Looking Back (Part 2)
(Last week I published a piece of my own story, a summer diversion. Here’s a bit more.)
National Public Radio [1] was a wonderful place to work, and I stayed for 8 years, from 1974 to 1982. Many of the voices you grew to know were there then: Susan Stamberg, Bob Edwards, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, Robert Krulwich, Carl Kasell, Scott Simon and Ira Flatow, among others. Back then, one of the producers of “All Things Considered” was a guy named Bob Siegel–you know him as Robert Siegel, for many years a host of ATC.
“Options in Education,” my weekly series, became a fixture on NPR, and we managed to raise money from the Ford Foundation [2] and a couple of other places. With my own weekly 1-hour NPR program and a mandate to report on ‘education,’ I had a pretty big tent to operate in, which I did for eight wonderful years, from 1974-1982.
Radio is a far more engaging and intimate medium than television. Listeners hear only a voice and apparently fill out the rest of the picture–height, age, weight, et cetera–in their minds (at least they did so before the internet eliminated secrets). We would get somewhere between 75-100 letters a week, often very personal. We answered all the mail.
Susan Stamberg’s office was across the hall, and one day I noticed that she had taped about a half dozen envelopes addressed to her on the door–and each envelope had a different spelling of her name: Stanberg, Steinberg, Stonehead and so on. As it happened, I regularly received similar envelopes, and so I proposed a contest: a year of collecting different versions of our names, with lunch to the winner [3]. After a year, Susan had about 30 variations on her name, but I had nearly 40, including Bob Merrow, Joe Marrow, Ed Merrill (but, alas, never Ed Murrow) and so on. My favorite, however, was “John Moron.”[4]
I took full advantage of my freedom to report. I snuck into China with a group of Canadians in early 1977 or 1978, the first NPR reporter to get into that vast country. Because a Canadian physician, Dr. Norman Bethune, had cared for Chairman Mao during the Long March and thereafter, Canadians had special status, while Americans were viewed with suspicion. actions which gave Canadians special status.
Visiting schools and universities in (mostly rural) China was revealing [5]. This was in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and we saw and heard first-hand the devastation that spasm of narrow Looking Back (Part 2) | Taking Note: