How this site came about

As I push eighty and my contemporaries die off, I become increasingly concerned about what I’ll leave behind — not my reputation but my legacy, i.e. whatever might be as useful as, say, a rusty pot to a castaway on a desert island. In 1990 I was asked to write a monograph about KPFA's early history for a Danish scholarly journal. The result was “The Lengthening Shadow: Lewis Hill and the Origins of Listener-Sponsored Radio in America". Its readers urged me to expand it into a book, and so in 1994 I extended a concert gig in Canada into a research trip across the US. As I talked to the station's aging survivers, I became convinced that the book should include a CD-ROM with selections both from the interviews I'd recorded and from representative KPFA programs. But no agents or publishers were interested, and I couldn’t take a couple of years off from my work as a sound designer to write it on spec, and so the tapes gathered dust in the attic.

And then in 2008 I attended a workshop on media documentation at the British Library, in the course of which I learned that what I had was not just a box of old tapes, but an Archive of Oral History — one of the trendiest things going! Running up to three-and-a-half hours each, were they too long? The BL's Lead Content Specialist doesn't feel that she's doing her job properly with less than thirty-six!

I also had tapes of many of the programs I had produced or worked on, together with a few others I'd chosen to keep. Here they are in mp3 format, freely available for streamed listening, subject to the usual "fair use" restrictions. You are invited to turn off your BlackBerry and pass through these Stygian portals into living history!