Franklin Avenue

Ruth Seymour's Revenge
Ahh, pledge time at public radio station KCRW. It's a time to donate money so Nic Harcourt can buy a few more import CDs featuring moody Belgian bands and Jason Bentley can sustain his raging Ecstasy habit. (Just kidding, boys!)

For years I ignored the pleas of Nic, Jason and (especially) General Manager Ruth Seymour, preferring to donate any money I could to my college radio station, WNUR.

I finally gave in two years ago. As grating as they are, I actually don't mind the pledge drives that much. Perhaps it's because at WNUR we were always scraping by and truly needed those pledge drives to survive.

I have fond memories, believe it or not, of coordinating those drives at the station. It was a tremendous effort to organize volunteers, collect free food to feed those folks, organize premiums, design a new T-shirt (the year I ran the station we got cartoonist Lynda Barry to design our shirt -- it was awesome!), and, most importantly, mail out those pledge forms.

Of course, there's little similarity between the massive machine that is KCRW and the student-run nature of WNUR (even though we had a pretty healthy signal, hitting Chicago). KCRW is a well-oiled factory, collecting millions of dollars every pledge drive. We, on the other hand, collected $50,000 in a good year.

And if we managed to cash all the checks. Yup, we'd frequently find checks throughout the year that we had somehow forgotten to cash. How I miss college radio!