Joe Frank died a year ago. He was 79, and he was a radio giant. He conducted interviews,

read stories, wrote dramas, and none of it was like anything done before, because it was so

raw and frankly, nuts. To many of us, it was shocking and sad. He wasn't a huge star. But his light has been reflected in the great work of people you do know. Mark Oppenheimer is the host of the podcast on Orthodox. He spent the past year interviewing Joe and those he influenced for an article in slate called Joe Frank Sines

Off.

Joe Frank had one of the most difficult lives of anyone who didn't live through a genocide,

whom I've ever interviewed.

He was sickly his entire life.

He was born with club feet.

He had testicular cancer at a young age.

He had a different cancer about every other decade. His mother hated him. His father died young. He was just in enormous physical and psychological pain. He was a child of privilege. He grew up quite wealthy on Central Park in New York City, the child of parents who had fled the Nazis. He hadn't trained to be a radio person.

He had gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop and wanted to be a fiction writer. And then for a while,

he was a high school teacher at the Dalton School in New York City. Then he promoted concerts up in

Western Massachusetts, and he would drive up and down I-91 and listen to the radio on his way

to the shows he was promoting in the Springfield area.

And that's when he began to think that maybe he had a future in radio because he found that

those voices keeping him company late at night on the highway in the cold were so soothing to him

and gave him a kind of community and company that held his melancholy at bay.

And so he began to volunteer at WBAI, which was radio-wise really the place to be,

was doing very interesting work.

Hit or miss work, some of it was terrible.

But he went there and just studied and learned to cut audio,

learned to edit, and listened.

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