Lorenzo Milam, legendary pioneer of neighborhood radio, dies at 86
“A broadcaster ought to be inspired to be experimental.” — Lorenzo Milam
Lorenzo Milam died July 19 in Pueblo Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was 86. He was a pacesetter in incapacity rights, publishing and half a dozen different pursuits.
However in neighborhood radio, Lorenzo was a legend in his personal time. He impressed a whole lot of individuals to start out neighborhood radio stations throughout the nation, myself included, and has left us a raucous and sprawling residing legacy.
Lorenzo was some of the influential and provoking characters ever to take a seat behind a microphone. By way of his playful genius and uncompromising dedication to the First Modification proper of free speech, Lorenzo was largely chargeable for making a nationwide motion that launched a whole lot of grassroots stations, touched hundreds of lives and warped the form of public broadcasting ceaselessly.
Lorenzo realized primary operations at his school radio station, however it was his discovery of KPFA, the unique Pacifica station in Berkeley, Calif., that remodeled him from a DJ into an iconoclastic radio pioneer.
He was so captured by the distinctive pacifist programming and listener sponsorship of KPFA that in 1958 he tried to start out a Pacifica-like station himself in Washington, D.C. When that didn’t work out as a result of the FCC was frightened of a Pacifica voice in our nation’s capital, he fled to Seattle. There he was in a position to fulfill his dream of a freeform, anti-commercial station — KRAB. (Pacifica finally did get that license for Washington, D.C, and WPFW went on the air in 1977.)
With the assistance of gifted mad-scientist engineer and partner-in-crime Jeremy Lansman, KRAB went on the air in 1963 and was the primary non-Pacifica station to supply a extremely broad and quirky vary of voices, music and tradition over the airwaves. “Lorenzo was an extremely affected person mentor,” stated Chuck Reinsch, KRAB’s common supervisor. “He shared his dream and made the hassle and the battle to attain it interesting.”
Within the ’60s and ’70s, the nation was roiled by the civil rights motion, Watergate, rising opposition to the battle in Vietnam, and the revolution in norms that introduced in regards to the counterculture and Woodstock Nation. So whereas CPB, created in 1967, was aiming to professionalize “instructional” radio, Pacifica stations and KRAB had been pumping out sounds and voices that mirrored a really completely different politics.
On the time, frequencies on the academic portion of the FM band had been comparatively out there, and the precise course of to use for a noncommercial license was technical however not troublesome. Lorenzo acknowledged it was a second ripe with the opportunity of filling the spectrum with extra “different” radio stations.
All the time a prolific author, he produced a slim booklet known as Intercourse and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Find out how to Begin a Radio Station for the Group. It was a simple step-by-step information for learn how to discover a frequency, arrange a neighborhood group, fill out the FCC software, wait a yr for a building allow, after which, as soon as it was all assembled, put essentially the most outrageous programming doable on the air.
The pamphlet was an underground smash, and Lorenzo produced a second version of Intercourse and Broadcasting in 1974 as an precise e book (Dildo Press; with 20 pages on Find out how to Begin a Station and 300 pages of his musings and essays from the KRAB Program Information).
This version turned the enduring publication of neighborhood radio. In brief order, native teams started to use for radio licenses and be granted building permits in all places – Pittsburgh; Cincinnati; Denver; Dallas; New Orleans; Atlanta; Minneapolis; Salt Lake Metropolis; Lincoln, Neb.; Tampa, Fla.; Madison, Wis.; Austin, Texas; Little Rock, Ark.; and Portland, Ore., in addition to small cities like Telluride, Colo.; Park Metropolis, Utah; and Provincetown, Mass.
By way of Lorenzo, these teams had been in shut contact with one another, and shortly it was obvious {that a} vital mass of station initiatives was underway.
I’ll be exhibiting my age right here: That is the interval after I was seduced by neighborhood radio. I used to be a pupil at Antioch Faculty, and my private curiosity in sociology and mass communications introduced me to WYSO, the campus station. Although not a neighborhood licensee, a lot of the programming was produced by native volunteers, and the faculty itself was changing into a hub for different media — not solely radio, but in addition movie, video, pictures and journalism.
It was right here that I first heard of The KRAB Nebula tape change, ¼-inch audio tapes that had been being despatched between stations to share applications, which we aired on WYSO. It was additionally the place I met Jeremy Lansman, who put a duplicate of the Intercourse and Broadcasting booklet in my arms.
