Lois Reitzes’ 46-year run at WABE ends on a high note

But general manager John Weatherford wasn’t ready to dump the public radio station’s most recognizable name. Aware Reitzes had interests far beyond classical music, he offered her the daily culture and arts interview show “City Lights.”

Credit: ajc staff

Credit: ajc staff

After shaking off the disappointment of losing her forum to wax poetic between symphonies by Bach and Beethoven on WABE, Reitzes was game. But could she engage listeners like NPR’s renowned interviewer Terry Gross does on “Fresh Air?”

Fortunately, Weatherford (who died in 2023) “gave me carte blanche,” said Reitzes. She was able to pick and choose who to profile, what to focus on and how long interviews should go. She thrived in her second act at WABE for a decade.

Not to say it was easy. She struggled at first to find her voice. It was hard to shake old habits, to become a full-fledged personality.

Reitzes then received trenchant advice from Christine Dempsey, who arrived as WABE’s vice president of radio in 2016 and had worked with Gross in Philadelphia. “You’re the show,” Dempsey told Reitzes. “Your classical presentation is very nice, but I don’t hear your jokes, your outrageous humor, your silly puns. You need to shine through.”

Soon enough, Reitzes said, “I felt liberated.”

But at age 71, Reitzes is ready to end the daily grind. Her final day will be June 26.

Credit: CONTRIBUTED

Credit: CONTRIBUTED

The Lois bump

“City Lights” quickly became a go-to place for actors, comics, authors, playwrights, dancers, poets, singers and artists of all stripes to talk about their craft and their latest projects.

“She was the one person you could count on to spread the word about the arts, the one person people would listen to,” said Jon Carr, artistic director for Dad’s Garage. “There was a direct correlation between being on her show and ticket sales.”

Leslie Gordon, former director of the Rialto Center for the Arts who now runs the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, dubbed it “the Lois bump. It was like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

It helps that Reitzes actually likes to hang out with creative people. Quarterly, she’d host dinners at her charming gray bungalow in the Morningside neighborhood she purchased with her husband Don Reitzes, a Georgia State University sociology professor, in 1979 for $59,500. (They negotiated a $2,500 discount.)

“Lois loves to curate her dinner table with people she thinks ought to know each other,” said Susan Booth, former Alliance Theatre artistic director who now runs the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. “Through her and those dinners, I met some of Atlanta’s most fascinating people and did so in a setting that was so warm and so inviting of intellectual curiosity.”

ASO pianist Julie Coucheron was one of those guests, who turned Reitzes on to gjetost, a Norwegian brown cheese that tastes like butterscotch. “She is a great cook, an excellent chef,” Coucheron said. “She makes amazing dinners.”

Her vast array of friends include Joe Gransden, a popular Atlanta jazz singer, trumpet player and band leader. She asked him for a theme song for “City Lights,” and he readily gave her the first song he ever wrote in his early 20s, appropriately called “The First Time.” It features a jaunty opening riff he felt worked well to open a concert or, in this case, a daily radio show.

“She really helped a lot of careers like mine,” Gransden said. “It’s like the local equivalent of being on ‘The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.’ Every time I was on her show, I’d get inundated with texts and emails. Her reach was so vast. She is so loved.”

“City Lights” reflected Reitzes’ broad interests. One recent week, she spoke to Tomer Zvulun about the Atlanta Opera production of “Siegfried,” the directors of an indie Atlanta psycho thriller “Meta Take One,” Zac Brown Band’s John Driskell Hopkins about his battle with ALS and comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” castmate Jay Pharoah.

“Lois doesn’t make a distinction between low and high arts,” said Atlanta screenwriter Topher Payne, who was a guest on her show many times. “To her, it’s simply art you connect with as an observer or listener.”

Talking to Reitzes to promote “My Summer Prince,” Payne’s first Hallmark movie in 2016, was a highlight of his career up to that point: “I was beside myself. I felt like I made it.”

Ruby Velle, who heads Atlanta soul band the Soulphonics, said she was so nervous before appearing on “City Lights,” she rehearsed with her husband, who pretended to be Reitzes. But the real Reitzes made her feel comfortable immediately.

