Susan Stamberg, an original National Public Radio staffer who went on to become the first U.S. woman to anchor a nightly national news program, died Thursday at the age of 87.
Few figures have informed the sensibility of NPR more than Stamberg. Colleagues considered her a mentor, a yenta, a founding mother — always tough, and always true to herself.
Stamberg is survived by her son, the actor Josh Stamberg, and her granddaughters Vivian and Lena.
NPR host Scott Simon contended she was the first real human being to host a regular evening newscast. Stamberg even knit while sitting in front of the microphone at All Things Considered.
Stamberg’s stories and segments over the decades spanned the human experience, from examining matters of state to illuminating pointillist details of artistic achievement. She would be recognized by her peers with honors from the National Radio Hall of Fame, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and more. She retired in September.
Such a reception was not guaranteed when NPR hired Stamberg before its broadcast debut more than five decades ago. She originally was assigned to cut audio tape — it was literally tape back then — with a single-sided razor blade.
Women didn’t yet have a clear place in broadcast journalism, finding themselves sidelined and dismissed at major television networks and even in radio.
At the outset, Stamberg and another of NPR’s “founding mothers,” Linda Wertheimer, insisted they deserved to have an office. They shared a room with photocopiers.
“Susan and I disagreed about politics,” Wertheimer recalled. “That is to say: I thought it was fantastically interesting. All I wanted to do was cover politics. She thought it was the most boring thing imaginable. She couldn’t think why anyone would want to do that.”
Instead, Stamberg interviewed the jazz great Dave Brubeck at her own home, a yellowing copy of a song’s score clipped out of an old musical magazine atop her piano for him to play from.
She called the dentist of then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to learn more about his notably toothy smile.
And Stamberg famously shared her mother-in-law’s recipe for cranberry sauce — she insisted on calling it cranberry relish — with millions of listeners year after year. She inflicted it on such on-air guests as White House chefs, the former editor of Gourmet magazine and the rapper Coolio.
A big break comes by dialing the weather
Stamberg was born Susan Levitt in Newark, New Jersey in September 1938 and was raised and educated on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
She was an only child — and the first in her family to go to college, earning a degree from Barnard College in English literature while living at home.
She met Louis Stamberg while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Once married, they moved to Washington D.C. He went on to have a long career with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
She took a job at WAMU, the public radio station. She made her on-air debut when the weather girl (as the job was then called) got sick.
“It was very sophisticated,” Stamberg told an interviewer for the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011. “You picked up the phone and dialed WE 6-1212. And they told you what the weather was and you wrote it down. We didn’t have meteorologists, there were no computers, and there were no windows in the studio.”
Yet when it came time for Stamberg to speak in front of the microphone for the first time, she realized she had forgotten to make that call. So she said the first thing that came to mind: It was 98 degrees.
The problem: it was February.
“We had probably two listeners. Neither of them called,” she said. “But it taught me enormously important lessons: Always prepare. You don’t go on the air unprepared. And don’t lie to your listeners even if they never hear you and they never call.”
Stamberg continued to recite the weather on WAMU, but found it rather boring. To spice things up — for both herself and her listeners — she added a few lines of weather-appropriate poetry to each report, drawing on her English literature degree.
When Louis Stamberg headed to India for a two-year stint, Susan worked for the wife of the American ambassador there and filed stories for Voice of America, the U.S.-backed international broadcaster.
‘Be yourself’
After joining NPR, Stamberg rose quickly from producer to anchor of All Things Considered in 1972. The first journalists hired at NPR were feeling their way, she said, and that was doubly true for women.
“There were no role models, there were these men, these deep-voiced announcers, and they were the authoritative ones,” Stamberg recalled years later. “So I lowered my voice” — here her raspy voice descended what seemed like two octaves — “and I talked like this.”
She said Bill Siemering, NPR’s first program director, showed courage by putting her behind the microphone.
“He said two magical words to me very early on,” she said. “He said, ‘Be yourself.’ And what he meant was, we want to hear from — we want to hear voices on our air that we’d 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.”
