Meeting the person ‘behind the voice’
Anytime a radio personality gets on the air, listeners develop a mental picture of the person behind the voice.
Frequent National Public Radio listeners are no different. Ira Glass, Sylvia Poggioli, Steve Inskeep and Juan Williams appear on the radio so often anyone who has heard them has developed a mental image of what they look like even without scouring NPR’s site for a portrait.
Nina Totenberg, who, for the record is all of 5-foot, 4 ½-inches and looks like everyone’s favorite aunt, is no different.
Totenberg has been on NPR almost since it first went on the air in 1970 and she loves to talk about what it was like “back then.”
“I’m so old that there were no women reporters when I was young,” she told a crowd of college journalists in Washington, D.C. “I wanted to be Nancy Drew. I figured as I got older I realized I couldn’t be Nancy Drew because, first of all, I’d have to kill my mother. Nancy Drew had her widowed father and her boyfriend Ned and her red roadster. And none of those things were going to happen to me and I really loved my mother.”
She enjoys a good laugh.
So, she wasn’t going to be Nancy Drew. And she wasn’t going to be a police detective.
Continue reading “NPR’s Totenberg: ‘I wanted to be a witness to history’”