Introduction from
Public Radio: Behind the Voices
by Lisa A. Phillips
A few months into my first on-air job in public radio, as news director of KTPR in Fort Dodge, Iowa, I took a train to New York for the
holidays. The isolation of my new life in a small city where I knew no one had me starved for social interaction, so I spent a lot of
time on that two-day train ride in 1992 hanging out in the dining car. Making conversation, I soon discovered, was not going to be a
problem. As soon as I answered the classic opener, What do you do? I was peppered with questions. Do you know Scott Simon?
Terry Gross?
Even though I had only just started to learn the ins and outs of public radio, I tried to answer them. I had not then had the chance to
meet Scott Simon, though I had talked to Terry Gross, my idol, at a reception in St. Louis. "She was nice," I said. "And short. Very
short." I shared what she’d told me about her start in radio. Her roommate in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s was a host of Woman Power, the feminist show at
WBFO, the local NPR affiliate. The roommate and her lover, who also worked on the show, came out as lesbians on the air. The lover decided that, now that she
was out, she would move on to the station’s lesbian-feminist show. Terry stepped in to take her place on Woman Power. From there, she hosted a daily interview
program and then was hired to host Fresh Air in Philadelphia.
With these few details, I had my train companions enthralled. The irony of my dining car popularity was that my day-to-day existence then was pretty humble. My
audience was the northwest quarter of Iowa, one of the least densely populated areas of the country. At times I was nearly certain that the number of people
listening would fit into the one-room schoolhouse where the Webster County Historical Society gave tours. My day at the station started at 4:30 a.m. so I could
warm up the transmitter in time to broadcast the deep-voiced "Good morning" of Bob Edwards, then the host of Morning Edition. In the fiercest snowstorms, I drove
my station wagon through unplowed streets so I could get on the air to tell everyone else to stay off the roads. One winter there was a stretch of twenty-five below
zero mornings. I stepped very carefully down the stairs outside my apartment. Because I’d read the cold exposure warnings from the National Weather Service the
morning before, I knew that if I slipped and fell and knocked myself out I would be frozen dead in mere minutes. And, of course, no one would be there to turn on
the transmitter.
It was tough. I had to be in bed by 8:00 p.m. if I wanted any chance of a full night’s sleep, an impossible feat in northern Iowa summers, when it doesn’t get dark
until 9:30 or so, and not easy the rest of the year. I tried to adjust by going to bed earlier and asking family and friends not to call after 7:30, but they didn’t always
remember. A college buddy would phone, and before I knew it, it was almost 10:00 and I’d lost my chance to feel human the next day. I’d catch myself nodding off
over the computer keyboard as I wrote my newscasts, or messing up on the air, announcing the time was 7:00 when it was actually only 6:00. I remember a phone
call I got in the studio at 5:30 one morning. "Dear, you sound tired today," the woman said.
I was. I was exhausted and underpaid and lonely. But I loved that job anyway. I loved hearing the Morning Edition theme music. Sometimes I’d do a little dance to
it to wake myself up. I loved hearing Bob Edwards breathe between sentences in my headphones. He had a very distinctive, weary sigh-breath, from smoking and
years of getting up at 1:30 a.m. Most of all, I loved being a part of public radio, something so beloved and respected and fascinating.
KTPR as I knew it back in the early 1990s is gone. The station now mainly transmits the signal of WOI, a larger and far better funded station sixty miles away in
Ames. Public radio, though, is stronger than ever. Nearly twenty-seven million Americans listen to more than nine hundred and fifty public radio stations,
broadcasting from Presque Isle, Maine, to Barrow, Alaska. The number of nationally distributed programs from National Public Radio, Public Radio International,
American Public Media, and other sources is in the hundreds. As ownership consolidation forces commercial radio to neglect local news and information, public
radio affiliates are investing an increasing amount of time and energy in these areas.
As commercial radio becomes increasingly formulaic, public radio is creating a veritable listening renaissance. Commuters arrive at the office and talk about the
news stories they’ve just heard on Morning Edition. Car Talk’s Tom and Ray Magliozzi are just as much household names as Bob and Ray ever were. An
appearance on World Cafe can be one of the biggest breaks of a new rock group’s career, transforming it from obscure to adored on the independent music scene.
