Note: The following transcript is created by both humans and AI, so despite our best attempts may contain errors.
Bull: And today is Thursday, January 2, 2025 at noon, Pacific Standard Time. This is Brian Bull, lead interviewer and director of the Public Radio Oral History Project. Today, our guest is Susan Stamberg, one of NPR’s Founding Mothers and longtime host, reporter, and now special correspondent. She was the first female broadcaster to host a national news program, NPR’s All Things Considered, and has received practically every journalism award out there, including the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and being inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. In 2020, she also received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the same block as the Pointer Sisters and Mel Blanc. Susan Stamberg, it's so great to have you join us and thank you for making it.
Stamberg: I didn't realize they were my neighbors on Hollywood Boulevard. No kidding, I didn't realize that about the Pointer Sisters, I'm in very good company.
Bull: And the voice of Bugs Bunny, yes, it's very prestigious. (Stamberg laughs) So some basic biographical information. First place is when and where were you born?
Stamberg: Oh, I was born in Newark, New Jersey, but only because my mother happened to be there at that time. She -- we lived in we're based in Manhattan, but she went to Newark to stay with her sister because the sister’s husband was connected to the gynecologist. Did you follow all of that? And soon as I came out off they went back to Manhattan. You really want to know the year it was about 100 years before you were born. Brian, 19, wait a minute. Yeah, yeah. 1938. I'm very old, so you have to treat me with respect.
Bull: Absolutely. Is it safe to call you a Jersey girl?
Stamberg: Never, never in my presence. I'm a New Yorker, born and bred.
Bull: How did you pass the time growing up in New York before getting college and your eventual broadcasting career?
Stamberg: Well, I was in Manhattan through my college. I had a very good education at a public school. It was called then the High School of Music and Art. today, it's called LaGuardia, and you took a lot of tests to get in. There was a lot of competition and the music students had to bring in and perform on their instruments. I had to bring because as an art student, I had to bring in a portfolio full of my art. Then I went to Barnard College, which was, is across the street from Columbia University. I don't like to say it's the women's part of Columbia, because it's quite independent, but it's, it's linked to Columbia. And I got a wonderful arts and liberal arts education there. And then I left New York when I lived at home for college. Left New York to go up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and get a get a degree of Brandeis. I never stayed. I dropped out. I realized I didn't want to go to school anymore. I wanted to be away from home and begin my private life, independent life, and so I got various jobs and things and fell into radio.
Bull: Did your parents have any specific expectations as to what their daughter should grow up to be?
Stamberg: My generation, there was no “to be” for women except get married, stay home with the children. That was it that was the expectation. Neither of my parents had college educations for various reasons, and I came upon it really, with a woman who remains my best friend, who was at high school with me, but her parents were educated, and they gave her a framework for being able to continue her studies. She went to Radcliffe, very, very bright. And did graduate work, and all had ran one of the biggest city -- one of the biggest city planning firms, eventually, in Manhattan. So Debbie was really my stalking horse, in a way, I thought, "Oh, that's — I could do that!" And I did.
Bull: So you studied art and I had a portfolio, and went to Cambridge briefly before dropping out of that. How did you come to get into broadcasting? I believe your resume has WAMU in it.
Stamberg: That's it. WAMU which is the public radio station in Washington, DC, and it was just starting up. And it's really interesting to me. I realized that the other day that I've been involved in the creation of two big institutions. One was NPR, I'm a founding mother of it, but the other was WAMU, but it was began as a student station just going into the dormitories at American University in Washington, but has exploded over the years to be one of our very largest stations and most important stations in the network.
And I fell into it because I had grown up listening to the radio long before there was television and falling in love with it as a medium. And I never thought, I thought, oh, it's much too glamorous. I'd never be able to work in that and I never tried until I got very bored with a job that I was doing in Washington, D.C. where I had moved after Mary, I was a typist. You didn't have a whole lot of opportunity, but at least it was a job.
I got bored with it and began calling around in DC to various people I knew. One was a television producer in Boston, Cambridge, and she produced a weekly TV show for PBS with Eleanor Roosevelt. And I called her and said, “What do you know?” And she said, “Well, they're starting this new network. It's called National Public Radio. Why don't you call a few people there and see if they have anything to do it? You could be a producer.” And I said to her, “What? What does it produce? Or what's a producer do? And she said, “A producer is a person who won't take no for an answer.” And I thought "I could do that." And so I did.
Bull: Wow. You know, and radio was the medium that connected people to one another, not to mention entertainers, politicians and events around the world. What were some of your earliest influences from radio broadcasting, anyone that you particularly liked to listen to, or any programs?
