Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

6 KPFA

101 6 KPFA Lew Hill burned hot. His eyes pierced. He was pale and spectral thin, painfully arthritic and usually wreathed in cigarette smoke. He spoke mellifluously in complicated paragraphs that could sound either brilliant or utterly incomprehensible. Some people, he enchanted. Eleanor McKinney, one of his chief allies, said Hill “brought together in one man the radical ideals of a visionary and a poet with the practicality of a man of action” (McKinney 1966, 9). Others, like Roy, resisted his spell. “He drew to himself,” Roy once wrote, “a strange assemblage of disciples who were little more than rubber stamps.” Roy was Hill’s unequal partner in a great venture, for a time. The two men worked side by side at KPFA, the nation’s first noncommercial , listener-supported radio station unaffiliated with a church or university. The station was really Hill’s baby, but Roy helped nurture it. Together they liberated part of the broadcast spectrum. People’s lives changed by listening to KPFA. Careers were turned, thoughts inspired. Roy’s own life reset as a result of his work as the station’s promotions and marketing director, as he honed his business skills and cultivated a broad Bay Area network. Hill and Roy worked together well, until they did not. Their relationship ended badly. In some ways they summoned the best and the worst in each other. Both men believed in radical direct action. Effective pacifism, they thought, must go beyond mere protest. Principles must be lived. And enemies, it turned out, must be fought. 102  Radical Chapters  The son of a well-to-do lawyer who served in the Missouri state legislature , Hill was a military school alumnus who went on to Stanford in the late 1930s. While there, the tennis-playing teenager repudiated his military school past by declaring himself a pacifist and registering as a conscientious objector. In September 1942 Hill was assigned to the Coleville Civilian Public Service camp located on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains abutting the Nevada border. Like Roy and many others, Hill soon enough lost patience with the trivial work that he likened to moving rocks from one side of the road to the other. Medically discharged in October 1943, Hill served for a time with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Committee on Conscientious Objectors, advocating on behalf of pacifists who had walked out of their camps or stopped cooperating. More generally, he was a fount of notions. As U.S. troops drove closer to Japan in 1945, Hill characteristically began plotting a dramatic gesture that would end the war once and for all. A dozen pacifists would sail across the Pacific Ocean and carry a peace message to the Japanese people on behalf of the American people. “The plans, very extensive and detailed, included bombarding the major cities with [peace] leaflets,” Hill advised Roy in a March 6, 1948, letter (Tracy 1993, 176). Even Hill’s friends dismissed the notion as harebrained. But it was a big idea, no one could deny. It was just the ambitious kind of idea Lew Hill specialized in. He kept hatching others, often circling around the general theme of direct communication. People talking to people, that was the key. While in Coleville, Hill had discussed with fellow CPS man Roy Finch the idea of creating a different kind of radio station. It could help spread the message of pacifism, yes, but more broadly such a station would bind people in conversation. It would neither condescend nor incessantly sell, sell, sell. It would bring progressive political action into the twentieth century, updating the street-corner soapboxes and pamphleteering of yore. The Coleville conversations would spread as the CPS men scattered. After KPFA  103 Hill left, Finch would eventually move on to Minersville, where he would join Roy. That radio could be a force for social change was not, in itself, a radical thought. During the initial radio boom of the 1920s, the new medium was envisioned as a potent resource for educational and political discourse. It would enable conversation across vast distances, uniting society. It was not, at first, regarded strictly as a commercial medium. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, at the dawn of the industry, had declared it inconceivable that advertising chatter might drown such potential for public service. Instead of ad revenues, many thought some type of...