US international broadcasting: three brushes with history.

Yuri Olkhovsky, 1930-2009: from "1964 to 1983, he worked part time as a broadcaster and writer for the Russian Service of Voice of America, and in 1983, he took a two-year leave from GWU to be deputy director of Radio Liberty in Munich. Radio Liberty was a government-funded station established during the Cold War to broadcast behind the Iron Curtain. When Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974, he told reporters that he had been amazed at the amount of straight news on Voice of America. The broadcaster he often heard was Dr. Olkhovsky." Washington Post, 2 July 2009.
     "Baritone saxophonist Jack Nimitz died June 10, 2009 at his home in Studio City, California. ... The first time I heard him was on a Brunswick LP (circa 1953) by THE Orchestra, an outstanding ensemble led by drummer Joe Timer and fronted by disc jockey Willis Conover who would later earn fame as host of an enormously popular nightly jazz radio program heard around the world via shortwave on the Voice of America." Jack Bowers, All About History, 1 July 2009.
     Actor Ryan O'Neal: "In the late ‘50s, [his] family relocated to Germany, where Blackie O’Neal was working as a writer on Radio Free Europe broadcasts. Ryan graduated from Munich American High School in 1959. That same year, he made his TV debut as a stunt man in the German TV series, 'Tales of Vikings' (Syndicated, 1959-1960), which both his parents were working on at the time." Hollywood.com bio, evergreen. Posted: 03 Jul 2009 Permalink Print