Stamberg: Oh yes, I loved all the dramas on the radio. Grand Central Station, I can…there was a time I could recite the entire announcer opening for that one. But these were all, you know, I love Lux radio theater. I mean, it was all these dramas that were on. Murrow came along and he invented broadcast news that was later, that was during World War Two, but that was what was out there. And the only once I went on the event and became the first woman to anchor a nightly news program.
There were no other well, obviously I was the first. So there were no other people. The only ones on were men, and the only thing I knew to do was imitate them. I can't say they were role models for me, but that's what on the air. So I thought, here's how to do it, lower your voice and sound very authoritative. And I did that for a while, but NPR, you heard the difference, huh? NPR had begun by then.
Bill Siemering, who came out of Wisconsin to NPR to become our first program manager, and put (on) All Things Considered. -- really was his concept. And he got it on the air, on the brand-new NPR. And he came to me after too many days of hearing me like this, and he said, “Susan,” he said, two wonderful words to me. “Be yourself.” Now nobody says that to you. Mr. Rogers probably says it to children, “Be yourself. We like you just the way you are.” But otherwise, people say, “Sit up straight, comb your hair, you know, put on some lipstick.” They do all of those things. But Bill and Mr. Rogers did not. Bill said to me, “Be yourself.” And so I started speaking just as I'm talking to you on the radio this way. And that was new too in its day, because everybody else, the women, were trained actors, and so they came with a very careful accents and very careful delivery.They weren't relaxed and natural.
So we made a new sound with radio as well, with NPR.
Bull: It had to have been very liberating too, to just simply be yourself on the air, versus trying to emulate everyone else back in the day.
Stamberg: Absolutely. It was terrifying, because here I was doing this big job for a brand new and I didn't know how important it was would become news organization, so I was scared most of the time as I grew into it and learned how to do it. But yeah, it was, it was intimidating too.
Bull: You were there for NPR earliest days, back when it was forming its news department and literally finding its own voice. How did it feel, Susan, to be part of something that was not yet fully defined in a media landscape that was both male dominated and also largely headed by television?
Stamberg: Well, first of all, the male dominated -- I never got a job in my entire life that was not decided for me by a male. So I'm certainly a feminist, but not anti-male, because I'm very grateful to the men who decided I was hireable. But in the beginning, it was thrilling. It was so exciting. We were making, creating something that had never existed with very big ambitions.
I mean, in my mind, this skinny little network was going to be, I wanted it to be the New York Times of radio. I wanted it to be that big. We had five reporters. So that was quite an imagination that I had. But Bill, again, in his wisdom got made an arrangement with the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, which in those days was a very strong paper and had reporters all over the world. So his arrangement was, anytime news broke in any foreign country I could speak do on the phone with any one of their reporters, and that'll open many doors for us and strengthened our work and our report.
Bull: One of the classic “two-ways” we call them today.
Stamberg: Yeah, two ways, right, interviews, I call them.
Bull: Along with the late Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer, you have been deemed one of NPR Founding mothers. What does that distinction mean to you, personally?
Stamberg: Well, I made it up. It's my it's my rubric. Totenberg never liked it. She always objected. But I got tired of hearing about Founding Fathers, and I knew we were not that, so we were obviously Founding Mothers, and I was going to put that on the map. That's why. And so what else?
Bull: Oh, I just curious what that distinction meant to you personally, but it sounds like it's also what you coined yourself, so --
Stamberg: I did! A lot, and I used it as much as I could.
Bull: In 1972 you became part of All Things Considered, a hosting position that you'd keep for 14 years. Back in that early period, what were some of the challenges in doing a live magazine program in real time?
Stamberg: Well, we had so few resources, that was really the challenge every day. We had, as I said, five reporters, that's all. And we had an hour and a half. It was in the beginning. ATC was a 90-minute program. We so we had 90 minutes to fill, and that was hard to come by on many, many days. The pressures and the expectations of the hosts were enormous, because we had to do most of those 90 minutes with only the five reporters.
So there was a lot, a lot a lot of work to be done. But as I say, it was a thrilling challenge, because we were starting it, we were creating something that had never existed. And that part was fabulous, because you could do anything. It was open to anything.
Bull: And I think part of the challenge too was member stations were both a very small and also very undeveloped network; many had not yet fine-tuned or even adopted the “NPR sound,” so to speak. And so-
Stamberg: Exactly.
Bull: -- that took that probably took a number of years to really get that system established.
