by Mary Moore

"Is this a picket line?" said the short, elderly woman as she came to an abrupt stop in front of KPFA's closed and guarded front door. "I never cross picket lines" she firmly added to those of us protesting in front of the closed door. "No" we assured her, "go right on in, we are merely handing out flyers to inform people about the situation at the station."

That was the scene on Saturday evening, November 4 [1995] as several people from the TAKE BACK KPFA group gathered to protest the insensitivity (to say the least) of management's decision to "Honor the Elders" after purging a bunch of them from the air just a few months before. The event we were covering was an early reception at the station to "honor the elders" that had given big bucks over the years. But of course they were not planning to honor people like Mama O'Shea, Phil Elwood, Chris Strachwitz, Bill Mandel and others who had, after 20, 30, close to 40 years of volunteer programming, been abruptly terminated. Instead they had picked Studs Terkel and Jessica Mitford who were clueless about what was going on at the station and in my opinion were used by management to appease longtime listeners who were upset (again, to say the least) by management's ongoing obtuseness.

The flyer we were handing out had a quote from Bob Baldock, main organizer of this event that had appeared in the PORTLAND FREE PRESS shortly after the now famous purges. It read "Thirty to forty years (on the air) is absurd". Underneath Bob's quote was an excellent point that read "Studs Terkel has been on the air at WMFT in Chicago for 38 years! And Hooray! Lucky he wasn't on the air at KPFA this year!" So here was this very strange situation of importing elders from far away to "honor" while disrespecting those up close. Way to go KPFA!!!

We held our signs and passed out our leaflets in front of the station for about an hour, meeting many sympathetic people--both donor/listeners and programmers who did go in for the reception (once they realized it wasn't a picket line they were crossing). Some of them came back out with food from inside to share and many expressed their outrage to us about management's "lack of class" (one of the nicer phrases I heard).

After a couple of hours we went over to the Berkeley Community Center for the main event. and it was while passing out flyers there that I received my big surprise of the night. It seems that it wasn't only Studs and Jessica who were clueless about this "honoring". While many people we talked to did know what was going on, a vast majority expressed total bewilderment about who KPFA was or what it was supposed to represent. Apparently blocks of tickets had just been given away to senior centers so they could get a good size crowd there. Needless to say, after all the flyers were passed out we did not go in. I'll honor my elders every day in a real way thank you very much!! And that means I'll be working hard along with alot of other people to get their voices back on the air.