“Her questions were very in tune and poignant,” Velle recalled. “She asked me about the roots of soul, not just as an emotional form of music but as a semipolitical one based on social justice. It was very thoughtful for her to bring a new generation into what soul music really is.”

Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@

Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@

Reitzes’ longtime producer Summer Evans marvels how her boss can speak to a Grammy-winning musician with the same respect and interest as she would a 13-year-old who won a poetry contest.

“She makes everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the room,” she said.

Reflecting the broad range of her interests, Reitzes likes to say she embraces the four M’s: Mozart, Motown, the Muppets and Mel Brooks. And on air, she enjoyed tweaking the staid image of public radio.

During an interview with comic Ike Barinholz in 2018, the station played a clip of his film, “The Oath,” about which he noted with glee, “I cannot believe that I’m on NPR and the word ‘fart’ was mentioned.”

“But ever so tastefully,” Reitzes cracked.

She once brought in the edgy and deliberately shrill comic Gilbert Gottfried, who had recently gone viral reading a segment of “Fifty Shades of Grey” on YouTube. “We can’t air that,” she told Gottfried. “Maybe ‘the’ and ‘and.’ We’re an all-ages radio program and we want to keep our license so in the true tradition of public broadcasting, we’d love for you to read something considered outrageous from 100 years ago. Of course, it’s British, which makes it classy. And in your own voice.”

Reitzes laughed throughout his reading of “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and concluded with a twinkle in her eye: “D.H. Lawrence is smiling.”

A voice like ‘diamond dust and molasses’

Reitzes grew up in Chicago with an unusually deep voice for a girl.

When she was 5, a family friend nicknamed her “Tallulah,” as in actress Tallulah Bankhead who possessed a patented husky voice. “For a little kid, that was pretty funny,” she said.

In the 1970s, she believed that voice helped her in radio when “there weren’t many women on-air. Perhaps back then the perception was that men’s voices sounded authoritative and women’s voices did not. Unfortunate.”

It’s a voice that gets recognized far more often than her face. “I have to be careful what I say in public,” she said. Early in her career, she recalled being at a Kroger near Emory Village and said to herself, ‘Where do you suppose they keep the rice?’ A woman popped into her aisle and yelped: ‘You’re Lois Reitzes!’

“That just floored me!” she said.

Radio, she noted, provides “an intimacy that creates a friendship listeners feel with us that’s incredible.”

Credit: JOHN SPINK

Credit: JOHN SPINK

In 1989, reporter Drew Jubera wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her vocal precision “is the enunciation by which all others are judged. No syllable goes unattended or escapes her mouth without some civilizing effect.”

Atlanta author Vanessa Riley said “her pregnant pauses add weight to what she’s saying. You are hanging on to every word, so it’s amazing.”

Payne described her voice as “diamond dust and molasses: elegant, thick, sweet, deliberate. She conveys a relaxed and wide bemusement that lets listeners know there’s an authority in the room.”

As for critics who can’t stand her voice? “Not everybody likes nice things,” Payne joked.

No such thing as being too prepared

Reitzes said she spent far more time working on “City Lights” than her classical music show “Second Cup.”

Why? Her need to be meticulously prepared for each interview with a pre-written intro and questions on her laptop or on a piece of paper.

Credit: Rodney Ho/

Credit: Rodney Ho/

Prep is “inherent of who Lois is,” said “City Lights” producer Kim Drobes, who will take over as a co-host after Reitzes leaves. “It’s stunning. We tell her, ‘You’re ready. You got this!’ Then something technical goes wrong and she doesn’t have her printed notes. That happened with Alton Brown. She killed it anyway because she was so prepared.”

“She forgot to print out her questions,” coproducer Evans recalled. “I was in the room videoing it. She didn’t skip a beat. I had no idea she didn’t have the questions in front of her. She even made references to certain page numbers in his book. I was blown away.”

Her favorite subjects are authors because of her deep abiding love for reading. She jots notes into the corners of pages, underlines specific passages and inserts Post-it notes to assure quick access to particular pages.