Stamberg: Many years, because most of them were classical music stations. And there were very few of them did news. But over these years, and I've been noticing it. Now that I'm home, I'm working from home, and I have the radio on all day. Of course, I'm hearing what we're doing, what we're getting from the stations, and it's first grade. We've done a whole lot of training in the field to work with station people, station report, and they're really working now at on our level, on that part, they can do a two way, as you said, and they can make their own stories and file them as well. And that's become very important. In the beginning, I think we had 68 member stations, and maybe, if we were lucky, we had 68 listeners that would have been a huge audience for us at the beginning. So it was very rudimentary. You know, we were sort of but as I say, so exciting and inventive and challenging.
Bull: You also went on to host Weekend Edition Sunday, before becoming a cultural correspondent for Morning Edition and Weekend Edition, Saturday. What keeps you motivated and engaged with your work more than a half century later?
Stamberg: Oh, isn't that incredible? Well, for one thing, I'm stuck to my microphone. I'll never be able to put it down, so I figure if I'm carrying this thing, I may as well use it. No, I love the medium. It was the glamor medium of my childhood, and I love the flexibility of it. I love that I don't have to comb my hair, and I love the doors that it opens to me. I've written a few books, several about NPR, and in one of them I call it a magic wand, because it really is. You wave it against the silence, and you wave it against confusion. That microphone is a very important tool for communication, and so I love that about it.
These days, I'm not doing news, I'm doing cultural reporting, and mostly just because it's so impossible to do, I'm reporting on the visual arts, and I've sort of invented ways to do that so that it, I hope works. B ut each time it's figuring out a new way to do something new. And I love that too. I love the challenge of it.
Bull: That leads in perfectly to my next question for you, Susan. One of my earliest pleasures in my own public radio career was becoming an intern for NPR cultural desk back in the 90s (Stamberg: I remember.) There was, yeah, there's you. Sharon Ball, Aileen Ellis, Tom Cole, Lynn Neary and others, who are all great in demonstrating the craft, and I got to go with you to the National Gallery of Art for an assignment. I think it was on a new Picasso exhibit of his early childhood works. And me, being this wide-eyed kid from Idaho, I was just dazzled how much you went into the gallery, talked to the curators, absorbed all this information and stimuli during that visit and the questions that came to you to ask the curators in rapid succession, not to mention the piece that came out of it a few weeks later, I was just really amazed how quickly you just worked with it. And I was curious if you had a way to describe what your creative process is like, when you report on something like a cultural piece?
Stamberg: Yeah, I'm glad that you came along, and I'm glad you remembered it was Picasso with an art exhibit. I mean, preparations are different for different things that you do. If it's a writer, you read as much of him or her as you can, obviously the book that they're going around selling and prepare that way. But then look up some biographical things, find out earlier works that they've produced.
For art, they're mostly about exhibitions of work by people who are dead. So the only ones that I like Picasso, the only ones that I have to talk to are the curators. So I read ahead. I go to see the show, the exhibition, I read some something about the biography of each of the artists, and then I listen really hard, and I think that's the clue to the whole thing. I listen and it prompts follow up questions. And the answers suggest to me, just as you're doing now, what the next question ought to be. So it's become much easier for me than it was at the beginning.
And what has to do with that, it's so funny, Brian, you're going to find this very humorous. Is I don't have to deal with the pictures themselves. When computers came along and someone said to me, “Oh, Susan, now on our website you can put up the pictures!” I arrogantly said “They don't need to see the actual pictures. I want to make them see them on the radio. That's my challenge.” Well, now it's such a salvation, you know, it gives me so much more time than having to say “the upper part of it is green and then it bleeds to an orange and blah, blah,” you know, describing all of that stuff. So it's tremendous. First of all, it was so arrogant of me, I think that I could do without the picture. But second, but, but it's so wonderful to be able to show listeners what it is I'm talking about.
Bull: Oh, absolutely. And you know, I think it was a great way to apply your writing talents to try to describe a piece of art that only people could just listen to at that point. But yeah, the web has really kind of changed the way that we report that is definitely true.
Stamberg: Yes, and also to expose these artists, many of whom are unknown or little known, and their work, to listeners, but I found a way to do it. Once I was free to use the full amount of time that I had, I moved into their biographies instead, and found some fascinating information about their lives, how they became creative, how they became artists, what it meant in their day. And those were old days, 16th century, you know, 19th, 15th, whatever.
So it gave me a lot of time to just give context for them. Knowing that people could be looking at the picture as I spoke, or going to look at it afterwards. That was great freedom, too. And it was funny. It was a lot of fun to discover that and then figure out a way to make it work.
Bull: I don't suppose you recall any unique, interesting tidbits about Picasso in his early years?
