Lewis Hill is generally recognized as the founder of listener-supported broadcasting in the United States. He was born in 1919 in Kansas City, Missouri and grew up in Oklahoma. He attended Stanford University in the late 1930s and, during the Second World War, filed as a conscientious objector. After the war Hill decided that pacifists needed more powerful venues to spread their message; he and a small group of ex-conscientious objectors created the Pacifica Foundation in 1946. Their first practical project, listener-supported KPFA-FM, was inaugurated in 1949.

After Temple University Press published my book Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, Eleanor McKinney, KPFA's first program director, sent me several boxes of old KPFA materials, among them the typed out scripts of a series of Reports-to-the-Listener produced by Hill between 1950 and 1952. To the 1,000 to 3,000 or so people who subscribed to KPFA in the early 1950s, this was Lewis Hill. I know of no audio versions of these talks that survive; they have not seen the light of day in almost fifty years. I am in the process of transcribing them, as I have the time, for this website.