Lynn Samuels, a Brash Radio Talker, Dies at 69
Unlike most of her fellow radio hosts, Ms. Samuels was also adept at holding an audience's attention with a distinctively intimate style of personal commentary.
By Paul Vitello
Dec. 26, 2011
Lynn Samuels, whose brash political opinions and unrestrained New York accent made her an unmistakable voice in the male-dominated world of political talk radio, died on Saturday at her apartment in Woodside, Queens. She was 69.
Ms. Samuels, one of the first women to host a political radio show, was found dead by the police, who investigated after she failed to show up for a scheduled 10 a.m. show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, a company spokesman said. No cause of death was announced.
Friends said she had seemed well on Friday night when they exchanged e-mails with her. The police indicated that there was no sign of foul play.
Ms. Samuels made her name on WABC radio in the 1980s and ’90s as the voice of liberalism in a lineup composed mainly of right-leaning men, including Rush Limbaugh. For several years, Mr. Limbaugh took over Ms. Samuels’s chair and microphone at the end of her shift. They got along fine, she once said, by chatting about television shows and movies.
She received most of the hate mail sent to WABC in those years for her defense of President Bill Clinton, environmentalists, gun-control advocates, the Democratic Party, and Tinky Winky’s right to his sexual identity, whatever it was. (She brought it up mainly to mock the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s claim that Tinky Winky, a character from the children’s television show “Teletubbies,” was “role modeling” a gay lifestyle.)
Unlike most of her fellow radio hosts, Ms. Samuels was also adept at holding an audience’s attention with a distinctively intimate style of personal commentary.
She talked about members of her family, old boyfriends, her phobias, and how she spent her time off the air.
“To tell you the truth,” she once said, “I don’t like talking too much once I leave this booth. I’m talked out.”
Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers, the trade journal of the talk radio industry, called Ms. Samuels a unique voice. “She was a pioneer for women in the modern talk radio era, and for liberal talk radio,” he said. “But also she was a master of a kind of radio that many people look back on wistfully: when radio was about spending a few hours with an interesting human being, hearing their take on life.”
Her take on life was often gloomy. A favorite word was “doomed.” Being contrary sometimes seemed as important to her as being right. When she worked at the ultra-liberal, listener-supported radio station WBAI, she was considered something of a right-wing nut by some staff members — against whom she conducted on-air, internecine warfare over control of station programming in the 1980s.
At WABC, she was fired three times (and rehired twice) for comments considered subversive and bordering on the incitement of proletarian revolution.
On Sirius XM Satellite Left, a subscriber-based channel for a left-of-center audience, where she began working eight years ago, she inveighed against illegal immigrants and turned viciously critical of President Obama. After decades of living in the Village, she moved to Queens.
“She could be very hard to deal with; she wouldn’t listen to reason,” said John Mainelli, a longtime friend who, as program director at WABC, hired her. “But she did her homework, she was funny, compulsively candid, and you just couldn’t help listening to her.”
For years, Mr. Mainelli said, he tried to convince Ms. Samuels that she could become a national talk radio star if she damped down her accent. “I said, ‘The syndicators like you, but they say you’re just too New York,’ ” he recalled telling her.
“I know what that means,” she told him, he said. “That means I’m too Jewish.” Then she said what she thought of people who used phrases like “too New York.”
Lynn Margaret Samuels was born in Queens on Sept. 2, 1942. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Her father worked in the entertainment business, though several people who knew her for years said Ms. Samuels had been extremely private and almost never spoke of her family. They said a sister and two nephews were her only survivors.
Bob Grant, the talk radio host, who was a colleague at WABC, said Ms. Samuels was “funny, smart and original.”
“What I admired about her was, she wasn’t afraid. With all these right-wingers around,” he said, referring to her view of him as well, “she just said what she had to.”
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