PACIFICA RADIO Archives IN THE NEWS
Pacifica Radio Archives' November 19th special day of programming
has generated some national news! Below are links to 5 differnet
articles printed about this special day for Pacifica.
(The following links will direct you to the corresponding
articles)
Tolling of the bellwether - Pacifica Radio
Network Struggles To Save Its Past
San Francisco Chronicle; Tyche Hendricks [Page A - 21]
November 21, 2002
The Pacifica Radio Network Is In A Race
Against Time To Salvage Its Disintegrating Library Of Historic
Tapes.
Special to The Times; Steve Carney
November 18, 2002
Pacifica Raising Money To Save Priceless
Tapes
New York Daily News; David Hinckley
November 18, 2002
Save The Archive
Chronicle Staff Writer; Dan Fost [Page B - 1]
November 14, 2002
Save The Voices Of Maslcolm X And Other
Rare Recordings
Bay View Newspaper San Francisco
November 13, 2002
Support
the Pacifica Radio Archives Online
(use the secure web server to help preserve our living history)
PACIFICA RADIO IN THE NEWS
Tolling of the bellwether - Pacifica Radio
Network Struggles To Save Its Past
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, November 21, 2002
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/21/BA1481.DTL
Berkeley -- Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio bellows
through a megaphone atop a police car at a 1964 UC Berkeley
rally. Playwright Bertolt Brecht testifies before the House
Un-American Activities Committee. Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar
Romero gives his last interview before his 1980 assassination.
They are among the voices on 47,000 recordings in the Pacifica
Radio Archives in Los Angeles, and they are in various
states of decrepitude.
The listener-sponsored Pacifica
radio network, which includes Berkeley's KPFA-FM,
has made news over the past few years for its bitter internal
struggles, but it is also noteworthy for an unusual audio
library that spans more than half a century of political and
intellectual history.
"It's a priceless cultural record," said Gary Handman,
director of the Media Resource Center at UC Berkeley's Moffitt
Library. "(Pacifica) has chronicled most of the bellwether
social and political movements around the country over the
last 50 years or so."
Handman, who has collaborated with the archive to post on
the Internet recordings documenting the history of both the
Free Speech Movement and the Black Panther Party, said he
hopes to see more of the collection preserved and made available
to the public.
"The recorded voice and on-site recordings of events
have a power and immediacy that the printed word doesn't,"
he said. "But that treasure is only as good as the access
to it."
Now the archives are initiating a campaign to preserve the
old open tapes -- some of which are gummed up by moisture
-- and transfer them all to compact disks.
Pacifica has applied for grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, among others, and hopes to match them with $200,000
in listener donations. A 13-hour fund-raising marathon Tuesday
on the five Pacifica stations brought in $170,000, said archives
director Brian De Shazor.
"The money is going to preservation equipment, supplies
and training," De Shazor said. "And we have immediate
work to do on the air conditioner for the room where we keep
the tapes."
The archives include speeches by Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank
Lloyd Wright and Malcolm X; poetry readings by Allen Ginsberg,
Maya Angelou and Dylan Thomas, and interviews with Simone
de Beauvoir, John Coltrane and Huey Newton.
"Sitting in my chair here and listening to Dr. Martin
Luther King speaking outside a jail where Joan Baez was put
for protesting the Vietnam War, I'm floored by the depth and
wealth of material the archive has," said KPFA interim
General Manager Jim Bennett during Tuesday's marathon. "These
were things that weren't being recorded elsewhere."
Excerpts from the tapes have been used in documentaries,
such as the Public Broadcasting Service series on the civil
rights movement, "Eyes on the Prize," and by scholars
of American social history. The archive has an online catalog,
from which the public can order copies of tapes.
Pacifica began broadcasting in 1949 when KPFA was founded
by World War II- era pacifists as the nation's first listener-sponsored
radio station. With a mission at the station to promote peace
and cross-cultural understanding, the programming ever since
has been an eclectic mixture of left-leaning public affairs
coverage, music, literature and the often unpolished voices
of activists and ordinary people.
A protracted battle over control of the nonprofit network
left Pacifica weakened financially and organizationally, and
only in the past year have the five stations begun regaining
a sense of stability. Last month, KPFA listeners contributed
a record $1 million to help rebuild the local station.
De Shazor said the daylong program of archival tape was
a good reminder of the network's activist roots.
"People are saying, 'Oh, this is the history of where
Pacifica has been, and this is where it needs to be now.'
"
David Seubert, curator of the performing arts collection
of the Davidson Library at UC Santa Barbara, has been advising
the network on how to preserve its recordings.
"There's an extraordinarily rich collection there, not
just political but related to arts and literature," he
said. "It's a unique source of information about our
culture and our times."
The library is on the Web at www.pacificaradioarchives.org
or can be contacted by phone at (800) 735-0230.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 21
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SAVING VOICES OF A GENERATION
The Pacifica radio network is in a race against time
to salvage its disintegrating library of historic tapes.
Steve Carney; Special to The Times
November 18 2002
www.calendarlive.com/tv/radio/cl-et-carney18nov18.story
Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abbie
Hoffman, Cesar Chavez -- these and other famous figures from
American history may be gone, but their voices live on in
a massive library of recordings at the Pacifica radio network.
But those are in danger of fading away too.
Housed at the network's local affiliate, KPFK-FM
(90.7) in North Hollywood, most of the 47,000-tape collection
resides in a packed storage room, cooled by an air conditioner
meant for a space half the size.
Faced with inadequate facilities and deteriorating acetate
and magnetic recordings, Pacifica's five-station network,
which includes stations in Berkeley,
Houston,
New York
and Washington, D.C., is
planning a daylong pledge drive Tuesday to raise $200,000
to help restore, preserve and house the tapes.