Stamberg: Oh, well. I mean, there were so many that I did you know, because he so dominated the art world in those days coming up, I suppose he still does, but it's much more contemporary art that people are talking about now. And I'm not great at that. I really am not. I grew up with the masters, the Old Masters, you know, sure I have to I play catch up, or I just don't understand it, or I don't know what to say about it. Still —
Bull: I find that hard to believe,
Stamberg: It’s true!
Bull: Wow. You know, one of the one of the most recurring compliments that people give you is the warmth and vitality of your voice. It's very assuring, engaged and distinctive for other journalists who are trying to make their own mark in audio, any advice you'd give them for finding their voice?
Stamberg: Well, Bill's was the best. That is, be yourself, but it all sounds so different. There are these young women now who they're very breathy, and they talk like this: soft, gentle, and starting with my generation, we spoke, no, it didn't start that way. They started it -- this kind of talking. We spoke very forthrightly, as I am now. Many of us, me were smokers, so we've got these big voices and deep ones, and sometimes when I hear these really soft little ones, they sound like little girls to me, and they sound not very confident, as if they're always asking questions. So I think in my mind, I never say it out loud, “Take up smoking girl.”
Bull: (laughs) Oh my goodness, you heard it first from Susan Stamberg! Do you still smoke?
Stamberg: Oh, no, I gave it up when I got pregnant.
Bull: All right, good for you. I remember I used to work on the overnight shift for Morning Edition, back in the Bob Edwards era. Anytime that Bob needed to be found for a two-way in the studio or anything for that matter, I always knew that I would just have to go into the parking garage there -at the location at 635 Massachusetts Avenue -- and just look for the faint, glowing ember in the shadows.
Stamberg: (laughs) I'll tell you, Brian, both, the two of us, we were partners, co-hosts on All Things Considered for a while before there was a Morning Edition, and we just lit up constantly in the studio. I mean, we just smoked our way through the day. Every time I did an interview, I lit a cigarette first, till they banned it, till they said, “No, you can't do that anymore.”
Bull: Do you remember what year that was?
Stamberg: No, I don't.
Bull: Probably was --
Stamberg: — no because he was still smoking when he went into Morning (Edition.) That was around 1979 so it was much later than that.
Bull: Yeah, I remember. I believe he probably went into the parking garage because they wouldn't allow smoking and studio or the offices by that point.
Stamberg; Definitely.
Bull: But, but -- as bad of a habit as it is, it does kind of give that sallow bass to a voice after -
Stamberg: It lowers your voice, exactly!
Bull: It does. It does, but hard to think of what people can do best to kind of get that quality in their voice without taking up smoking. I'm sure there are ways, though.
Stamberg: I don't know. I don't hear it very much! What I want to know is this current way, because I hear it so much on our air and in real life, this very questioning kind of super soft and not at all authoritative way of speaking. Or at least it's that to my ears. You probably don't feel that, and people listening to this won't, but --
Bull: There are a few that I hear every so often that there's this annoying quality -to me- where every statement sounds like a question, even though it's not necessarily a question?
Stamberg: Oh, it makes me nuts!
Bull: I don't know where they pick that up. I don't know where that but again -
Stamberg: It's so tentative. It's not authoritative.
Bull: No, no.
Stamberg: And sometimes I'll say it to a guest. I'm very rude at this point in my career, I'll say, could you please, I noticed that you're raising your voice at the end of every sentence, can you try to just think of a straight line and take it all the way out. Don't go up at the end.” And most of them are very polite with that guidance. But not all.
Bull: I'm sure they've never been told that before.
Stamberg: I'm sure not!
Bull: Well, you're Susan Stamberg, so you can get away with that.
Stamberg: You bet! I am, and I always have been.
Bull: What moments, Susan, were you proudest to be working in public radio?
Stamberg: Well, I was very proud, I think, as people began to discover us and really liked it, and started sending us letters and telling us we became kind of a cult object. We began rather slowly, certainly from the beginning, gathering listeners who understood what we were trying to do and really loved it. So I would get a cold, and listeners would bring me literally, to the network, soup! Hot soup for my cold and I drank it. You know, these are such innocent days when you hear this. I mean,(Bull: Those were!) No, no security. I never thought, “Oh, my God, what if it’s it's poison?”
Bull: No royal tasters!
Stamberg: No, no. That's right, but I don't know there were so many, and I'm thinking about him so much these days. Jimmy Carter. Again, I was honored to be asked to be the questioning side of an interview with him. It was the second time that he agreed to do a call in with listeners. The first time was with Walter Cronkite, and the second time was me, and I sat in the Oval Office with him and managed the listeners who were calling him and spoke with him. And he was so he was so gracious and so unflappable and dedicated.
