Chatting with Ruth Seymour

Before Ruth Seymour retires next month as the power behind NPR station KCRW, the February issue of Los Angeles magazine sits her down for a Q&A with editor Richard E. Meyer. It hits many of the topics you'd expect, and it's already online. Seymour says don't expect a memoir of her three decades as a public radio pioneer: "I don’t want to relive the past. It is enough for me to have lived it." Another excerpt:

What was your best decision at KCRW?

To stay. It was enormously difficult at the beginning, and I really lost heart. We had one typewriter that continually broke down. We had only five employees, including myself. The chairs were missing legs where they would topple over. The station was licensed to Santa Monica College, and the college was under a lot of pressure to shut the damn thing down. The administration was very, very supportive, but there was great doubt in every other part of the college....

You’re “strange but brilliant,” people say. “A grand eccentric.”

I’m not eccentric. In fact, among eccentrics, I think I would be considered extremely conventional. Public radio used to be full of people like me. None of them were eccentric. They were just individualistic. But as time went on, very talented people could earn more in commercial entertainment, and the kind of people who were attracted to public broadcasting were administrators. They were not programmers, whereas in my world that’s the whole thing. It’s about programming. It’s about content. So some of us who stayed were probably considered eccentric.

Cropped photo of Ruth Seymour in Los Angeles magazine / Marc Goldstein