 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual panel discussion led by Lisa Napoli, author of Susan, Linda, Nina and Koki, The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR. One of the founding mothers of today's book is sadly not with us. Koki Roberts, who died in September 2019, joined National Public Radio in 1978, spent more than 40 years in broadcasting. As a political commentator for ABC News and NPR, she won countless awards. She was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame and was cited by the American women in radio and television as one of the 50 greatest women in the history of broadcasting. Koki was a longtime member of our National Archives Foundation board who worked tirelessly on behalf of our education and outreach activities. Over 10 years together, Koki and I often found ourselves in the rotunda of the National Archives where the conversation turned to the Barry Faulkner murals, depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Koki always bemoaned the fact that there were no women depicted. Her wise counsel, intelligence, wit, and passion for the role of women in our society will be missed but never forgotten. Today's author, Lisa Napoli, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Early in the rise of the worldwide web, she covered the intersection of technology and culture at the New York Times, cyber times on MSNBC and for Public Radio's Marketplace. A chance to help start a radio station in the Kingdom of Bhutan led to her first book, Radio Shangri-La, what I learned on my accidental journey to the happiest kingdom on earth. Her biography of 20th century philanthropist Joan Crock is titled Ray and Joan, the man who made the McDonald's fortune and the woman who gave it all away. Her third book is Up All Night Ted Turner's CNN and the Making of 24-Hour News. I'm very pleased and honored to welcome our three special guests, Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer, with Koki Roberts, the four founding mothers of the book's title. Susan Stamberg, who has been with NPR since the network began in 1971, is the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program and has won every major award in broadcasting. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. Beginning in 1972, Stamberg served as co-host of NPR's award-winning news magazine, All Things Considered, for 14 years. She then hosted Weekend Edition Sunday and now reports on cultural issues for Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday. Stamberg is well known for her conversational style, intelligence and knack for finding an interesting story. Her thousands of interviews include conversations with Laura Bush, Billy Crystal Rosa Parks, Dave Brubeck, and Luciano Pavarotti. Stamberg is the author of two books, Every Night at Five and Talk. Stamberg also co-edited The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road, which grew out of a series of stories Stamberg commissioned for Weekend Edition Sunday. Her professional recognitions include the Armstrong and Dupont Awards, the Edward R. Marrow Award from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the Ohio State University's Golden Anniversary Directors Award, and the Distinguished Broadcaster Award from the American Women in Radio and Television. Nina Totenberg is NPR's legal affairs correspondent who reports irregularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court in legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. As Newsweek put it, the mainstays of NPR are Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg. In 1991 NPR's coverage anchored by Totenberg of Judge Clarence Thomas' Senate confirmation hearings in the allegations by Anita Hill received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. Totenberg was named broadcaster of the year and honored with the 1998 Saul Tyshoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation, the first radio journalist to receive the award. She also received the American Judicature Society's first award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of Women We Love. A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals, among them the New York Times Magazine, the Harvard Law Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine and others. As NPR's senior national correspondent, Linda Wertheimer brings her unique insights and wealth of experience to bear on the day's top news stories. In more than 40 years since she first joined NPR, she has served in a variety of roles including reporter and host of all things considered for 13 years. From 1974 to 1989, Wertheimer provided highly praised coverage of national politics and congress, serving as congressional and then national political correspondent. Wertheimer covered four presidential and eight congressional elections for NPR. In 1976 became the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential nomination convention and of election night. Wertheimer is the first person to broadcast live from inside the United States Senate Chamber and her 37-day coverage of the Senate Panama Canal Treaty Debates won her a special Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Award. Wertheimer has received numerous other journalism awards including awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for anchoring the Iran Contra affair, a special report. Her American Women in Radio TV for her story Illegal Abortion and from the American Legion for NPR's coverage of the Panama Treaty Debates. Her 1995 book Listening to America 25 Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio celebrates NPR's history. Thank you for joining us today. Now let's hear from our panel. Hello. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for that wonderful comprehensive introduction. These women need no introduction but we just got a terrific introduction for the archives for the future generations and that's who I'd love to focus on today. I want to go back in time for people who may not know what it was like before these women were iconic and before NPR was an iconic presence in the news media. And briefly, briefly before I do that I want to also say thank you to all archives because without archives I would not have been able to write any of the books I've written. Most people couldn't have Koki who said herself that she couldn't have and archives are invaluable. You cannot find everything on the internet and you can hear everything you need to know from the past, even on NPR. So thank you to the women whose lives I invaded. This is an unauthorized book and I'm delighted and honored that you took the time to join me here tonight to launch this book with the upcoming anniversary of NPR's 15th anniversary. So