Wikipedia:Karen Earle Lile

Karen Earle Lile is an American entrepreneur, talk show host, producer and art director/designer whose public works involve sailing as a sport, music, pianos and United States Post Office postal cancellations. She brought Sail Sport Talk to sports talk radio, where she now hosts a weekly talk show Sail Sport Talk with Karen Lile on Sports Byline USA to an International audience. Two notable music projects include her production of the first classical music video that was done in a music video format for the A&E Network: the Kendall Ross Bean: Chopin Polonaise in A Flat, and  producing a benefit jazz album with 60 musicians, including Grammy artists for KCSM (FM) ]in the last two weeks before Fantasy Studios closed. Lile also designed the Building Bridges symbol and produces the USPS Building Bridges Special Postal Cancellation Series.

Early life and education
Lile is a third-generation native of San Francisco, California. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982 with highest honors in English. Her works have spanned the public, community and private sectors.

Community service
As a volunteer, Lile has organized projects for the violence prevention, the homeless and child abuse prevention. Lile was an early proponent of barter. She and her then husband Kendall Ross Bean were whistle-blowers on a group of businesses in the behavior modification industry. Lile and Bean Family story was prominently featured in Dan Rather's 48 Hours (TV program) over a period of 6 months and the investigative report aired on October 15, 1998. This began a succession of investigative reporting by television, newspaper and national magazines into practices that this group of programs was engaging in and the Lile-Bean Family story was included in Chapter 6 of a book by published by Riverside Press called Help at Any Cost. Some of the schools were shut as a result of what this investigative reporting revealed.

Music producer
Lile produced both classical and jazz music albums at Fantasy Studios periodically from 1985 to 2018. Lile's first public work was interwoven with a new trend emerging internationally, the rock music video. In 1986, when rock music videos were being recognized on news and entertainment magazines in the late 1980s, television hosts would note the novelty of one of the first classical music videos to be broadcast on Arts and Entertainment Network, Kendall Ross Bean: Chopin Polonaise in A Flat, in juxtaposition to the MTV top ten.

Lile and Bean, co-founders of Piano Finders, used the piano rebuilding company's knowledge of how a piano works, to create a glass box around the piano action to film the inner workings of the piano hammers, as part of the music video.

Lile partnered with the Local Origination Programming the Televents in Pleasant Hill, CA on this production. As the producer, Lile received a nomination for an ACE Award for Outstanding Programming Achievement at a ceremony on May 18, 1987 by the National Academy of Cable Programing in the Ninth Annual System Awards for Cable Excellence in the category of Music Single.

Art director and designer


On May 29, 1996 Lile collaborated with USPS on the USPS release of a new breast cancer research stamp. She is the Art Director and one of three founders for the USPS Building Bridges Special Postal Cancellation Series.

Lile has continued as an art director and creates the concept and produces the ceremonies for the active USPS Building Bridges Special Postal Cancellation Series. Past cancellations have featured SFJAZZ Center, the Lady Washington and Pier 39, the 100th Anniversary of the Pacific Inter-Club Yachting Associations Opening Day on the SF Bay and a tribute to Music Recording History after the closing of Fantasy Studios.

Talk show host
Sail Sport Talk with Karen Lile began on April 4, 2019 as a talk show about the sport of sailing, syndicated inside main-stream sport talk on Sports Byline USA with Karen Earle Lile and Rick Tittle as co-hosts interviewing racers, commodores and designers of boats talking about sailing sports to an audience of baseball, football and soccer fans. The show is broadcast from the studios in San Francisco to 200 sports talk radio stations across the country, on the Armed Forces Network's 500 radio stations in 168 countries as well as on all 10 multi-digital platforms of the Sports Byline USA broadcast network.

The ancient sport of sailing had not become a regular part of mainstream sports talk on radio before 2019, other than the twice a decade America's cup races and an unusual happening in an International ocean race. Lile was the first to bring Sail Sport to international mainstream sport talk on Sports Byline USA. As a sailor, she has been welcomed aboard historic boats in the Pacific Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, Caribbean Ocean to do live broadcasts through Sports Byline USA, capturing sail sport history in over 90 interviews to the date the Sail Sport talk brand received its US Trademark.

Prior to that, Lile was creating music and sports spotlights for the network since 2015, featuring the music stories of sports celebrities like Bernie Williams and Barry Zito in three minute spotlights that were placed throughout the network's programming.

Personal life
Lile cruises with friends on the San Francisco Bay, along the Pacific Coast, in the British Virgin Islands and on the Dhows in Zanzibar's Indian Ocean for recreation. Lile and Kendall Ross Bean were married in the past and had two daughters by their marriage.