His petition, filed five decades ago, sparked an urban legend that still continues to circulate to this day.
His petition, filed five decades ago, sparked an urban legend that still continues to circulate to this day.
recnet.substack.com
He was one of the founders of St. Louis's KDNA along with Lorenzo Milam, who documented some of that in
Sex and Broadcasting, a wonderfully disorganized mess of a book that has gems on many pages. I wish I could say I remember more of KDNA, but I only got to hear about a year of it after my family moved to the St. Louis area in the 1970s. Lansman and Milam sold the station, which became easy-listening KEZK, to provide funds to establish more community stations, but it took about 15 years for Double Helix to return to the air on a noncommercial frequency as KDHX. By that time, I believe Lansman was no longer involved. Double Helix also tried many times to get the St. Louis public schools to cooperate in programming the schools' long-neglected FM station, KSLH, which was hardly ever on the air, but the school board ultimately sold it to an arm of Bott Broadcasting and it's now Bott's usual preaching programming. Some of the KDNA equipment went 120 miles west to KOPN in Columbia, Missouri, which was able to go from 10 to 40,000 watts as a result. KOPN is still around today in Columbia, though the old KDNA antenna, relocated to a public housing tower near downtown Columbia, was mangled and had to be replaced.
Frank Absher's St. Louis Media History project reported that Lansman was most recently in South Africa. When the Usenet group ba.broadcast was still active, he would pop up every once in a while.
An email sounding the alarm about the Lansman-Milam petition made the rounds of one of my employers in the mid-1990s. I was one of the people who had to counteract that rumor within the company, as well as keeping the then-new email servers up because of all the back-and-forth that resulted.
