Steve Post

Steve Post (20 March 1944 – 3 August 2014) was an American freeform radio artist and the author of Playing in the FM Band.

Post, born in the Bronx, became fascinated by radio at about the age of 8 or 10, recording 'broadcasts' on his father's Webcor tape recorder, using names such as Paige Turner. Upon his mother's death of cancer, when Post was 10, he was sent for a time to a boarding school in New Jersey. An indifferent student, by his own account, he eventually graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School.

Post was a pioneer and a trailblazer in freeform radio at WBAI-FM in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bob Fass, drawing his inspiration from Jean Shepherd, initially transformed and redefined the form and its possibilities, and Fass, Post, and Larry Josephson, a sort of informal, free-floating, quasi-magical creative triumvirate, then pushed the possibilities significantly further in the artistic, cultural, and political turmoil of the time.

Post was, ‘a legendary New York broadcaster’ who, through his years first at WBAI and then at WNYC, was a ‘wry, one-of-a-kind’ personality', a ‘creative genius’ who showed ‘extreme personal courage’, who presented a ‘combination of warmth, bitterness, intelligence, mordant humor, and brilliantly on-target observations’, who ‘didn’t care about fairness, objectivity, balance, the canons of journalism’, who ‘just said whatever the hell came into his mind’, and who formed a deep ‘personal connection… with… listeners scattered around the New York area.’

Post’s style was at the core wry, witty, and sardonic – ‘curmudgeonly’. If Will Rogers had famously said that he never met a man he didn’t like, Post said no such thing – indeed, he quoted Hobbes as an influence, saying ‘I believe people are essentially brutal, murderous, lying bastards who put on masks of civility to make society work.’

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