And you're hearing all that now because in the obituary work that people are doing, but, there's a follow up to that. Anyway, we worked for an hour together, and I enjoyed it a lot, although, again, because I'm not much of much on politics, I'm not very good at it. It wasn't so much that substance as it was the quality of his delivery and his physical, you know, the clues to how he was feeling about something, his posturing, how he was leaning in.
But a few years later, he was going around selling I call it, but he and his wife had written a book together, and they were on a book tour, and he came to me, to it, and I reminded him, I said, “Mr. President, I was in the Oval Office with you X number of years ago, and we spent quite a bit of time taking calls from listeners.” And what he said was, thanks so much for remembering.” Isn't that lovely?
Bull: That is.
Stamberg: He wouldn't have had a clue about it. He would have had no memory at all. But how gracious he was to say, “thank you so much for remembering.”
Bull: And was there any evidence that he was a supporter for public broadcasting?
Stamberg: No, the Clintons were. That was, that was our fan system that in those days, because there they were in this, well, it wasn't as small as Carter's peanut town, but there they were in -- wait -- in Arkansas. What was the name of the town? Little Rock?
Bull: Yes, I think it was.
Stamberg: And they were hungry for World News and hungry first to find out what was going on. I don't know what their local paper was, but we at that point could report on the world. We had a lot of reporters, and we were doing very solid work. And so that was, did I answer the whole question? My mind began to wander.
Bull: I was just doing a little follow up on whether Carter was a public radio supporter at that time, it sounds like the Clintons definitely were, though.
Stamberg: The Clintons definitely, they really turned to us to find out what was going on.
Bull: And I think that speaks to NPR's appeal, both as an organization and also its member station network, and that the programming and the news and the culture reaches areas of the United States that would otherwise be news deserts were not for the member station network and the translators.
Stamberg: Absolutely and you know, the flip side of that is, is emerging now, as I was saying, I hear such improvement from the stations all over the country, and what they’re doing in terms of doing stories and reporting, and what I'm hearing on the air these days, and I love it, is very well presented local news about the oddest things. This is how it was in our beginning that was Bill Siemering again. His goal was to let the country speak to itself and to one another, and tell the funny little things or the scary or the difficult things that were going on locally in their towns.
And the first broadcast we did had the story of a barber who was shaving women's legs. I mean, that's, yes, that's, I don't remember what, but I remember it happened. And you know how local we could get. This is something that is going on in that town. Imagine right now and the country current, things that stations are doing us are like that. They're not quite as maybe artistic, but they are that odd and strange, and bringing the country, opening up the country, and letting a listener hear what else is happening.
Bull: I think that speaks a lot to the experimental and exploratory nature of public radio (Yeah,) that gives it a lot of that appeal. I remember you too, one of your earlier segments involved you going into a closet with, oh, what's his name? (Stamberg: Ira Flatow.) Yes, and chewing, what was it? Lifesavers?
Stamberg: Wintergreen Life Savers. Oh, this is just so funny! You remember, because he had gotten the word that Wintergreen Life Savers glow in the dark, and he was doing science reporting for us, and so he got himself a roll of Wintergreen Life Savers, and said, “Come on, we have to go into this dark closet and test it out.” So we both took our microphones into the dark closet, and we chewed and the tape is so funny. It's me saying, “I see it. Oh, look. Oh, I see it,” and Ira doing the same thing. It was a riot. And later I spoke with my mother, and she said, “What were you doing in going into dark closets with a young man?”
Bull: Well, you had to see the sparks.
Stamberg: Exactly, and we did! I hadn't tested it again lately. Maybe they changed their formula.
Bull: That would be a good follow up someday. Let us know if you ever do that.
Stamberg: Okay, okay.
Bull: I think back over your career, Susan and all the honors and awards and accolades that you received, and I confess that when I think of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, I normally think of A-list celebrity actors and directors, not necessarily a public radio special correspondent and host. How were you approached on getting your own star on the walk?
Stamberg: Well, it was quite an honor, but it was also embarrassing. You know, it's sort of funny. It is the Chamber of Commerce of, I guess it's of Hollywood that makes the decision. And there was a reporter we had Sonari Glinton, who was a great fan of mine, and the chairman of the NPR board, Paul Hager. And between the two of them, they cooked this up. They thought it would be a nice thing to do, but also very nice publicity for the network might gain us a few more listeners, and so they got together and made it happen. I'm very I was very grateful to them, and a little embarrassed.
I have to say, people the East Coast doesn't know anything about that, but it's a big deal out West, and especially as you can imagine in Hollywood.