After commencement, I moved to Cincinnati with another Antiochians “to start out a radio station.” Stepchild Radio of Cincinnati Inc. acquired a building allow in 1974, and in 1975 WAIF hit the airwaves, the identical week as WORT in Madison (we had a pleasant rivalry with them to see who would get on the air first). Having an precise voice on the radio dial — it was very thrilling!
I met Lorenzo in particular person early in 1975, when he invited a pair dozen radio initiatives to satisfy on the KRAB firehouse studio. An organizing effort ensued, which led to 80+ radio-activists exhibiting up in Madison that summer time for NARK, the Nationwide Various Radio Konvention.
Lorenzo shared his imaginative and prescient at NARK: “That is the place the true neighborhood radio thought emerged: one which relies on hordes of volunteers and fixed inflow with freeform rambunctious, tearing-up radio, lastly torn away from the pale grey shadows that had encumbered instructional radio in america for 40 years.”
It wasn’t lengthy after {that a} dozen stations convened in Cincinnati, hosted on my own and WAIF, with the specific objective of making a nationwide group. On the finish of the weekend, the Nationwide Federation of Group Broadcasters was shaped, and Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford, recent from Lorenzo’s station KDNA in St. Louis, had been headed to Washington, D.C., to arrange store.
The scores of stations that had been constructed within the ’70s and created NFCB represented a second technology of neighborhood radio modeled on KRAB and Pacifica. A 3rd technology of stations signed on within the subsequent decade, together with many minority initiatives similar to Native American stations and Radio Bilingüe, which created their very own mannequin for funding and program manufacturing. Most however not all of those shops are nonetheless on the air.
The fourth technology of stations is likely one of the extra dramatic developments in public radio — the creation of LPFM, the low-power radio service. Now boasting a whole lot of stations, LPFM is the brainchild of Pete Tridish, a broadcast engineer and former pirate radio DJ who clearly credit Lorenzo. “I solely met him as soon as, however Lorenzo wrote the blueprint for my life in Intercourse and Broadcasting,” Pete stated.
Lorenzo’s imaginative and prescient for neighborhood radio rested on prepared volunteers to run the station, in entrance of and behind the microphones. As Grey Haertig, one other engineer, tells it, “I walked into KRAB in 1966, on the age of 16, and the odd, bespectacled man with thein quiet, amused voice and crutches gave me a job because the Monday night time announcer, primarily as a result of I might pronounce the bizarre names of the (regularly) bizarre classical music that was interspersed between all the opposite bizarre stuff all through the day. Unbeknownst to me on the time, my life’s trajectory had been set.”
I’ve to share yet one more occasion in Lorenzo’s legacy: The Lansman-Milam Petition.
Lorenzo and Jeremy had been at all times on the lookout for methods to poke the forms on the FCC and problem the principles. In 1974 they turned alarmed that the proliferation of non secular radio stations throughout the noncommercial band, together with multiples of university-owned licenses, wouldn’t go away any room for brand spanking new neighborhood candidates.
They submitted RM-2493, a Petition for Rulemaking on the FCC that requested a freeze on issuing new building permits throughout the noncommercial band till the FCC might decide clear standards for who might apply for these restricted frequencies.
Whether or not they deliberate it or not, they unleashed such a firestorm on the FCC that the Fee has nonetheless not recovered.
The attorneys for a lot of of those spiritual broadcasters noticed the petition and instantly declared that it was an effort to finish spiritual broadcasting. The stations urged their listeners to write down to the FCC and demand these godless heathens not take their stations off the air.
The FCC acquired extra mail on this topic than some other in its historical past. Actually thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of type letters and postcards poured in from churchgoers across the nation. There was additionally the false rumor that the infamous atheist Madeline Murray O’Hair was behind this plot to close down spiritual radio.
To set the document straight in his personal vogue, Lorenzo printed The Petition Towards God, however this explicit rumor has persevered over time, and periodically even now the FCC receives new mounds of mail.
Radio waves by no means die. So Lorenzo’s voice remains to be going out into area, urging us to be outrageous. Lorenzo did many different issues together with his life after he left neighborhood radio, however his best legacy might be that he impressed hundreds of standard individuals to rework the airwaves and make them their very own.
Nan Rubin has been a neighborhood media organizer and activist for greater than 40 years. With a selected deal with coverage and expertise, Nan helped create each the up to date actions for media justice and media reform. She constructed neighborhood stations WAIF in Cincinnati and KUVO in Denver, and he or she was a founding member of NFCB and AMARC, the World Affiliation of Group Radio Broadcasters, primarily based in Montreal. She lives in Las Cruces, N.M., the place KTAL-LP, her newest station mission, has been serving 100,000-plus individuals within the Mesilla Valley for 3 years.