Wallace Smith’s Return

The article regarding the return to KUSC of Wallace Smith has just come to our attention and needs some comment (“Wallace Smith Returns to KUSC,” by Dennis McDougal, July 21).

We wish Smith well at KUSC, especially since--according to him and your article--it’s the station he “did not leave.” That must mean that his one-year tenure here at WNYC was something we dreamed!

If your reporter had checked with us, we would have set the record straight on Smith’s observation that “the job I was hired to do at WNYC did not exist,” and given a distinctly different version of Smith’s tenure here.

His employers, whom he maligns as “mayoral appointees” who prevented him from succeeding, are the ones who have turned WNYC into the country’s top-rated radio station, one that also supplies distinguished national programming; in addition, they manage a thriving public television station.

As he told your readers, Smith also hated the Big Apple. Maybe he couldn’t adjust to the time difference between New York and Los Angeles. As Fred Allen defined it, “If it’s 4:30 p.m. in New York, it must be 1938 in Los Angeles.”

PETER MINICHIELLO

VP, Marketing & Development

WNYC Communications Group

New York