Bull: Yes, right. And they would have had a ceremony, I'm sure.
Stamberg: Yes, it was outside, of course, because the weather was always gorgeous and invited guests. But here's the kind of thing, a radio person notices: there was a big audience, and most of it was photographers, news people, and they were all bunched up together, looking at me, but my dais - my speaking platform - was turned to them so I never got to look at the audience, all those nice people who had come to watch this, I had to keep turning over to see them. You know, I spend my life never seeing my listeners. And here was this golden opportunity to see them all, and all I was doing was looking at a bunch of paparazzi. I was very happy that they were there I suppose, but it was a funny form of communication.
Anyway, there I am, and now I feel because they put a star in the pavement, which means that all kinds of people can walk all over me whenever they want to! (Bull laughs) It's flat. It's not the one….there's a different part of Hollywood Boulevard where the old movie stars press their hands into the square --
Bull: Oh, the wet cement?
Stamberg: Yes, or they stood in it and pressed their footprints. But this was not that. This was a flat star. And I went looking for it one day. I hadn't seen it the day that because they didn't install it the day that it was presented.
So a year or so later - my son lives in LA - and I said, “Josh, you know, could I go see my star? I've never seen it in the pavement.” He said, “Sure.” So he took me there. And we're looking, we're looking. And there are three guards around in front of it, and they all one of them comes over to me and says, “Can I help you look for someone?” And I said, “Yes, you can.” “Well, who is it?” he said. And I said, “Well, it's me.” And he looks at me, and he says, “Oh?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And I even I don't do this. This is not typical of me. I took out my driver's license and showed him a picture to prove that, in fact, it was me and I had my name on it. And he looks up, he looks at the picture, he looks at me, and he calls out to the other two men, “Hey, here's one!” And he points at me. They
come running over. And we had to, I had to post for my picture with each and every one of them. They were very excited! (laughs) “Hey, here’s one, guys!”
Bull: I'm sure they all told you what their favorite NPR segment was, too.
Stamberg: I doubt it. I don't think they ever heard of it. That's the thing.
Bull: I don't suppose you ran into any Hollywood celebrities during the star dedication for you, or did you spot anyone?
Stamberg: Well, Annette Benning was lovely enough to introduce me and have a few introductory words. That was very kind of her, and she spoke beautifully about it. My son helped me with that. He approached her. He's an actor, and he was in a play with her at the Geffen Theater there, and so he felt he could call and ask, and she said yes, which thrilled me, because I think she's so wonderful.
Bull: She is a great actress. Wow, Annette Benning. And, of course, your son, Josh Stamberg starred in “Wandavision,” not too long ago, on Disney+.
Stamberg: Yes, among other programs, the number one program in the world for awhile.
Bull: You must have been proud.
Stamberg: I was very proud, but I knew nothing about it, because I never read comic books and I didn't understand it. But I watch everything that he does, and he's been working. He's a working actor, which is not a contradiction in terms as it is in so many cases, he's been working since he graduated college.
Bull: Wow, that's excellent. Did he have any specific thoughts on his mom getting on the Walk of Fame?
Stamberg: Oh, I thought he had a big kick out of it. But what he liked better was that, Boheyga again, bought everybody who had come for it lunch at Musso & Franks, which turns out excellent martinis, and so we had really good lunches that day. And I think that impressed him more than anything! But my two daughters - my two grand girls - came, and they loved it. They felt it was such a nice, fussy being made around my their Zuzu, their grandmother. They called me Zuzu.
Bull: Oh, that's so beautiful. Back in 1983 NPR faced a financial crisis, and I know that its president and vice president resigned as it was, to help offset a funding windfall, and there were some cuts of programs and the like. And since that time, NPR rebounded, grew and now faces some new challenges, and this includes a competitive media market, renewed calls from critics to defund it, a smaller audience, and technological threats even like AI. And I was curious since you've been through hard times before, Susan with NPR, any thoughts or ideas on how in person can continue to thrive and promote its service into the future?
Stamberg: Well, it's really tough, I will say, and I didn't realize it until fairly recently, how competitive it is out there, because I all I do is keep my radio on and listen to the local station all day. And I don't listen on my telephone, you know, I don't do any of that stuff. I own eight radios in my house, and that's what I listen to.
So I only fairly recently realized the challenge of that, but we're the only ones who do real news now. TV certainly doesn't, the TV news is not real news. It's a few little boys, and then they move along with advertising. We spend two hours every day with our magazine programs, Julie met so people will always want to hear that but the death of radio has been predicted so many times, and it never goes away.
