A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

NPR

I knew nothing about National Public Radio when I began working there, but I knew the reality of my situation. My severance money from Mutual was just about gone and I needed a job. I opened the phone book and called everything that had the word radio in its name. Just before I got to radiology and radio repair, I called NPR and talked to a producer named Rich Firestone. Rich said that the news director, Cleve Mathews, had a few projects in mind and I should talk to him. In fact, Cleve had just fired his newscaster and was just as much in need as I was. I made a tape for Cleve, and he told me to come back the next day and sit in with Bill Toohey, the New York reporter serving as temporary newscaster. Bill explained the format and had me do the 8:00 pm newscast . It was February 15, 1974, and I had a new job. When radio began, all stations were noncommercial. They stayed that way in most countries and might have remained commercial-free in the United States if the government had resisted pressure from big business. Most of radio quickly became a new advertising medium, but some stations were licensed to schools, churches, libraries, labor unions, and other nonprofit groups. They were called educational stations until the 1960s. A few of the stations in the Midwest earned a following by providing information to farmers. In other places, such as my hometown, educational stations were the only source of classical N P R 44 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X music on radio. Lectures were common, and tapes were exchanged by stations in a sort of informal network. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was a part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. It was spawned by recommendations of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting . The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created to sustain local stations and to grant funds for the production of programs. The Public Broadcasting Service would distribute TV programs nationally. There was a major flaw in all these plans. The Public Broadcasting Act made no mention of radio. Ultimately, noncommercial radio licensees successfully lobbied Washington to include them. Public radio stations wanted something better than exchanging tapes. In 1970, they established National Public Radio as a production house for national programming and a nationwide distribution system. The first broadcast, in April 1971, was a session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on Vietnam. On May 3, 1971, All Things Considered debuted as NPR’s first regularly scheduled, daily program. That first broadcast included coverage of the massive May Day antiwar demonstrations taking place in Washington that week. Listeners heard reporter Jeff Kamen ask a police officer if driving his motorcycle into a group of demonstrators was a standard crowd-control technique. This was a new kind of radio produced by a new breed of broadcasters. All Things Considered was the brainchild of Bill Siemering, a very bright and inventive man who loves radio and its service to communities . The mission statement Siemering wrote for NPR has a lot of wonderful things to say about the type of journalism the network would pursue. By the time I got to NPR, Siemering had been fired, and producer Jack Mitchell told me ATC was not meant to be a news program but rather “a magazine of the air.” It gave listeners a mixture of aural experiences—the chatting of women at quilting bees, interviews with dulcimer makers, and commentary by storyteller John Henry Faulk, former New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, and early radio performer Goodman Ace. Mike Waters, one of the program’s early hosts, produced a fantasy about God creating a sunset. Music and literature were important subjects to cover, and if the occasional piece of jour- 45 N P R nalism crept into the mix, that was okay too. All Things Considered developed a loyal audience who loved the program’s quirks and surprises. Critical reviews were favorable, and ATC won a Peabody Award in its first year. I wish I could say that I walked through the door and immediately embraced this marvelous radio experiment. The truth is that I was horrified by the whole outfit. Public radio in those days had not fully emerged from its earlier “educational” incarnation. It...