Rick Lee

• Years at WGBH: 1963 – 1970
• Position(s): Radio announcer/editor/producer, radio Production Manager, Education Division Executive Producer (TV)

From Rick Lee — 2000

I worked first for Don Quayle, AGM/radio, while I was a junior and senior at Amherst College and ‘GBH was putting WFCR on the air. We experimented with using FM subcarriers to do two-way classroom sessions.

Don liked my work and offered me a job after graduation. When I graduated, he had left ‘GBH. But he had put in a good word with Hartford Gunn. So I came to work in 1963 at ‘GBH/FM as a weekend announcer and radio producer when the station was in Kendall Square. Bill Pierce was in Symphony Hall and I did the studio end of symphony broadcasts, etc. TV was at that time at the Museum of Science. (This was about a year after the fire on Mass. Ave.)

I worked for T.F. Conley who had replaced Don Quayle as AGM/radio and did lot of early radio network programs, long before NPR. We had an East Coast hookup to NY, Phila, DC, and west to Buffalo and did a nightly 2-hour “Kaleidoscope,” a predecessor to All Things Considered. I also edited Michael Rice’s tapes from England, “Diary of a Rhodes Scholar,” and various other tape inputs.

When we moved into the new building about 1966, Michael Rice had finished his Rhodes scholarship and took over the radio operation from Tom Conley. Michael asked me to be Production Manager for radio, which I did for a year or so before Bob Larsen invited me to become Executive Producer in the new Education Division which was about to put WGBX/44 on the air. I produced its first television program, a live interactive simulation of diplomacy around the Korean War called “The Most Dangerous Game.”

Thereafter, I did a bunch of simulation game shows for schools, with students doing more and more of the writing as well as talent slots. I also produced a series of films about kids in urban environments, and continued doing programs about normal family development which I had begun in radio with Norman Paul (“A Chance to Grow”) and Dick Chasin (“Three Families”).

I was invited to be “field faculty” for some graduate students at Harvard in 1969. When Hartford Gunn left ‘GBH to go to PBS in 1970, I went to a Harvard faculty meeting and asked about becoming a student in the new psychology Ph.D. program. The folks I’d worked with on the faculty supported my application for an NIMH grant and I left ‘GBH in the summer of 1970 to go to graduate school.

In graduate school, I worked at the Boston State Hospital, and Lorraine and I redeveloped our performance schedule in folk music. We had done several shows at Club 47, Unicorn, etc. in 1963-4, but suspended performance while I was busiest at ‘GBH and while our son Peter was small.

In 1975 Folk Legacy released our first recording. Several followed in various combinations in 1978, 1983, 1984, 1985. Lorraine and I split in 1986.

Since then, I have been working with Roger Fisher and his colleagues designing and teaching a workshop on negotiation at Harvard, and have been teaching action methods and video-feedback at the Family Institute of Cambridge.

Waterbug Records asked me to do a solo CD in 1995, released as “Natick.” Most recently a solo CD of mine for Waterbug, “There’s Talk About a Fence,” was released in 1999.

So I continue to do video, mostly closed circuit, and singing and playing.

Details on the music are at: http://www.ricklee.org

Details on the video-feedback project should soon be at: http://www.familyinstitutecamb.org

The main new excitement is my 3-1/2 year-old granddaughter, Sammi. She’s learning to play harmonica and we have been playing and singing together just for fun.

All the best. Rick.