David Brud­noy ’62 was born on June 5, 1940 in Minneapolis, MN. A mem­ber of Timothy Dwight College, Brud­noy majored in Japanese Studies at Yale and grad­u­ated a Rank­ing Scholar on the Dean’s List. As an under­grad­u­ate, Brud­noy estab­lished him­self as an out­spo­ken politico, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the George Orwell Forum, the Criterion Board & the Yale College Democrats. He received his mas­ter’s degree in Far East­ern stud­ies from Har­vard and a sec­ond mas­ter’s degree and a doc­tor­ate in his­tory from Bran­deis Uni­ver­sity before estab­lish­ing him­self as an icon­o­clas­tic radio host based in Boston, MA.

Brud­noy began his career in broad­cast com­men­tary and jour­nal­ism in 1971, when he worked for Boston’s WGBH-TV. From 1981 to 1986, Brud­noy was a con­trib­u­tor to WRKO, before mov­ing to WBZ, where he would stay for the rest of his career. Brud­noy would go on to become the the top-rated talk radio host in New Eng­land, appear­ing in his WBZ reg­u­larly sched­uled week­day evening slot until his retire­ment and death. Dur­ing his career as a radio host, Brud­noy also had arti­cles and movie reviews pub­lished in The New York Times, The New Repub­lic and The Sat­ur­day Evening Post.

In addi­tion to his career on the air­waves, Brud­noy taught classes at Boston Uni­ver­sity, North­east­ern Uni­ver­sity, Mer­ri­mack Col­lege, Uni­ver­sity of Rhode Island, and the Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment at Har­vard.

In 1994, Mr. Brud­noy revealed pub­licly dur­ing his radio show that he was gay and had AIDS, a pub­lic procla­ma­tion that fol­lowed a near death encounter with viral pneu­mo­nia.

In 1996, he received an hon­orary doc­tor­ate from Emer­son Col­lege and pub­lished his mem­oir, “Life Is Not a Rehearsal.” He became a brother of Phi Alpha Tau, a com­mu­nica­tive arts fra­ter­nity, in the spring of 2001. That same year, he estab­lished a fund for AIDS research. In September 2003, he was told he had Merkel cell car­ci­noma; he died after it metas­ta­sized in his lungs and kid­neys on December 9, 2004.

He was 64 years old.