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BY: All right. So I know that you had a very long and varied career mainly in media and communications. What have been some of your most memorable jobs or experiences? So I know you've done many, many things, just some highlights.

SM: Oh, gosh. I feel really blessed that I found jobs, that I got paid to do something that I loved. I mean, many people go through their whole career doing a job because it's a job to pay the bills. I was very fortunate, and even though my career was pretty eclectic, going from one thing to another thing to another thing, there always was something that was really compelling and really exciting for me. Let me think about... okay, I was executive director of Pacifica Radio Network in the 1980s. And we had one case at the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to editorialize for all noncommercial broadcasters. At that time, public radio and television were not allowed to editorialize. Because in their infinite wisdom, when Congress created public broadcasting, they decided that they didn't want local politicians trying to push the station to do one thing or another thing. So the best way to avoid that is that we couldn't editorialize. But at Pacifica, we felt like, hey, if a commercial network can editorialize and they're selling Coca-Cola or hemorrhoid treatments or something, why can't we, who can't advertise, why can't we editorialize? So Pacifica went all the way to the Supreme Court. It happened, the suit happened before I got to Pacifica, but the actual hearing at the Supreme Court happened when I was there, and we won. And we agreed that we weren't going to editorialize about local potholes or local politicians or any of those things. That when we did use that, we would use it for something really important.

And we were at a national board meeting several years after we won that right, hadn't editorialized yet at all, had no policies on it in particular, except that the whole network had to, really all five stations in New York, Washington, D.C., Houston, L.A., and Berkeley, all had to agree to whatever we editorialized on. So we were at a board meeting, and during a break, I got a phone call from our reporter in Johannesburg, South Africa, and he said -- now remember, this is in the 1980s -- and he said that President Botha's government was amassing the military outside of Soweto, and it was the tenth, it was about to be the tenth anniversary of the uprising in Soweto, where the local people were protesting the national government. And he said, "If something isn't done, there's going to be a bloodbath. They're going to kill all the people that are marching in the streets." So I went back and reported that to the board, and they immediately decided, that's our first editorial. And so Jack O'Dell, who was the chair of our board and a longtime civil rights leader, just went into a back room and, by hand, penned out what he was going to say, went over to the local station and recorded this. We decided we would put it on the air, every hour on the hour through that date, which was like several weeks away. And we had lots of affiliate stations who took our national news on a daily basis. And we encouraged them to have their own editorials on the same issue. Well, they just aired our editorial. Bottom line was, there were so many calls, and the calls were to call the White House to tell President Reagan to tell his friend President Botha in South Africa to back off and allow the peaceful commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising, or else the whole world would be against them. The White House comment line -- and that's back in the days of regular telephones -- it blew up the line completely. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to call and just chat it up with whoever's on the other end of the line. So I said, "So are you getting many calls about this?" "Oh, yes, and we can't understand what's going on because every hour on the hour, we get a flurry of calls from all over the country, and then things quiet down. And then again the next hour, we get a flurry of calls again. We can't understand what's going on," and she was the one that told me that it blew out the lines for a while, because I don't know how many lines they had, but anyway, it blew out the lines. So that was, to me, one of my proudest moments, even though I didn't do the editorial or anything, but because we used the resources we had, which was five major market stations plus all of our affiliates, to make a difference someplace else, thousands of miles away. That's one of my proudest moments.

Another one was when I was working for the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. This was in the late 1990s, early 2000s in New York. And we had a prearranged phone call with the Cuban Council of Churches, and it was right after the little boy was found floating in the water, Elian Gonzalez, and there was this whole brouhaha about his distant relatives in Florida wanting to keep him, versus his father in Cuba wanting him back. The mother drowned during this unsafe trip to try and get to the United States. And so I almost just gratuitously said, at the end of the phone call, "So if there's anything we can do to help the little boy, let us know." The next morning at seven o'clock, there was a fax in my office from the Cuban Council of Churches asking the churches in the United States to help them get the boy back, and it was in Spanish. So I raced to our bilingual Spanish writer and I said, "Can you translate this real quick?" And she translated, and her eyes were just as big as can be. So then I ran to my boss's office and he said, "This is bigger than the Methodists, we need to take it upstairs," which meant to the National Council of Churches of the United States. And so to make a long story short, that led to the grandmother's coming over and Dr. Brown, who was the head of the National Council of Churches, who was a grandmother herself, she took those grandmothers to Congress, all around, and it was a whole big campaign. And I stayed in New York and handled all the press and the media. And I had worked with the national media before in a previous job. So they had me stay in New York fielding all the calls and who would be the guest on the Sunday shows and all of that, and that helped get him back home.

BY: So it sounds like, at least, those two examples are really the power of collective action.

SM: And communications, yes.

BY: Yeah, right.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.