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VOL.21, NO.8
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More than 125,000 readers throughout Greater Baltimore
Radio host lets others speak
A ‘weird’ start
“I was a weird little boy,” Steiner said, his raconteur’s voice allotting ample time and space for bursts of hearty, all-encompassing laughter. “I couldn’t catch a baseball. I thought about being a guru in India,” he said. He also dreamed of joining the Boy Scouts. He begged his mother, a vivacious, British-born woman whose ancestors mined gold and ran rum, to sign him up. She promised to register him for a troop based at Beth Tfiloh, the family’s Orthodox synagogue, where Steiner was bar mitzvahed. But Steiner balked. “I didn’t want to be in a troop with all Jewish kids. I wanted to be in a troop with all kinds of kids,” Steiner remembered.
AUGUST 2024
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PHOTO BY STEFANIE MAVRONIS
By Tony Glaros Marc Steiner, the acclaimed talk-show host, podcaster, writer, teacher and civil rights advocate, says he was just in the right place at the right time. “I stumbled into radio,” Steiner said in an interview with the Beacon. In the waiting room of his dentist’s office 31 years ago, Steiner struck up a conversation with the assistant general manager of Johns Hopkins University’s WJHU-FM (now WYPR). “I told him I’d love to have a radio show,” Steiner recalled. “He said, ‘You don’t know anything about radio.’ I said, ‘What’s to know? You have a microphone and subject matter. You talk. So?’” From that exchange emerged an offer: As an experiment, Steiner would helm a Tuesday evening talk show in the station’s studios on North Charles Street. He proved to be an excellent interviewer, turning the status quo on its head. Two years later, he was awarded the weekday noon to 2 p.m. time slot. Steiner would go on to win a Peabody Award, the most prestigious recognition in broadcast media. He’s still at it. Since 2018, Steiner has hosted “The Marc Steiner Show” on The Real News Network, a Baltimore-based progressive platform. Now 78 and a great-grandfather, Steiner lives in Sparks, Maryland, with his wife, Valerie. Recently he reflected on his life and the unique perspective he gained while growing up in West Baltimore.
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LEISURE & TRAVEL
Enjoy history, hikes and haute cuisine in the Hudson River Valley; plus, a cruise along the Seine from Paris to Normandy page 15
Marc Steiner is host of The Marc Steiner Show, which runs weekly on the independent, Baltimore-based Real News Network. He grew up in West Baltimore, where he developed close ties to his Black neighbors, which shaped his worldview. Steiner won a Peabody Award in 2007 for “Just Words,” a series of interviews with 55 marginalized Baltimoreans.
By coincidence, the family’s Black housekeeper had a nephew who led an allBlack Boy Scout troop, so Steiner joined, “integrating the troop,” he said. “It was the beginning of my lessons about race.” Decades before his career as a radio host, the teenage Steiner learned to listen carefully to his friends and neighbors. “I wasn’t self-aware that I was listening,” he remembered. “I was the only white kid on the corner, at the pool hall, the bowling alley, and at the parties I went to. A lot of Black kids didn’t like me. But I had my guys — I was really tight with them.”
His first protest at 13
When Steiner was 13, he and his mother were strolling the sparkling halls of the new Mondawmin Mall in West Baltimore.
He spied a small band of Morgan State students picketing the White Coffee Pot, and his mother let him join the protest. “So, on that February day, three months away from my 14th birthday, I walked my first picket line and joined the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. As he grew up, Steiner befriended the Black community, “jitterbugging” on street corners with kids. He also found himself in the midst of some serious tussles. At one party where he was the only white attendee, a disagreement over money spilled over, and Steiner “knocked out” someone, he said. Later, at a pool hall, when rival gangs tangled, “Someone shot at me,” he recalled. See RADIO MAN, page 20
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