KPCC Host Steve Julian is Dead at 57

Steve Julian, the host of KPCC’s Morning Edition since 2000, died at his home in Pasadena Sunday morning from complications from brain cancer. He was 57.

KPCC announced Julian’s death on its website, www.kpcc.org, early morning on Monday.

His best friend Larry Mantle, host of KPCC’s Air Talk, said Julian was a singular talent who is “completely irreplaceable.”

Julian was the smooth, soothing voice that woke up tens of thousands of listeners in Southern California for 15 years, providing the day’s news, weather and traffic.

“The tone and richness of his voice perfectly conveyed the man behind it,” Mantle adds in the story on the station’s website.

Another comment on the site came from Bill Davis, president of Southern California Public Radio.

“He came across as someone who was knowledgeable, friendly and accessible, and that’s the kind of sound we wanted – one that was not lecturing to you but was riding along with you in the car to work,” Davis said.

Julian was born in Pomona in 1958 and spent the majority of his life in Southern California. His news career started when he met Mantle while working at KPRO, a Riverside radio station, in the early 1980s.

At the time, the radio station was switching from being a big band music station to all-news and talk. The news director overheard Julian, who worked in production, talking to Mantle, who was the assistant news director, as they discussed the day’s events in the newsroom. Right then, the news director told the two friends they had such good chemistry and decided they should anchor the afternoon drive-time.

The pairing was successful but then Mantle left to join KPCC as news director, while Julian left radio to become a police officer.

Julian attended the police academy at Rio Hondo College and joined the Baldwin Park Police Department.

Mantle said Julian’s dream wasn’t to work in radio but to be a cop like his father was. An unfortunate twist made Julian decide to leave the force, and he went back to radio.

In 1995, according to the KPCC website, Julian returned to broadcasting as a traffic reporter for AirWatch America based in Santa Ana. Five years later, he joined KPCC as the host of Morning Edition.

Julian was on the air the morning of the 9/11 attacks in New York and broke the grim news to Southern California listeners. Davis recalls that Julian decided to switch the broadcast over from a taped programming to a live feed from New York’s WNYC, and that decision, says Davis, “really accelerated the change in our view of ourselves as an institution.”

His colleagues described Julian as always calm and collected as he handled all kinds of news stories on the station.

“You could get in his ear during a five-second sound byte and say two or three words about something that had just broken, and the way he delivered it, it sounded like poetry
on the air,” said Nick Stoffel, KPCC’s Morning Edition producer.

Aside from hosting the magazine show, Julian pursued playwriting, directing and acting in local theaters.

He directed classics such as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of Salesman” at the Covina Center for the Performing Arts as well as new plays at L.A.’s Coeurage Theatre Company where Julian also served on the board of directors.

Julian is survived by his mother, Marlene Julian, and his wife of two years, Felicia Friesema, director of marketing and communications at Foothill Transit, who wrote a moving blog about Julian’s fight with cancer.

Julian was diagnosed in November and has been off the air since then. In January, KPCC renamed the studio where he hosted Morning Edition “The Steve Julian Studio.”

Donations can be made to Coeurage Theatre Company or Ensemble Studio Theatre Los Angeles. Donations can also be made to KPCC where Julian was also a longtime contributing member.