Beating the Algorithm: A Legacy of Mentorship at KCRW
Where is Mister Rogers when we need him?
Four snapshots, of hundreds:
My dad, driving anywhere, listening to the news on WXXI, the Rochester NPR radio station.
My boyfriend sporting a Powdermilk Biscuits shirt and insisting WUOT, the nearest NPR station to his no-stoplight Appalachian town, helped him and his family feel less alone, more connected to the world outside the Smokies;
Hearing “Dr.” in front of my name for the first time on that same NPR station during a pledge drive; and
Nic Harcourt soundtracking my visits to my sister when she moved to Venice Beach.
Public radio is an essential third space in American civic life and culture, both scrappy and communal, a place to be alone/together, to support and be supported by. Even if that “place” is constructed and held through soundwaves, it functions as a room of refuge, designed to be accessible to all.
That was Connie Alvarez’s impression as a first generation American. Growing up, her family only listened to Spanish radio at home, in keeping with her parents’ farsighted domestic policy: “No English at home, no Spanish outside.” Connie wasn’t interested in radio as a kid going through LAUSD schools, though she did notice the more global flavors of Spanish TV news. “Unless there was a giant boa emerging from a pipe in India, something sensationalist or quaint, most English language TV news barely mentioned countries outside the U.S.”
If Connie wasn’t aware of NPR writ large, it was surreptitiously twining into and enhancing her life. As a teen, dates with her now-husband included drives to the beach listening to NPR Playhouse. “The production was old timey, like clomp clomp noises for someone walking away, so I thought it was an old show! Its charm wore me down pretty quickly. I was like ‘fine, I’m into this story.’” In college she worked nights at a logistics company. “No one else was there but us, so we turned on the radio and listened to Garth Trinidad’s “Chocolate City.” As a non-traditional UCLA student, Connie was too broke to live in Westwood. She took two buses to and from campus, a two and a half hour commute. Unable to listen to music for that long, she found a radio program reporting on the Bus Riders Union and People of Metro LA. The time spent commuting morphed from chore to gift. By simply listening to smart people discussing the workings of her city, she received an ancillary education to her university classes. She marveled as she listened: “Who has the time for such deep and nuanced conversations, all without commercials, way over on the left dial?”
When the pledge drive came on—someone in a New York accent saying “Come on over and help us make calls to support public radio”—she thought: “I'm going to call this bluff. I'm going down there to check out whatever this is.” At SMC, she wandered the campus and found a tiny basement studio. “I discovered that the three things I was listening to—Playhouse, Chocolate City, and the Bus Union—were all produced by KCRW. Connie laughs. “I took off my backpack and never left.”
She began by making pledge drive calls. “I wanted to know if this was real,” she says. “It was instantly super fulfilling. I had also never been around so many white people at once, but everyone was so genuine and passionate. I didn't know what I needed, but as soon as I walked in, I realized ‘Oh this is what I needed.’”
Connie remembers Sarah Spitz as one of the most generous and intellectually curious of all the people churning out gold in that cramped basement. “Sarah was already mythic,” Connie gushed. She ‘did everything,’ including producing the bus union pieces. From 1996-2010, Sarah hosted and produced The Politics of Culture, sparking insightful and fruitful conversations. Connie started writing a newsletter to members; Sarah provided the inside scoop. “Sarah was our entire voice, our star pitcher, along with Debbie Adler, who did our music. They both did so much work to get our name out there in a real way. They did true public relations, not cheesy but connective.”
Connie was hired as a freelance volunteer coordinator and ended up filling in for Jennifer Ferro during her maternity leave. One day, Connie was asked to help out and speak to a Mexican journalist. Connie’s first thought was: “Am I dreaming? I don’t have a degree in journalism!” The answer was: “If you have a brain and passion and use one to polish the other, that's what matters here.” She believed the people in that office because they modeled—even embodied—that spark. Here were a bunch of curious people she was hanging around with as a volunteer who became her coworkers. “I adopted that outlook as director of volunteer services,” she says. “When I'm interviewing someone, I’m thinking ‘I’m interviewing you to be our future coworker, our future producer.’ Passion really leads the way.”
At first, passion wasn’t necessarily top of the list for Sarah. Her mom’s gentle but firm goading to find a job with health insurance initiated Sarah’s journey with KCRW.
In 1979, Sarah was in a low place. She was the lead singer in the Casuals—they played parties—but the lead guitarist broke her heart. She was four years into her job in the 16mm film rental division of Universal Pictures. On her commute, she began listening to “Morning Edition” on KUSC, heard the KUSC pledge drive, and found out that MCA (which owned Universal) was matching donations. “I noodged everyone in the office to pledge and later decided to go to the station as a pledge drive volunteer.”
That weekend, she drove to an ugly building in a sketchy neighborhood, and fell in love. Wally Smith handed Sarah a live mic and without thinking, she said on air, “I'm a member and because I’m a member I feel like I own a piece of this station and its programming.” The phones lit up like the Fourth of July.
