Bob Fass - Early Years

Early Years

Bob Fass was born June 29, 1933 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fass received a scholarship to study acting with Sandy Meisner and Sidney Pollack at the Neighborhood Playhouse and was also a member of Stella Adler’s workshop. He appeared on stage in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage at Circle in the Square, The Execution of Private Slovik with Dustin Hoffman, and The Man with the Golden Arm at the Cherry Lane, among other New York productions. When he went into the army in 1956, he started a theater at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In 1960, he took over the role of the warden in the legendary off-Broadway production of Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya. Over the next two years, he played a variety of roles in the show, also acting as assistant stage manager.

In 1963, he began working at WBAI, one of the nation’s first listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio stations, operated by the Pacifica Foundation. Novelist and poet Richard Elman, a friend of Fass’s from high school, who was producing programs for the station’s Drama & Literature Department, helped Fass get a job as an announcer. He then was given the midnight to dawn time block to use as he wished. Jay Sand, in The Radio Waves Unnameable, writes “He had the same supplies as any other broadcaster---two turntables, a microphone, a stack of records, perhaps a guest in the studio, a friend on the phone,... (but) the radio program he created however transcended those common wares.”