There'll always be the human voice telling stories. There'll be an audience for that and a need for it, and what the form it takes and where, where the place that it comes from, that can shift, but the longevity of it is really there. It's built in to our DNA, I think. And so I don’t worry that it's going to disappear. I do worry about the many ups and downs of it, but our listeners are very faithful, and they're very good in the contribution that they make to the stations to keep us going. And the stations are most dependent on the federal money. The network less so, although the stations pay a good deal to subscribe to our service, but we also have funders and businesses and underwriters who help us a lot.
The stations don't have quite that kind of access, so it's always a balance, and if we lose their contributions because they don't have the money, then we'll start to be in trouble. So far so good. We'll see what the new administration has in mind. But again, I feel it's so we are so low profile compared still to all the media that's out there, that we may just be last in line here to be eliminated.
Bull: Yeah, well, I hope that day never comes. I was talking to Terry Gross just last week (Stamberg: Ahh, yeah.) and first off, she raves about you as being a role model and other kind words, but she also said too that the media landscape is overwhelming between streaming services and the podcast landscape and options out there that, she just felt that you know, as long as they continue - this is speaking on behalf of Fresh Air, of course - that as long as they do insightful, interesting conversations with artists and authors and lawmakers and the like that she felt that, Fresh Air still stands its own ground pretty well.
Stamberg: And no one else is doing it, like us exactly. Yeah.
Bull: And so fingers crossed going into the future that critics and administrations may say or do that NPR will find its footing, especially among its listenership and that support that's just so crucial.
Stamberg: Yes, I agree. Well said.
Bull: Now I felt like I should give out a number to call, I’ve been doing this job too long (both laugh)
Stamberg: Pass the hat, Brian.
Bull: One of the most long-standing traditions associated with Susan Stamberg horse is that cranberry relish recipe, which I understand has been shared practically every year since 1971. I mean, this is a recipe with longevity, and tell me again please, if you will, how you came across this recipe and why you promote it so much.
Stamberg: Well, I call the recipe Mama Stamberg’s cranberry relish. Mama Stamberg is my late mother in law, and I was invited to her home Allentown, Pennsylvania, to be looked over by the parents of my husband to be, we were about to get engaged, and I was taken out there to shake hands and let them look me over. And we had a lovely -it was Thanksgiving- we had a lovely turkey dinner, and included in it was this dish I thought was fabulous, a very hot pink and tangy, tangy. It wasn’t you know, apples or oranges and cranberries. No, no, no. Very, very different. I thought it was delicious, and I asked her for the recipe. So that's how it started.
She --and I thought it was her recipe-- years later, I discovered it wasn't her sister in law had clipped it from the New York Times and published. It was published by Craig Claiborne, who was the food editor in those days. I put him on the air years after I'd been doing the recipe on the on the radio, and apologized to him. I said, “Look, I didn't know this, and it's been just theft. I didn't give you the credit for it.” And he said, “Susan, you've got more mileage out of this recipe than I ever have. Go for it. Use it as much as you like!”
But I started putting it on because I just felt we were the nation was in flux, with everybody was moving someplace else. And look for traditions. And this could be a very nice tradition to launch on a radio network for the country. And I got lots of reaction to the broadcast, but also to the recipe. And many people would say “It's awful. I can't stand it!” but enough of them really did like it, so I kept it up every year, and it was fun. It was fun to get those reactions to. In fact, I have a tray of it in the freezer right now, if you'd like me to mail it to you.
Bull: (laughs) Let me go back to you on that. I recall the descriptor as “Pepto Bismol pink.”
Stamberg: Well, one of the one of the readers said, er, listeners, said that. I it hurt my feelings, but it's a good line, isn't it?
Bull: It is, it is.
Stamberg: It’s how people remember things, it's kind of the turn off for people, but how silly of them.
Bull: It's almost a fluorescent pink in some ways, and I had it before.
Stamberg: Oh, yeah. And what do you think? You can tell me the truth.
Bull: I liked the pungency of it, because I'm a big fan of horseradish (Stamberg: Right!) and I like a savoriness of the onion, so it kind of cuts through what is otherwise a pretty standardized recipe by now, and so I will be honest in saying I won't go back to it every year, but when I do get offered it, I won't turn it down. So --
Stamberg: Oh Bravo to you, good for you!
Bull: So you can you can send me. I'll give you the mailing address and you can ship me a container, Susan.
Stamberg: One time I got all the White House chefs in for a series of interviews I was doing, but I brought the recipe with me and handed each one of them a copy, and got each one to read a part of it, one after the other, ‘til it was all on the air. And the last one was Nancy Reagan's bakery chef (Bull: Oh wow!) and he read his portion, and then he said in German - he was German - “You make it, and then you throw it out!” (both laugh)
Bull: Wow, wow.