Riley, the author, said the first time she appeared on “City Lights,” she could tell Reitzes had read her book thoroughly: “She’ll narrow in on one or two lines of a book on a particular page. She digs deep into how the book hits her as a reader. She picks up on nuances that make you feel like what you do matters.”

Reitzes has a special level of open mindedness to varying viewpoints, Riley said: “She allows her thoughts and feelings of what moves her. You get that. But she also leaves space for you to explain to a wider audience why this book is special, why you need to read this book. She is amazing at that.”

Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com

Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com

The time has come

One late May afternoon in a room at the station packed with classical music CDs now just used for decor, Reitzes was typing furiously away on her laptop prepping for an interview with Christopher Escobar, owner of the Plaza and Tara theaters.

Quila Lee had just wrapped up speaking with Reitzes’ colleague Rose Scott and her eyes widened and jaw slackened when she ran into Reitzes. “You look so young!” she blurted out.

Reitzes, flattered, pointed at her head and said, “In my mind, I’m just 18!”

But after a severe bout of the coronavirus in late 2023, she realized that wasn’t necessarily true. She felt slower.

“I was feeling the pace that was necessary for the show was taking more out of me than what I thought was reasonable,” she said.

So she told her bosses in early March that she would step away from “City Lights” in June.

“I’d like to be available more as a friend and relative,” she said. “I wanted to be able to have more hours living beyond work while I’m healthy. I look forward to exercising more, reading more, walking more.”

She plans to play with her grandson Max more, to visit her daughter Jackie in New York City more often and see more Broadway plays. (“Manhattan is my happy place,” she said. “It’s my favorite island getaway.”) She plans to attend ASO pianist Julie Coucheron’s Kon Tiki Chamber Music Festival in Norway next year.

And she’ll ironically have more time and energy to see more local shows, plays and exhibits in Atlanta that she would otherwise talk about on “City Lights.”

Credit: RODNEY HO

Credit: RODNEY HO

On May 29, Reitzes was in her comfort zone at Symphony Hall. As audience members filtered into the auditorium for an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert, she spoke with dozens of fans, her face a perpetually shifting array of emotions, mostly variants of joy and gratitude, with vibrant hand gestures punctuating her words.

Credit: ATLANTA SYM

Credit: ATLANTA SYM

Before the concert, the ASO bestowed a special gift to Reitzes it has never before given to any non musician: a lifetime “Golden Ticket” free pass to any ASO concert. The audience and orchestra gave her an extended standing ovation.

WABE has no ready replacement for her and may never find one. A week after her final show on June 26, the station will introduce “City Lights Collective,” a newsmagazine show that will feature contributions from more than a dozen journalists from around the city.

Reitzes won’t entirely disappear. She plans to pop back on the show every so often to talk with a favorite author or two.

“I have an open invitation to come back,” she said. “I just don’t have to be there every day.”

The Magic of Lois

Lois Reitzes’ colleagues and guests pay her tribute.

“I remember the first time being interviewed by her how she made it easy for me to talk by asking the right questions. She will steer the conversation in a way that will elicit something about yourself you may not have expected to say.”

“She is a reporter and host but she is also an integral part of who we are as an arts community. She has a genuine love of the art form and the people involved in it.”

“Lois has always given us universal consideration and that has meant a lot. We aren’t niche because of Atlanta’s demographics but the theatergoing population. Lois reminds us stories about humanity are what we’re all here for. I don’t know if there’s anybody else who helps us see our shared humanity in the arts more than Lois.”

“Lois is irreplaceable. I grew up as a kid listening to Lois. She is a household name for so many Atlanta families. Beyond that, Lois is a true humanitarian and we will all miss her and wish her the most joyous of retirements.”

“In a landscape dominated by click bait and shock jocks, Lois is a testament to the soft-spoken power of integrity and authenticity.”

“The first time I got to visit her in the studio, I remember thinking she had the perfect job — listening to music she adores and talking to fascinating people all day, only pausing now and then to tell the listeners what time it is. She seemed like she was having the time of her life.”

“She did not just kick up her heels with her last act at WABE. In fact, she never worked harder in her career than hosting ‘City Lights.’ But it was a seamless and beautiful transition from classical music to arts coverage.”