Ralph Jennings, who gave stature, stability, prosperity and influence to WFUV, Fordham University’s radio station, died on Oct. 9 in Manhattan. He was 86.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by normal pressure hydrocephalus, a brain condition, and multiple infections, his wife, Paula (Tadlock) Jennings, said.
Dr. Jennings, a lover of the radio since he was a little boy with severe nearsightedness, took over at WFUV in 1985. At the time, the station played rock shows with shout-outs to the disc jockey’s dorm buddies and cultural programs that targeted niche audiences. At the office, Dr. Jennings discovered matching grant forms for $10,000 that were lying around unnoticed and had never been processed.
“You had a 50,000-watt radio station in New York City that covers 13 million people, acting as a sandbox,” Dr. Jennings recalled to The New York Times for a profile in 2011.
Dr. Jennings wanted to maintain the station as a trainer of student talent. WFUV was established in 1947 from three converted lecture halls as New York City’s first college noncommercial station, with alumni that included the sportscasters Vin Scully and Mike Breen, as well as the multifaceted music broadcaster Paul Cavalconte.
Yet in some fundamental ways Dr. Jennings reimagined the station.
He obtained support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by expanding the station’s professional staff.
He began employing professional D.J.’s, seeking both mentors for students and tasteful curators of new music in an era when commercial radio was narrowing its playlists.
Today, WFUV has 30 full-time professionals who run the station alongside about 70 students.
The D.J.’s wound up including major radio figures like Rita Houston, who gave the folk singer Brandi Carlile her first airtime. The station also championed the singer Norah Jones and the folk band Mumford and Sons before they made it big.
Its weekly listenership increased nearly tenfold under Dr. Jennings to about 300,000 by the time he retired in 2011, up from 30,000 to 50,000 when he took over. (Last year, Fordham magazine estimated that the station had 325,000 weekly listeners.)
Dr. Jennings was succeeded in 2011 by one of his early hires, Chuck Singleton, who remains WFUV’s general manager.
“Ralph laid the groundwork for a public radio service that is known and appreciated by hundreds of thousands of weekly listeners in New York and beyond,” Mr. Singleton said in an obituary published by WFUV.
Ralph Merwin Jennings was born on March 26, 1938, in Manhattan and grew up in Torrington, Conn., in the northwestern part of the state. His father, Wesley Jennings, was an insurance agent and his mother, Nan (Alderman) Jennings, ran the family home.
He was never able to see more than a foot or two in front of him and was considered legally blind. He did chores at the local radio station starting at the age of 13.
In 1963, he graduated from the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he managed WWST, the student radio station. Five years later, he earned a Ph.D. in communications from New York University.
He spent 13 years working for the Rev. Everett C. Parker, who was the director of the Office of Communications at the United Church of Christ. Dr. Parker devoted his time to opposing discrimination in public broadcasting, and Dr. Jennings became a lead researcher for his campaigns. Dr. Jennings’s reports on gender and racial bias in coverage and on-air talent often received coverage in The Times.
Their best-known campaign was for the removal of the license of WLBT, a television station in Jackson, Miss., on the grounds that its programming was so racist that it failed to serve the public interest, as was required by law.
A legal battle concluded in 1969 when Warren E. Burger, who was soon to be chief justice of the United States but was then a federal appellate judge, ordered the station’s license to be revoked.
Dr. Jennings went on to help establish Mississippi’s nonprofit radio network. He also supported balanced racial representation in programming at WFUV.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He married Paula Tadlock in 1982. In addition to her, he is survived by their children, Matthew and Alma Jennings. He and his wife lived in Upper Manhattan.
When WFUV was established in 1947, The Times wrote that its task was to steer “between the Scylla of academic boredom and the Charybdis of shallow popularization.”
An article in 2013 by the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, seemed to confirm that this mission had been accomplished. He wrote that WFUV’s programming constituted “a kind of salvation for folk music, old and new, and broadly defined” — serious but not too serious. Mr. Remnick concluded, “The old, weird America lives.”
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