Her colleague Jack Mitchell, the initial producer of All Things Considered, said sexism wasn’t the only obstacle that Stamberg had to surmount.
“Besides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,” Mitchell said. “Here is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it.”
Mitchell said that did not play well with NPR board members from stations in the Midwest.
“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,” Mitchell said. “We did it anyway and he was very supportive afterwards.”
The Wint-O-Green science experiment
Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts — the other founding mothers of NPR — all made their careers covering various facets of federal Washington. Stamberg was a few years older and she followed a decidedly different path, holding All Things Considered true to its name.
At one point in 1979, she conspired with then-Science Correspondent Ira Flatow to determine what really happens when you chomp on Wint-O-Green LifeSavers in the dark.
“I say let’s go into the closet and find out,” Flatow teased her in a segment that has been handed down as lore for decades inside NPR.
Stamberg laughed. “I’m game if you’re game.”
“I saw it!” She triumphantly called out from the storage closet where Flatow was crunching down on a mint. “I saw a flash of, kind of, a greenish light just for a fraction of a second.”
After 14 years, Stamberg shifted to hosting Weekend Edition Sunday, which afforded her the chance to keep doing the kind of coverage she wanted, given NPR’s evolution into an increasingly formal news organization.
In 1987, she used her platform to launch an NPR institution: the Sunday puzzle.
“Her idea was that Weekend Edition Sunday should be the radio equivalent of a Sunday newspaper. You get your news and culture and sports and everything,” NPR Puzzle Master Will Shortz recalled on that show years later. “We all know what’s the most important part of the Sunday paper. And it’s the puzzle.”
That same year, Stamberg invited a pair of brothers who were mechanics, Ray and Tom Magliozzi, to talk about cars in a weekly segment inspired by their gig on Boston’s WBUR. Nine months later, they had their own national show on NPR. Others claimed credit for first hearing their promise; she put Car Talk on the air.
Probing both famous directors and never-seen actors
She saw cultural journalism as a respite from news, but also brought a seriousness of purpose to it. She believed listeners’ relationship with culture, high and low, defined how they experienced the world around them. Such matters were neither trivial nor flighty.
When the famous film director Elia Kazan appeared in 1988 to promote his memoir, she leaned into the surrounding controversy. Decades earlier, in testimony before a Congressional committee known as HUAC — the House Un-American Activities Committee — Kazan named people in Hollywood he believed to be Communists. Such actions often prompted people to be pressured to recant their beliefs or face blacklisting. They also sparked intense debate.
Stamberg didn’t duck the controversy; she led with it.
“There are 40 pages in the book [about HUAC], and that’s all there is,” Kazan complained. “And every interview that comes out, that’s the most important thing, and I’m tired of it.”
Stamberg persisted and on it went for quite some time.
“It was a very intense experience,” Stamberg recalled decades later. “We were not face to face. He was in our New York studio and I was in Washington.
“When I left the studio, I said to the person who was going to edit that 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.”
Stamberg yielded the weekend host’s chair after just a couple of years, choosing instead to roam around as a special correspondent in search of sound-rich stories about culture.
After her husband died in 2007, Stamberg spent more time at NPR West as her son Josh built a career as an actor in California.
Stamberg profiled the hidden hands of Hollywood each year during Oscar season. In March 2015, for example, she looked at loopers, the voice actors brought in after a TV show or film is finished to add background texture to the sound of a scene.
“What about the part of never being seen?” Stamberg asked looper David Randolph. “You’re neither seen nor heard, really. You’re sort of background mumble.”
“We believe that what we do is really important. And it’s collaborative. Every part of this industry has lots and lots of layers,” Randolph replied.
Stamberg had her own layers, leaving a legacy both as an unabashed truth teller and a spinner of stories. More tangibly, she leaves an irreplaceable mark on NPR’s headquarters in Washington: Her recorded voice welcomes those who enter the elevators, announcing each floor.
Jesse Baker contributed to this story.
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