Dead Air

“What we do,” says Perri Chasin, “is celebrate lives.” Nope, she doesn’t work for a certain cemetery chain. Chasin is firmly planted at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, where she and co-producer Forrest Murray research, write, narrate and edit monthly installments of “Final Curtain,” which as far as anyone can tell is North America’s first obituary-only radio program.

“We’re inundated with story ideas,” Murray says happily. Indeed, powerful actuarial forces are on their side. The two friends and producing partners regularly scour the Internet for noteworthy death notices, and at 2:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month, “Final Curtain” profiles six or seven of the recently deceased whose stories the pair deem interesting and below the radar of the mainstream media. Johnny Carson didn’t make the cut, but listeners have heard about French crooner Sacha Distel; Joseph James Zimmermann Jr., inventor of a telephone answering machine; Theodore Taylor, a physicist who spent the first half of his life building nuclear weapons and the last half working to abolish them; and Francis Brunn, juggler par excellence.

Each segment features narration and interview material, recordings of the recently departed when available and the occasional musical pun (for an obit on Willis Hawkins, designer of the workhorse C-130 transport plane, the producers played the Beatles’ “Carry That Weight”).

So far, “Final Curtain” has received about as much big-time attention as its subjects did while in this mortal coil. “We did get one review,” says Chasin. It was from the daughter of Danny Dark, a longtime off-screen TV announcer. “She heard her dad’s voice on the program when she was driving. She had to pull over.”