Leonard Lopate

Leonard Lopate (born September 23, 1940) is host of the public radio talk show The Leonard Lopate Show, broadcast on WNYC. He first broadcast on WKCR, the college radio station of Columbia University—where his brother Phillip was a student—then later at WBAI, before ultimately moving to WNYC.

Career

Lopate came to radio relatively late in life. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Williamsburg, he attended Brooklyn College and later Hunter College, where he trained as a painter (he studied with Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko), and worked in advertising for fifteen years. But when he was given a chance to host his first talk show on WBAI in 1977, he was hooked, and what began as a whim has become his life's work. Arguably, Lopate's background in art and literature (as well as in the commercial world) has been a major factor in his success.

Lopate's longest running program on WBAI was Round Midnight, a weekly late-night show, which featured interviews and free-form discussion on a variety of topics with listeners who called in to the station. The show ran through the mid-1980s, ending when Lopate moved to WNYC-FM to host a midday talk show with radio veteran Pegeen Fitzgerald, which evolved into his present-day show, The Leonard Lopate Show.