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Frank Millspaugh, the station’s general manager in the 1960s and 1970s, said listeners sympathized with Mr. Josephson’s perpetual grumbling about getting up early. But some board members of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the station, were unhappy with the countercultural tone of Mr. Josephson, Mr. Fass and Mr. Post.
”They wanted a more serious, more respectful sound for the station,” Mr. Millspaugh said in a telephone interview. But when they realized how effective these hosts were at raising money for the station, “they softened their criticism.”
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Josephson served two years as general manager of WBAI, which routinely ran smoothly. During an urgent financial crisis, the station turned to listeners to raise $56,000 to cover its monthly expenses. Within four days, $25,800 had come in, most of it in cash.
”We’re going to survive,” Mr. Josephson told The Daily News in 1976. ”We have to raise more money and spend less. It’s just like New York,” which was dealing with a much bigger financial crisis at the time.
Norman Lawrence Josephson was born on May 12, 1939 in Los Angeles. His father, Adrian, at one point owned a lumber company; his mother, Marian (Tyre) Josephson, was a homemaker.
Larry loved radio from childhood, but did not initially pursue a career in it. Instead, he enrolled at UC Berkeley and studied linguistics, then went to work for IBM as a computer engineer in the New York area. (He didn’t finish his bachelor’s degree until 1973.) He began volunteering at WBAI in the 1960s and was hired to host the morning show in 1966 because, he said, the station couldn’t find anyone another to wake up so early.
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