thank you so much. Thank you. It's so great. It's it's beyond my wildest imagination that we could have this conversation and it's better if the three of you just keep talking but I'll just try to guide us through. And even though Linda came first technically in March 1971 I want to start with Susan, who coined the name founding mothers for anybody who doesn't like the word mothers I've heard that mothers is a loaded word in 2021. That's better fathers. Right. My mother was shocked when I told her that but I won't tell you what she really said nice Brooklyn gal that she is but but Susan you you got into public radio before it was public radio and certainly before it was cool before you all made it cool. So why don't we start with how Diana McKellis who was an estimable force in her own right got you a gig at WAMU before WAMU was a major public radio powerhouse before such a thing existed. Well, well, Diana was wonderful. She produced Eleanor Roosevelt a series of television programs that Boston WGBH television station. And I got to know her when I was living in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to Washington and almost as important as Diana was in connecting with this new enterprise, which was foolish enough to hire me very early. Was the fact that I got bored pieces typing on the new Republic magazine. That was my first job in Washington I moved into this time my marriage into this town. My husband had a civil service job at the agency for international development, the foreign agency. So we were newlyweds and here we came. I typed, I typed because there was this vast range of not interesting jobs available to women of my generation in the early 60s so that's what you did you typed or you had children and raised them but there wasn't much else for us so type type type and finally it was enough. And I called around to people I knew and Diana had come to town. At that point, and she said, Well, there's this new network. This is the precursor of NPR by the way, 12 stations skinny little network along the east. And they're just starting up and they're living looking for a producer for a weekly public affairs discussion show. And I said, Well, Diana, what does a producer do. And she said a producer is someone who will take no for an answer. And I thought, I can do that, give me the phone number. So that's how it happened. And the way I got it was for about three months after I got the number. I called the director of this every week. And I think what happened was because I had no radio experience. And he got so sick of my phone calls that he said, Oh, yeah, come on, because they were very busy doing some UN broadcast. That's how mistakes were low. It's important to point out it wasn't like today where you have thousands of people going to highfalutin schools for radio training for degrees in how to get a job at a place like NPR or am you or at all you just you were working on your phones and it was unusual that a woman got that job but because the stakes were so low, it was okay. I was the first hired person on that staff, much like Linda being one of the first at NPR. And I eventually in about two years became the manager of this was only not because of any extreme leadership talents that I had, but because the manager left. So it was one done opportunity after another provided to me first by a woman and then by a man and I must say we're all Artemis three three and cookie was certainly, but I never got a job that was not decided upon in my behalf by anyone but a man time after time. So I have to give that credit to well and given that you've got really had two main jobs that you know you've been, you've been so you radio stuck for you it was something that you loved you'd grown up loving it, but you loved working it and let's just before we move on to Linda and Nina let's talk for a second about how it is that you decided you wanted to be on the radio, and that wonderful show kaleidoscope that you did that really was the precursor to all things considered. It was and it was started by this skin noodle network. And when it was heard by over 12 stations, probably to a listenership of 200, if we were lucky. But, but I walked in and I'm never walking into that station, and amazing, I discovered not long ago that really I've been involved in the creation of two big broadcasting institutions, I've been there from the beginning and PR and that station, which is a powerhouse now. I've been here, but I walked in into the control and I thought, I'm an English major. What am I doing here, because it was nothing but cables and stuff and things and boards and all kinds of technical things I've never been good at. But there I was because I had grown up with it and it was the glamour medium of my childhood. It was long before television we didn't have television in the house till I was in junior high school. And so radio was so fascinating to me, so amazing to be behind the scenes on it, which is how I joined as a producer, and then only went on the air. Well, the first time was when the weather girl got sick. And I was producing this daily program. And I of course it was my duty. We need to do that. It's kind of like a Lou Grant episode. Lou Grant episode. It really was. Tell us what happens, because that'll make it even more interesting. You want to hear the whole story? Yeah, you've got to tell the story. Okay, so the weather girl, that's sick. And I thought, it's up to me, I've got to do this. But I was so nervous. The way you did weather in those days, we had no meteorologists. So what you did was dial W E six one two one two, and wrote down what they told you the weather was, the weather, the temperature. And then you went on the air with that piece of paper. I was so nervous that I forgot to make the call. The air light came on. There were no windows in the studio. I couldn't even look out to see what kind of day it was. So I did the only thing I could think to do, which was I made it up. It was February. I said it was 93 degrees. And I said the wind was 100 miles and I just went on and on to fill. And then the format was you had to repeat it. But I was still so nervous that I forgot what I'd said the first time I made it up again. Now it was February, but it was 12 degrees outside and there was snow and there was this and then it went on. And thankfully I filled the time slot and I got off. But I learned two major lessons. One was you never go on the air unprepared. And two, you never lie to your listeners. So it was a valuable humiliation. I must say. Now Linda, you talk about how working at startups is great for that exact reason because you can make all the mistakes at the beginning and you make them in tandem with other people