From about 1963 through 1971, Baird Searles was the Drama and Literature director at WBAI, a listener-sponsored Pacifica Foundation radio station in New York City.
At a time when radio drama had waned to a trickle of obscurity, Searles kept the art alive with collaborators from the science fiction/fantasy community working directly with such writers as Joanna Russ, Roger Zelazny, Theodore Sturgeon and Samuel R. Delany.
He also produced a dramatized reading of the Gormenghast trilogy by the late British author Mervyn Peake, which helped bring these novels to the attention of readers in the U.S. His weekly series, "Of Unicorns and Universes," was the only program of critical commentary on science fiction and fantasy in its day.
Searles and producers Jim Freund, Margot Adler and David Marx authenticated the pronunciations of the characters and the languages by speaking on the phone with Professor Tolkien.
This 100-minute reading is still broadcast every year in late December on Jim Freund's Hour of the Wolf radio show on WBAI in New York.