Len Tillem

June 9, 1944 - January 13, 2022

“Why are you calling a lawyer?”

Mention that phrase in the San Francisco Bay Area and you’ll get a huge smile. That’s the question that attorney Len Tillem would ask each of his guests on his daily radio program that ran for over a decade in the Bay Area.

A lawyer by training with a successful law practice in Sonoma, CA, Mr. Tillem was best known as a beloved voice of everyday reason on San Francisco’s top-rated radio station, KGO. His combination of infectious good humor and friend-next-door advice made “The Len Tillem Show” a fixture in the lives of his listeners.

“I often (got) the question, ‘Did you hire him because you wanted a lawyer?,’” said Mickey Luckoff, president and general manager of KGO radio. “No, of course not. We hired him because he’s a personality, an entertainer.”

“To this day, I still don’t understand why the show is so popular,” Mr.

Tillem said during its run.

Leonard Tillem was born in the Bronx, N.Y. and grew up in Belle Harbor, N.Y. He attended Far Rockaway High School, Brooklyn College, and New York University Law School.

After several years of traveling the world, Mr. Tillem followed his sister, Susan, to California, where she was raising her three small children, Keva, Joya, and Lela. A central figure in their lives, he picked up the first of his most treasured monikers: “UL” for Uncle Lenny.

When he met his wife, Susan Fegan, she saw in him a unique family man who always put his loved ones first.

With the birth of their two daughters, Freya and Phoebe, Len picked up the moniker that filled him with even deeper meaning: “DL” or Daddy Lenny.

Over the decades to come, Susan Fegan and Lenny’s dinner table was the hub for the entire Tillem family. New members and subsequent generations not only learned the value of family, but the importance of being able to tell a good joke and a great story.

Asked recently by an expectant father what the secret was to raising such a close family, Lenny beamed to him, “Show them abundance!”

Whether as “UL,” “DL”, husband or brother, when it came to family, there was nothing Lenny wouldn’t do.

Through stories like the ones he loved to tell so much, his memory will soon take on a new moniker that Mr. Tillem was just getting used to: “GL.” May it be a blessing.

Lenny is survived by his wife of 35 years, Susan Fegan; his daughter Freya and her husband Jonathan; his daughter Phoebe and her fiancé Luke; his sister Susan Tillem; his niece Keva; his niece Joya and her husband Jon; his niece Lela and her husband Dave; and his brothers Jack and Herb Tillem.

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the family will not be holding a service at this time.