Have you ever wondered what it takes to be successful, live by your own terms, and do it with integrity? In this episode, I have a very special guest, Donna Halper, who has been credited with initially catapulting the success of the band RUSH in the United States back in the early ’70s.
As some of you know, RUSH is my all-time favorite band, for many reasons, but mainly because they did it with hard work and never conforming to what the music industry wanted them to be. RUSH has taught me many lessons over my life, pretty crazy for a prog-rock band, but that is what makes them unique. Even if you are not a RUSH fan, I highly encourage you to listen to the episode, because we get into a whole host of topics about living a life of passion and integrity.
Donna Halper is an author, educator, media historian, and radio consultant.
Donna L. Halper, PhD is an associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Lesley University, Cambridge MA. She is the author of six books and many articles. Her most recent book is a newly revised and expanded second edition of “Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting,” published in March 2014. She is also the author of a well-received local history, “Boston Radio 1920-2010,” which tells the story of Boston radio in words and pictures.
Dr. Halper is a frequently published and widely quoted media historian. Among her many published articles is one about early radio in Boston, “Preserving the Story of Greater Boston’s Pioneering Broadcast Stations 1XE and WGI,” which appeared in the AWA Review in 2018; and one about a priest who used radio to teach religious tolerance, “Father Michael J. Ahern: Boston’s First Radio Priest,” which appeared in Boston’s Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, in 2017. A collector of rare memorabilia related to the history of radio, she was awarded the 9th Annual Collectors’ Prize by Historic New England in 2018.
Dr. Halper also writes about baseball history. A talk she gave at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY, “Written Out of History: Women Baseball Writers, 1905–1945,” was published in 2019 in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2017–2018, ed. William Simons. McFarland & Co. And she has provided chapters for numerous books published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), including “Opening Fenway Park in Style: The 1912 World Champion Red Sox,” and “The Miracle Braves of 1914.”
In addition to researching radio and baseball, Dr. Halper is a free-lance writer for numerous magazines, journals, encyclopedias, and websites. One of her published essays, “How to Be a Skeptical News Consumer,” about the importance of fact-checking, was the #5 most-shared article of 2013 on the Skeptic Magazine website.
Dr. Halper’s research on media history and popular culture has resulted in appearances on both radio and TV. These include CBS Sunday Morning (where she was part of a segment on car radios), PBS/NewsHour, CTV News (Toronto), National Public Radio/Weekend America, History Channel, ABC Nightline, WBZ Radio and WBZ-TV (Boston), WGBH-FM and WGBH-TV (Boston), WBUR-FM (Boston), and a number of podcasts. Her appearance on the Sound Off Podcast, discussing her discovery of the rock band Rush, was the site’s most downloaded podcast of 2017.
Dr. Halper attended Northeastern University in Boston, where she was the first woman announcer in the school’s history, broadcasting a nightly show on the campus radio station beginning in October 1968. She completed a BA (English), M.
