatively short run for Alistair Cooke, and his intros mere appetizers. For more of Cooke, as he turns 90, sample some of his half-century of BBC essays. Some journalists make reporting seem easy, almost effortless. They express wise and frequently complicated ideas with directness, intelligence and wit. Their manner is both straightforward and entertaining — and above all, informative.
Michael Taylor believed in second chances — he was living proof that they come along. Before the early 1990s, the Los Angeles resident had been an addict, a dealer, eventually homeless. But one day he decided to turn his life around, and achieved the miracle — sobered up, straightened out and found his legitimate passions: community activism and radio. He became a reporter and later an occasional host of public affairs programming on Pacifica station KPFK. So he was a felt presence among Los Angeles’ South-Central community of leftists and grassroots organizers at the time of his cold-blooded murder over nothing more than a low-power radio transmitter, in April 1996.
In most sexual abuse cases, it’s one person’s word against another’s. In the Frugal Gourmet’s case, it was his word against 20 or more. Four days before he was to face trial in Tacoma, Wash., Jeff Smith, host of the popular PBS cooking show, agreed July 1 [1998] to pay an undisclosed sum to seven young men who had accused him variously of groping, kissing and raping them when they were teenagers. “Based on my interviews with a lot of the principals involved, I think it would have been pretty ugly,” says Deborah Holton, a Portland Oregonian reporter who has followed the story closely. Court TV had asked to cover the trial, and it could have featured testimony against Smith from more than a dozen people who didn’t sue him, as well as the seven who did.
Two decades ago, Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil gave public television a kind of news program that contrasted greatly with the aims of big-network journalism, and the distinction has grown year by year with the decay of the network news divisions. Contributing Editor David Stewart, retired director of international activities at CPB, profiled Lehrer for a forthcoming book on the major programs of public TV. In 1970, on a steaming summer morning in Dallas, I walked into a large room of the public TV station KERA and met Jim Lehrer for the first time. He was seated alone at the end of a long rectangular table, its surface strewn with daily papers, reporters’ notes, overflowing ashtrays and half-empty mugs of coffee. He was studying a clutch of wire service stories, shirt sleeves rolled back, tie pulled away from his unbuttoned collar — the city editor from central casting, I remember thinking.
Fred W. Friendly, the legendary CBS News producer who tried to bring innovation to public TV in the 1960s and later developed a celebrated series of televised seminars on major public policy issues, died March 3 at his home in New York City. He was 82. “He was a great broadcaster, a great innovator, a great friend of public television,” observed PBS President Ervin Duggan in a release. At CBS, Friendly worked for years with Edward R. Murrow, producing many of his appearances, including the milestone 1954 report that questioned Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and the famous CBS Reports: “Harvest of Shame” on the lives of migrant workers, aired in 1960. He was named president of the news division in 1964 and quit two years later when the network carried an I Love Lucy rerun instead of a Senate hearing on the Vietnam war.
As I write these words, Frederick Wiseman’s 30th film, Public Housing, is about to be broadcast, Dec. 1 [1998], through PBS, the national network that has presented all of his documentaries. It concerns the Ida B. Wells housing development on Chicago’s South Side. The sites of his past documentaries have varied from high schools to hospitals, from public parks to private playgrounds. He has shown us the inside of military and police units, welfare and model agencies, prisons, a primate research lab, a meat packing plant and a zoo.
Ralph B. Rogers, the Dallas businessman who re-founded and perhaps saved PBS in the early 1970s, died Nov. 4 after a long illness. He was 87. In business, Rogers was millionaire founder and, until recently, chairman of Texas Industries, a concrete and building materials firm now known as TXI. But in his civic life, he was many men–“one of the last survivors of a generation of leaders who shaped Dallas after World War II,” according to the Dallas Morning News.