MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg has died at the age of 87. There are few people who have informed the sensibility of NPR more than Susan. She was an original National Public Radio staffer who decided to make a life of it. Susan's stories shared her fascination with the spark of creativity. NPR's David Folkenflik has this tribute.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: If you were to poll NPR listeners about Susan Stamberg, dollars to turkeys, most would recall hearing something like this.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: So the raw cranberries, the small onion plus half a cup of sugar. Finally, for the grand finale, the last ingredient...
FOLKENFLIK: She shared her mother-in-law's recipe for cranberry sauce - excuse me - cranberry relish with millions of listeners annually. But she lived for stories like this.
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STAMBERG: I'm Susan Stamberg, and I'm realizing a fantasy. Dave Brubeck is sitting at my piano and playing my favorite Brubeck tune, "The Duke."
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FOLKENFLIK: She still had a yellowing copy of the song score clipped out of an old musical magazine. She put it atop her piano for him to play from.
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STAMBERG: That wasn't bad, and you didn't even have to read it off the music...
DAVE BRUBECK: No.
STAMBERG: ...Did you?
BRUBECK: Well, when you've written it yourself...
STAMBERG: (Laughter).
BRUBECK: ...You're home free.
FOLKENFLIK: Susan's colleagues considered her a mentor, a founding mother, but always tough and always true to herself. She was hired by NPR before its start, originally to cut tape - literal audio tape - with a single-sided razor blade. At the outset, she and Linda Wertheimer insisted they deserved to have an office together. They shared the room with photocopiers.
LINDA WERTHEIMER: Susan and I disagreed on politics.
FOLKENFLIK: That's Wertheimer.
WERTHEIMER: That is to say, I thought it was fantastically interesting, and all I wanted to do was cover politics. And Susan thought it was the most boring thing that she could imagine. And she couldn't think why anyone would want to do that.
FOLKENFLIK: She was born Susan Levitt in Newark, New Jersey, in September 1938, and was raised and educated on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Susan was an only child, first in her family to go to college, earning a degree from Barnard in English literature while living at home. She met and married Louis Stamberg, who would go on to a long career with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Susan worked for WAMU radio in Washington, D.C., where she made her on-air debut when the weather girl got sick, as she once recalled, for the Women's Jewish Archive (ph).
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DEBORAH ROSS: Do you have a memory of that first time on air?
STAMBERG: Oh (laughter), total, total memory. Here's how you did it - it was very sophisticated. You picked up the phone, and you dialed WE 6-1212. And they told you what the weather was, and you wrote it down.
ROSS: (Laughter).
STAMBERG: We didn't have meteorologists. We hadn't - there were no computers. There was no way - and there were no windows in the studio.
FOLKENFLIK: After joining NPR, she rose quickly from producer to anchor of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED in 1972, but women didn't yet have a clear place in broadcast journalism.
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STAMBERG: And in the beginning, I didn't - there were no role models. There were these men, these deep-voiced announcers, and they were the authoritative ones. (In deeper voice) So I lowered my voice, and I talked like this.
FOLKENFLIK: Stamberg said Bill Siemering, NPR's first program director, was brave to put her behind the microphone.
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STAMBERG: And he said two magical words for me - to me, very early on. He said, be yourself. And what he meant was, we want to hear from - we want to hear voices on our air that we would hear across our dinner tables at night or at the local grocery store. And we want our announcers and our anchor people to sound that way, too.
FOLKENFLIK: Her colleague Jack Mitchell was the first producer of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. He said her Jewish identity, with an obvious New York accent, presented yet another obstacle.
JACK MITCHELL, BYLINE: That did not play well with certain board members in the Midwest who felt she was, as they, for instance, said too New York. And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those because of the complaints from managers. We did it anyway, and he was very supportive afterwards.
FOLKENFLIK: Stamberg held the program ALL THINGS CONSIDERED true to its name. She once headed into a closet with Ira Flatow to learn what happens when you chomp on Wint-O-Green Lifesavers.
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STAMBERG: I saw it.
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STAMBERG: I saw it (laughter).
IRA FLATOW: What did you see?