Stamberg: And I had my ending. That was my great ending for this story.
Bull: There's something about being condemned in German that just has a cutting edge to it.
Stamberg: Oh yeah, oh boy. Yes it does!
Bull: So still continue to provide reports for NPR. Do you have any thoughts as to when you'll eventually hang up the "magic wand "of yours?
Stamberg: Listen, Brian, because I can't live without IT, I need those computer guys, and we have them 24/7 access their phone numbers so we can call and say, “Could you help me please? This isn't working quite right,” and I've become their best friend. I call about, well, once a day, maybe not quite that often, but they're wonderful. They're wonderful, and they help me, and they can do remote access. They can look at my screen and fix the problem that would have taken me five hours in order to try to do. That, and plus the fact I love the work.
Bull: You're obviously good at it, great at it, I will say, and very deeply appreciated by millions of listeners out there. And I'm delighted. Keep going at it. Susan, you are a treasure.
Stamberg: Ah, thank you.
Bull: Any final thoughts about your career, or the state of the public radio industry?
Stamberg: Well, public radio is just buzzing. It has been in such wonderful shape, and more and more young people want to be part of it, although these podcasts are also becoming so popular, and I think people may like story on demand more than having to listen for two hours to something on the air.
So I don't know the solution to that, but I think the podcast are probably that's the solution. So they can listen a bit here. Let's listen a bit there. Listen to what they want to. But I think public radio is in has been in very, very good shape, and hopefully will continue to do that. But as we said, the competition is enormous, and there's such a shift now. We’ll see what happens with the Trump Administration and what they do.
Bull: I compare notes on the industry with a number of people back at NPR, including Doug Mitchell, who heads the NPR Next Generation Project. And when we talk about podcasting, whether the talk is, is that it's new, it's innovative, it's fresh, and Doug and I both say, “Well that, but it's also Weekend Edition Sunday, all over again,” (Stamberg laughs) and that there's a lot of long segments on very kind of niche topics and voices, which is great, which is great. And so in some ways it's new, and in some ways it's kind of going back to some of the earliest features, and works on NPR. And so it's kind of great to see that innovation and experimentation come back.
Stamberg: Good, I agree with you, nice!
Bull: And if I may ask, Susan, how's the hip doing?
Stamberg: Well, I'm on a walker, and I said to my son, when I was trying to get up a flight of stairs, “Oh, honey, I'm getting old.” And he said, “Ma, you are old.” And he's right. I mean, it's okay, but everything else is falling apart. I gotta tell you, still, I have my spirit. I have my tobacco-strained voice, and I every now and then, I have my brain. So I think I'm doing pretty well.
Bull: Glad to hear that no keep resting up and recuperating. Susan, and this is has been a great hour spent with you. Any last minute thoughts or things that you'd like to share while I have the recorder going?
Stamberg: No, I so enjoyed talking to you. I love your questions, and you've grown up very nicely since I last saw you.
Bull: Thank you. Thank you. I have a wife and three kids and five cats and, (Stamberg: Oh!) I’m nicely situated here in the woods of Eugene, Oregon, working for KLCC and the University of Oregon and so, yeah - I like to think that I've kind of made something of myself over the last 30 years.
Stamberg: Well, you certainly did. And that was one of our early stations, wasn't it? KLCC?
Bull: I think so. I believe it was KWAX in Eugene, Oregon until the early 80s, and then at some point, KLCC became the first station. I'm not quite sure what happened there. I need to track some people down and interrogate them exactly what happened.
Stamberg: Yeah, yeah, but I remember when I'm grateful to them, because I learned how to pronounce the name of the state. I always said, “Aragon.” I'm a New Yorker, so I listened to that's your station, and now I understand how to do it. So thank you. I'm grateful.
Bull: No, our pleasure, our pleasure. (Stamberg laughs) And this concludes my Susan Stamberg, January 2nd, 2025. Susan, thank you so much again for being a reliable, comforting and familiar voice on NPR all these decades. It's been great having you join us on the Public Radio Oral History Project today.
Stamberg: Thank you for asking me and nice to talk to you. Brian.
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The Public Radio Oral History Project was started by Ken Mills in 2022, as a way to preserve the accounts of the American public radio system's earliest pioneers, innovators, and personalities. It's currently headed by longtime radio journalist Brian Bull, a former NPR editorial/production assistant for Morning Edition, and participant in the NPR Diversity Initiative.
