Greg Palmer

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Bio

With the exception of a year in London, I've lived all my life in Seattle and environs. After the obligatory year at Boeing, I started in public radio as the manager/program director of KRAB, a listener supported station modeled after the Pacifica stations but with a tenth the resources, where I did everything from take out the trash and repaint the bathroom (because Lillian Gish was coming for an interview and there were things written on the walls in there we thought Ms. Gish might find, oh, odd) to producing hundreds of programs of all kinds, including a weekly comedy program. (Contemporary comedians frequently complain that there's no place to be bad anymore. KRAB was where I was bad much of the time, but I had my moments.)
From KRAB I became a commercial radio talk show host in the days when that was something to be proud of, as well as producing, writing and performing a daily satirical feature for that station, KTW, that ran in the morning news block and eventually won a 1974 Peabody award. I returned to KRAB for a year to do a NEH-funded series titled GOVERNMENT INSPECTED, which included a documentary about the maximum security prison in Walla Walla hosted by Aaron Brown.
Subsequently I was, for 13 years Arts and Entertainment Editor, "signature reporter" and occasional documentary creator (SMALL TOWN SATURDAY NIGHT, D-DAY:THE LAST WAVE, LONDON REVISITED, etc.) for KING Television News, and for the past seventeen years I have been an independent producer/writer/sometimes host of PBS documentaries, including DEATH: THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME (1993); VAUDEVILLE: AN AMERICAN MASTERS SPECIAL (1997); INSIDE PASSAGE (2006); THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION (2005); THE ART OF MAGIC (2000); THE PERILOUS FIGHT (Program Three): AMERICA'S WORLD WAR TWO IN COLOR; and for the Discovery Channel, REDISCOVERING AMERICA: THE ALASKA HIGHWAY. I've also done fiction television for families, including adaptations of Snow White and Puss In Boots, and a film shot entirely on location in what was then Soviet Georgia of a Russian folk tale called THE FALCON. (I'm at present working on a travelogue-type documentary about Georgia, which is one of the world's most beautiful, least known countries, populated by the earth's best hosts.) These three family films were based on three of the six plays/musicals for families I've written, that have been performed around the world. In print I wrote a companion book for the DEATH series, a book about my son titled ADVENTURES IN THE MAINSTREAM: COMING OF AGE WITH DOWN SYNDROME, and I edited a collection of letters of a World War Two rabbi, titled THE GI'S RABBI: THE WORLD WAR TWO LETTERS OF DAVID MAX EICHHORN. As this is being written I'm about to leave for Luneville, France, to do a piece for the Seattle Times on the synagogue there in which Rabbi Eichhorn conducted an historic Yom Kippur service in 1944, before the town was officially liberated.

What's your favorite public radio show?

Nothing outre; This American Life and Prairie Home Companion are both splendidly conceived, produced and performed.

What's your secret talent?

Shooting a documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in 1984, we were trying to get the opening shot of a Normandy farmer carrying his scythe walking across a field, with some cows in the foreground. But the cows wouldn't come to the right place for the shot. I told the shooter I could do it, mooed for a few seconds, and the cows immediately moved down front. I have subsequently tried to motivate American cows by mooing, with no success. My secret talent is I speak cow, but only in French. And that's the only French I speak.

What song is stuck in your head right now, you know, a music wedgie?

I'd think the percentage of people who answer this question honestly is smallish--the temptation is powerful to think of some song that pushes the image one wishes to project. So "Itsy Bitsy Spider" doesn't cut it, and probably not "Shut The Door, They're Coming Through the Window" or Stringbean's classic "Herdin' Cattle in a 1952 Cadillac Coupe de Ville" either. Right now I'm hearing the Beach Boys asking Rhonda to help them. So be it.

What sound is most characteristic of where you live?

Alas, traffic, but then I can see I5 from my porch.

What's your favorite sound memory?

In the early 1930s my grandfather and his brothers-in-law bought a small piece of land on top of a cliff overlooking Puget Sound, across from Seattle in a place called Keyport. I spent a lot of time there as a kid messing around on the beach. Today, if you stay overnight in the ramshackle little house my grandfather and father built, you'll hear birds singing very early in the morning. Only they aren't just birds; they are American bald eagles--a nesting pair in the tall tree next to the house. We don't associate raptors with singing necessarily, but these magnificent eagles sing to each other every morning, and there's no sound like it in the world. For me, that sound represents many things: a long interest in birds of prey; my family's history in that place and my now gone father and grandfather; my great luck to have been born and raised in the Northwest; America (I can be patriotically sentimental if need be); and especially the fact that the American bald eagle has been rejuvenated. There were never eagles at Keyport when I was young. But they are back, and they are singing.

Which station do you listen to most?

KUOW

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