STAMBERG: I saw a flash of kind of greenish light, just for a fraction of a second.
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FLATOW: Oh, yeah let me try.
FOLKENFLIK: In 1987, she moved to host Weekend Edition. One of her favorite interviews involved the memoir of the director Elia Kazan. Among the most sensitive topics in the air, his testimony before a congressional committee, known as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, in which he named people in Hollywood he believed to be communists. The act sparked intense debate. Stamberg didn't duck the controversy. She led with it.
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STAMBERG: And there's lots for us to talk about. I would like to get the HUAC business out of the...
ELIA KAZAN: Oh, no. Let's...
STAMBERG: ...Out of the way first.
KAZAN: ...Not start with that.
STAMBERG: I'd like to.
KAZAN: There are 40 pages in the book, and that's all there is of HUAC in the book. And every interview that comes out, that's the most important thing, and...
STAMBERG: I...
KAZAN: ...I'm tired of it.
FOLKENFLIK: And on it went.
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KAZAN: In my life...
STAMBERG: I'll tell you something...
KAZAN: ...Nor in the book.
STAMBERG: I'll tell you something. I came to your book thinking that, actually...
KAZAN: Yeah.
STAMBERG: ...That that was going to be, to me, the most interesting thing to read. In fact, it was not at all...
KAZAN: Yes. So talk...
STAMBERG: ...The most interesting thing.
KAZAN: ...About what's interesting.
STAMBERG: You really are a director, Mr. Kazan. You're directing this conversation.
KAZAN: (Laughter). Good for you. That's very nice, Susan. Don't get mad. It's just, you know, there are two sides to an interview, right?
FOLKENFLIK: Stamberg had been in NPR's Washington studios, Kazan in New York.
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STAMBERG: When I left the studio, I said to the person who was going to edit the tape, leave that argument in, and we'll start with it. And I've often asked myself, if it had been a face-to-face interview, would I have been able to be that persistent and stayed with it? I bet not.
FOLKENFLIK: A few years later, Stamberg yielded the host chair and roamed as a special correspondent. Stamberg profiled the hidden hands of Hollywood each year during Oscar season. In March 2015, she looked at loopers - the voice actors brought in after a TV show or film was shot to add texture to the sound of a scene.
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STAMBERG: What about the part of never being seen? At some point, I mean, you're working so hard here, you're neither seen nor heard, really. You're sort of background mumble.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Laughter) Well, we believe that what we do is really important, and it's collaborative. Every part of this industry has lots and lots of layers.
FOLKENFLIK: At times, she presented NPR itself with uncomfortable truths. When a national controversy broke out over a decision to terminate a prominent commentator, Stamberg said many of NPR's leaders had not served it well.
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STAMBERG: The work that we do has been so consistently extraordinary, the strongest news organization in electronic broadcasting, and that has been untarnished. So that's the thing that I'm just trying, as a long-standing staffer, to keep in my mind and keep focused on.
FOLKENFLIK: One last measure of Susan Stamberg's mark on the network, her recorded voice welcomes visitors who enter the elevators at NPR's headquarters.
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STAMBERG: Going up.
FOLKENFLIK: David Folkenflik, NPR News.
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AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Oh, Mary Louise. I just keep thinking the last time I got to hug Susan was...
KELLY: Oh.
CHANG: ...Was when she came into NPR West more than a year and a half ago, and she felt so small in my arms, but her voice was still so strong, so full of life, just like the...
KELLY: Yeah.
CHANG: ...Susan we've been hearing in the last several minutes.
KELLY: She was so fun.
CHANG: So fun. And I will always remember her advice to me when I became a host. She said, be yourself. But she said that only I, and no one else, gets to choose what being myself means. And I will never forget that, Susan.
KELLY: I love that. I will say one more thing, which is she always met her deadline.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KELLY: So sad as I am today, I'm not surprised in the least that word of her passing this afternoon came just in time for us to rearrange the whole show so we can honor her in every hour.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KELLY: The woman met her post. Susan, we'll do our best to...
CHANG: So true.
KELLY: ...Do you proud. And as you said so many times, thanks for listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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