"It's a recorded history of the 1st Amendment,"
said J. Brian DeShazor, the Pacifica archives manager. "Every
American should understand it and appreciate it and help fund
it. It is our collective history."
Among the selections from the network's 53-year history
is a recording of King's 1968 jailhouse visit with Joan Baez,
imprisoned in Northern California during an antiwar protest.
A Pacifica reporter was there and taped the meeting.
"That tape has already deteriorated in sound quality.
We could lose some of those rare, valuable recordings that
represent our 1st Amendment," DeShazor said.
The recordings are significant not just because of the speakers
and the messages they convey, he said, but also because of
the power of the voices themselves -- greater than simply
words on a printed page. For example, DeShazor described a
recording of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was
brutalized by police for leading voter registration efforts
in Mississippi.
"You hear in her voice how she had been beaten for so
many years, but you can also hear how she had been empowered,"
he said. "You can hear all of her struggle. It's very
powerful."
Tuesday's programming will feature selections from the archives,
focusing on topics including civil rights, civil liberties,
women's studies, Native American rights and the peace movement,
and donors can receive excerpts as premiums.
"They are sitting on a treasure," said Ruth Seymour,
general manager at KCRW-FM (89.9), who was arts director at
KPFK in the early '60s and program director in the 1970s.
"If you really wanted to go back and do a compendium
on American life, they have stuff that boggles the mind. It's
very valuable."
But the recordings aren't all political rhetoric and firebrand
speeches.
The library also includes landmarks of arts and literature,
with performances by jazz great Duke Ellington, folk singer
Pete Seeger, blues singer Big Mama Thornton and pianist Bill
Evans, among many others. Ernest Hemingway reads"In Harry's
Bar in Venice," Bette Davis discusses youth and age in
Hollywood, and Maya Angelou recites a poem about womanhood.
And in a nod to the radio drama that had been a staple of
Pacifica programming, the network commissioned a remake of
the classic thriller "Sorry, Wrong Number," starring
Shirley Knight and Ed Asner. That will air at 4 p.m. Tuesday
on KPFK.
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PACIFICA RAISING MONEY TO SAVE PRICELESS TAPES
David Hinckley; Daily News Staff Writer
November 18th, 2002
www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/36303p-34287c.html
New York Daily News
To save 50 years of irreplaceable social, cultural, political
and broadcast history, WBAI (99.5 FM) will join its four sister
stations tomorrow to raise money for the Pacifica Archives.
The one-day drive's goal is $200,000.
With about 47,000 tapes dating back to the early 1950's,
mostly on reel-to-reel, Pacifica faces the same crisis as
archivists everywhere. Over time, tapes deteriorate and contents
must be transferred.
"We've taken care of them, but over the next two years,
we could start losing material," says J. Brian De-Shazor,
Archives director. "Interestingly, some material from
the '70s is in worse shape than some '50s material."
The Pacifica Archives - which is separate from collections
at individual stations, though there is some overlap - contains
considerable material not recorded or saved elsewhere, from
gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings to forums
in which a James Baldwin discussed blacks and homophobia.
The material ranges from Bertold Brecht and Bertrand Russell
interviews to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl," and
Martin Luther King discussing draft card burning on a program
with Joan Baez.
While many people think of Pacifica as primarily political,
DeShazor notes it also has "a very strong tradition of
cultural programming, including radio dramas, that goes back
to our earliest years."
Tomorrow's fund-raiser, he says, is "the start of a
process" that will include an inventory as well as the
actual transfers. Pacifica is working with preservation specialists,
and the long-term goal is to house the Archives in its own
climate-controlled building. "That's ambitious for Pacifica,"
DeShazor admits. "But this material is that important,
for us and everyone else."
Meanwhile, his more immediate questions include what to
transfer the tapes to. "Reel-to-reel tapes lasted 50
years," he says. "But in digital right now, CDs
might only be good for 10. So this next transfer may be basically
a holding action."
In any case, preservation has already accomplished something
astounding.
"It may be the first thing in Pacifica history,"
says spokeswoman Karen Pomer, "that everyone agrees on."
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SAVE THE ARCHIVE
Dan Fost; Chronicle Staff Writer; [Page B - 1]
Thursday, November 14, 2002
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
/chronicle/archive/2002/11/14/BU186722.DTL&type=business
SAVE THE ARCHIVE: Pacifica Radio, the five-station network
that includes Berkeley's KPFA, 94.1 FM, is trying to preserve
and digitize its archive, which it says is the nation's oldest
public radio archive. It includes more than 47,000 recordings
of speeches and interviews with such figures as Malcolm X,
Patty Hearst and Jack Kerouac, as well as gavel-to-gavel coverage
of the Pentagon Papers hearings.
The network needs $200,000 for the project and will hold
a fund-raiser from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday featuring some
of the rare recordings. Information and some audio clips are
online at pacificaarchives.org.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
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SAVE THE VOICE OF
MALCOLM X AND OTHER RARE RECORDINGS
Bay View Newspaper San Francisco
November 13, 2002
www.sfbayview.com/111302/malcolmx111302.shtml
In an effort to save and restore more than 47,000 historic
tapes that span half a century of radio programming, KPFA
and the entire five-station Pacifica Radio Network will broadcast
a national on-air fundraising benefit on Tuesday, Nov. 19,
featuring rare recordings from the endangered archives.
Thousands of tapes in the Pacifica Radio Archives, including
the voice of Malcolm X, are in danger of permanent damage
caused by aging and must be transferred to new mediums, such
as digital audio.
The Nov. 19 marathon broadcast will include historic recordings
of Fannie Lou Hamer, Paul Robeson, Pablo Neruda, Langston
Hughes, Jack Kerouac and many others. Tune to KPFA 94.1 FM.
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