March 29, 2024

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, Guru of Community Radio, Is Dead at 86

The silences — which on a commercial station would have been filled at least partly by ads — were an element of Mr. Milam’s noncommercial policy.

“Broadcast time is too valuable to be sold,” he said on the Wallace program. “I think it should be given away — and I think it should be given away with a rose.”

Mr. Milam was not the architect of noncommercial radio. The first such station was said to be KPFA-FM in Berkeley, Calif., founded in 1949 by Lewis Hill, who also established the Pacifica Foundation, its parent organization. Mr. Milam volunteered at KPFA in the late 1950s while he was taking graduate courses at the University of California, Berkeley.

“If Lew Hill fathered the movement, Lorenzo Milam reared it,” Jesse Walker wrote in “Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America” (2001).

Mr. Milam left KRAB in the late 1960s and helped start commercial-free stations in St. Louis, San Francisco, Dallas, Portland, Ore., Los Gatos, Calif., and elsewhere. KRAB went off the air in 1984.

“He was so excited about radio and truly believed in it,” Mr. Reinsch, who is also KRAB’s archivist, said in an interview. “He had this fantasy that he would change the world with it.”

Lorenzo Wilson Milam was born on Aug. 2, 1933, in Jacksonville, Fla. His father, Robert, was a lawyer and real estate investor. His mother, Meriel, was a homemaker.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/business/media/lorenzo-milam-dead.html

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