This American Life’s Ira Glass is the epitome of American cool, ferreting out the most riveting and unusual stories of our time and setting them to a background of
dreamy-hip music. We are turning to radio for stories, for music, for community, for insight, for laughter, the kinds of things that brought families around the Philco
in the days before television took center stage in the living room.
One of the results of this listening renaissance is that we have an intimate connection with public radio hosts, the people who bring this magic to us. They are with
us when we get up in the morning, when we drive to work, when we cook dinner, garden, sit in the bathtub.
We know them mainly by their voices, not their faces. This voice-to-ear relationship is a startlingly radical one in an era where image is everything, swaying its hips
to seduce us, vivid and lifelike on giant screen digital television.
Without image to overwhelm us, we behave differently. Alone in cars and kitchens, we fume at the latest news on gas prices, cry at Linda Wertheimer’s story about
women veterans learning how to live with amputated limbs, talk back to Daniel Shorr’s commentary. "It’s like Freudian analysis," one listener said. "They never
answer back."
How we want them to. Their voices leave us hungry. Despite our deep connection to them, we don’t know very much about them. They are veiled by the invisibility,
the inherent modesty, of radio. We delight each time the veil is briefly lifted. Remember when Susan Stamberg talked about her son’s first job out of college? An
aspiring actor, he was pumping coffee at Starbucks, not the most glamorous of gigs, but she was grateful that he had benefits and health insurance.
Then there was the time Scott Simon mourned the death of his cat. He played tape of the animal’s Halloween-perfect yowls, causing the fur on my own cat’s back
to rise. Of course, public radio personalities can’t indulge themselves this way too often, even if we want them to. They have a job to do, and that’s to deliver
information, ideas, sounds—not their personal stories.
My job, in writing this book, was to collect these personal stories. I’ve profiled more than forty of the most listened to voices in public radio. Interviewing my
broadcasting heroes was a great privilege and, when I wasn’t quaking from nerves, a tremendous pleasure and a lot of fun. I’ve shared a beer with Michael Feldman
(a local Wisconsin brew, of course). I’ve listened to Scott Simon coo on the telephone to his wife and eaten pistachio nuts that Jacki Lyden had just brought back
from Iraq. I’ve sat in Nina Totenberg’s cubicle at NPR as she reminisced about the days she typed news stories practically shoulder to shoulder with Cokie Roberts
and Linda Wertheimer, in a time when money and space were tight and ambition was limitless. I’ve listened to stories about childhood,
hometown, family, work, friends, radio, love,death, and dreams.
My only regret is that I wasn’t able to interview more of public radio’s luminaries. Time and space considerations limited the scope of this book to the most popular
programs and voices (with a few personal favorites thrown in). It was with great consternation that I left out a number of prominent figures. I should also note that,
much to my disappointment, a few of the people discussed in these pages declined my interview requests, and their profiles were based on research and
observation.
I wrote this book because I love public radio and I’ve always been curious about the lives behind the voices. I also hope that deepening the connection between
these voices and their listeners is one way to help safeguard public broadcasting in a time when political scrutiny of the medium is increasing and threats to its
funding abound.
What I’ve discovered along the way is that the lives of public radio personalities have many of the qualities of the radio they bring us. Their stories are fascinating
and significant—stories that enlarge our sense of history and humanity. I think of Michele Norris’s father, who took his family on a summer vacation through
Canada and made a point of talking to African American draft dodgers there about why they didn’t want to go to Vietnam. Though a postal carrier by profession, he
gave Norris her first lesson in journalism. I think of Noah Adams gathering many hours of interviews with single mothers in the low-wage workforce in Maine, yet
being reluctant to return to Washington because in his perfectionism he could never be sure if he’d done enough. I think of Marian McPartland shocking her
bourgeois British family by leaving her classical music studies at the acclaimed Guildhall School of Music to go on tour with a vaudeville group. I think of Nick
Spitzer’s restless mother, driving him and his siblings around New York City every night beforebedtime,playingthe radio and showing them the sights, giving him as
a young boy the wanderlust that would be at theheart of his approach to music on American Routes.
Public Radio: Behind the Voices offers a look behind radio’s veil of invisibility, a chance to get to know thepersonalities we listen to each day and the stories of
their lives. In the end, I hope, you’ll feel closer to the voices that fill our cars, living rooms, and offices, and you’ll listen even more intently.
Public Radio: Behind the Voices is for that ever-growing community of listeners, whose insatiable curiosity about public radio I discovered on that Amtrak train back
in 1992. Happy travels.