Fired from Universal, Sarah got her real estate license in 1980, and sold exactly two houses. She lived in a mobile home park in Malibu in her parents’ fifth-wheeler trailer, albeit on a bluff overlooking the ocean, for six months. She started working in property management in 1981, and in 1982, moved to Santa Monica. In 1983, she had a month from hell—getting robbed (she believed it was one of the apartment managers who organized the robbery), fired from her property management job with two weeks’ notice, and then assaulted in her apartment. Around this time, she listened religiously to Morning Becomes Eclectic. She had known Tom Schnabel—who’d started Morning Becomes Eclectic in 1977—at UCLA. Listening to his show—a familiar voice introducing wide-ranging musical artists—was “healing,” she says. She had continued to volunteer at the station “sticking my nose in everyone's business and getting premium memberships.” She overheard the Ruth Seymour say "Sarah could sell ice to eskimos." Sarah laughs. “Ruth was a legend. Under her leadership, our office was one of the first open concept spaces. It made for a few confrontations, but the collaboration and camaraderie far outweighed any downsides.”
In 1988, Ruth Seymour took Sarah to dinner at Gilliland’s, Irish chef Geraldine Gilliland’s once-beloved Santa Monica restaurant (Gilliland’s Luna Cocina Mexicana recently celebrated 30 years in business) and told Sarah she wanted to create a job for her. “Ruth saw something in me I didn't see in myself,” Sarah muses. “Somehow, everyone there did.”
The first time Sarah was on the air as a pledge drive pitcher in 1983 came about because of a blizzard. The programmer in Frazier Park was snowed in, unable to make it to the station for her early morning pitching shift. Sarah asked if she could try instead. Will Lewis agreed to her pinch-hitting. Afterwards, Lewis announced: "A star is born.”
Five years after she was hired, Santa Monica College reclassified jobs across the board which necessitated reapplying for her position. Ruth told Sarah to write a press release as her reapplication. Dustin Hoffman was about to receive an honorary degree from SMC, where he had enrolled in 1955 before dropping out to pursue acting full-time. The headline Sarah wrote was “The Graduate Graduates.”
After the 1992 Rodney King riots, Warren Olney, then-City Council member Mike Woo, and others did a call-in after a Town Hall simulcast with KCET. The idea for “Which way LA?” grew out of that robust call-in. Sarah produced the live show for five years. By 1996, she was producer on “Left, Right, and Center” and "The Politics of Culture," as well as live remote broadcasts. During this time she was also editor of the program guide, which no longer exists. They called it “Splice."
She retired from KCRW in 2010 not long after her mother died. “Everything I learned, I learned on that job,” Sarah says. “To echo Connie, who’s the heart and soul of KCRW, it was that rare alchemy of passion and brains in everyone around me. Put those two things together and the place, the experience—so much more than simply “the job”—will always be as much a part of my body as my arm.”
When I asked what we could do as appreciators of KCRW after the House’s bill to eliminate public media funding, Sarah and Connie did what they’ve been doing so well for so many years: crafting appeals for public support of organizations we need now more than ever. NPR reporting on its own peril is both devastating and poetic, a record of the bravery of the last person standing.
Connie said, “What makes this urgent is how few places disseminate unbiased information, truly for all, outside of the simple silos of accusations and categorizations. Go ahead and criticize it, sure, help make public media better. Remember Sarah saying that when you’re a member you have a piece of it, empowering ownership. We criticize it because we love it, just like the country. But make no mistake”— Connie’s voice was steady as always, but expanded with emotion like a bellow. “We need public media, just like we need our democracy. It’s a way to exist outside the algorithm, whose only mission is to divide us. That urge to click on things from the other side of the political spectrum that upset you? Well you don't have to do that with public media because it’s all here. Public media does the research for us. We need to be a little poked and pinched to venture out of our comfort zones, to find even one connection between what we believe and what others believe just as deeply.” Otherwise, there's no conversation, and without discourse, we’re lost.
“Not that we’re tech-averse,” Connie says. “We just want the tools of technology to resemble pens more than swords.” KCRW was the first radio platform to build a website—before NPR’s!—and was an early adopter of streaming. Steve Jobs played an excerpt “The Treatment” hosted by Elvis Mitchell when introducing the iPod at the World Wide Developers Conference in 2005.
KCRW has always been a trendsetter, a natural outcropping of the station’s unspoken credo of passion, generosity, and curiosity. Beck was busking in Santa Monica when “Loser” was first played on the radio (on Morning Becomes Eclectic, of course). Chris Douridas found Billie Eilish when she was 13 and was the first to broadcast “Ocean Eyes.” Coldplay performed live in the studio when Nic Harcourt was host of MBE—the band’s very first appearance in the US.
One of the first things you saw when entering the station: An ever-growing collection of Polaroids taken by notable guests.
The hundreds of public TV and radio stations are like tendrils across the country, holding us together. “KCRW pulled me out of a 1980’s gangster-ridden neighborhood,” Connie says, “so that I can be that support for others seeking meaning and refuge, a place to discover talents they didn’t know they had and work for the public good.” She laughs. “Like that wedge of the studio where I met Sarah, there’s no dumbing down in this corner.”
After a delicious hour of talking with the two of them, Sarah needed to leave for her volunteer gig at Our Big Kitchens LA. She serves on the advisory board of Food Forward L.A., an organization that rescues produce, to the tune of 1/2 billion pounds, that would otherwise go to waste.
Both Connie and Sarah recorded Story Corps segments with their moms. Connie and her mom Blanca’s segment was even animated! “The story represents my multiple bilingualism—my two languages and cultures, my home-family and my work-family—coming together,” Connie says. “Sarah was a part of that video even though she’s not in it. I found a place where we can bring our whole selves into a situation, be encouraged and nurtured to learn and grow, and then do the same for the next passionate and curious group, creating a legacy of mentorship.”