who are making them, which is helpful because you're all kind of treading the path. And that's what you did. You walked in in March 1971 to this real blank slate. And just to bump up against the anti-female sentiment that you had dealt with up until that point. Let's talk about really briefly the CBS news radio experience that you had where you were basically told you couldn't go but so far. You were lucky to get in the door in the first place, right? I mean, any job. Absolutely right. I was lucky. It was very clear that women were not to be on the air. There was a there was a very good reporter working for the station whose name was Mary Pangalos and Mary broke stories. I mean, she was a very good reporter, but she had to cut herself out of her stories and write a script which had some guy reading the stories so that she didn't she didn't appear. And I mean, I was just I was so horrified when I discovered that because she was a very talented, very, very, very pushy, strong minded woman, but she still had to put up with that. And I it was just impossible to believe. I think one of the things that is hard to believe for young women today is how really awful it was. They believe that they, you know, they believe that they are making a great sacrifice and constantly being hassled by the guys on that. They don't know from hassled, I got to tell you. It was, it was pretty brutal. My last book was about CNN, which was kind of like animal house in the early days, the creation of CNN. I don't think MPR was quite like that. I think it was more consensual. But right, every the what what you had to go through was all of you was just shocking like you say to young people today who don't understand the climate and is there a story you can tell us that makes a finer point of that. I one of when I finally fought my way onto the air and was able to go cover. I was I first. Oops. She became a consumer reporter Nina, while we wait for Linda to come back maybe we should jump to Nina because I mean I had. Oh, there's your. There you are. No, I'm not I did I go away. Yeah, we lost for a second. Well anyway, I was part. Yeah. I guess the sort of the single stupidest thing that ever happened to me was I went I went to interview a senator who was an aging fellow, but the chairman of an important committee, and so I went into his office and the secretary said, Our press, our press secretary is going in with you. And I said, Well, is that absolutely necessary because it was my experience that the press secretary would answer the questions if you let them in to the interview. So I wasn't sure that I wanted that person to be there. And they said, Well, okay, fine. And we did this. It's the only time I think I've ever been actually literally chased around the desk. And one of the things that was difficult was that this man was, you know, who's in his 80s. Because he would catch me. You know, it was just, it was, it was very difficult. And I kept trying to get around to the side of the desk where the door was so they get to leave. Oh, God. You know, he was a he was an important person. There's a you have in your book that that one of this, this, the senator from Alabama. He referred to me as little lady. And I referred to him as big senator and then he started with her to me as little lady. But we had a lot of little things like that. They weren't, they weren't terrible. But they weren't terrible because, you know, we were all perfectly capable of stiff arming anybody who got in their way. Right. Right. One of the things that I remember from that, from that time was that it was a great advantage for us to have started at the same time as the network started. Susan and I were there at the very beginning. And for us, we didn't have to, we didn't have to face the problem that, you know, you would have to face if you went to work for the New York Times. Right. And most of all, the man from the New York Times said to me, we already have our women. I think he said this, this was either the same person or some other person with similar views, who said it's almost all of us. Nina Kofi had the same experience. I had the same experience. And I would say probably later than we would like to think I have the last time that was said to me was in the early 1980s. Wow. Wow. It's truly appalling. But we had, we had, because we were there at the beginning, we were not, we were not forced to, nobody had to be fired to let me be the congressional reporter. No one had to be shot at sunrise to make Nina the reporter on the Supreme Court. Those places were open and we went into them. There were other people, you know, doing that work, but they, they didn't stick. They didn't stick around. And we did. Can you set the scene a little bit more about just how free form NPR was because I really want people to come away with that that it wasn't it didn't out of the gate become this major force that people trusted listen to. You basically were all inventing this form when when you walked in that door. I think it was interesting. I mean, I think it was interesting for the people who were listening. They didn't know quite how interesting it was to us. I was directing the very first programs that NPR produced the very first, all things considered. And what happened was that the program would start would hear the, you know, we'd hear the theme would hear the newscast and I'd be sitting there saying, Where is the tape? Where is the tape? And there would be no tape. There was no Adams who was who was Susan's colors for many years. No Adams once said that in the very early days you could count on the first piece being in the studio. Well, that wasn't always true, but but you had no idea what the next piece was going to be, not a clue. And nobody knew nobody had any idea what was going on after that. And all the pieces were supposed to fit into a, you know, like a puzzle. I'll be the right size. None of them were the right size. We would be handed a tape without any kind of a script to introduce it. What is this? Who's on it? Who wrote this? It was, it was at the end of every day, I was just a complete wet dish rat. And, and it was really being produced or created by a very small number of people that wasn't like now where you have this huge network of employees as well as all the member stations that contributed pieces to it was later. It was a it was a small group of very young people. That was one of the problems. And largely an experience. I mean, I came later, I'm not actually sure how many years later, but I came later. And I remember one day, a piece fell out and Jim Russell, who was the producer came to me and he said, such as a piece just fell out. I need you to craft a piece except you didn't say crap. And I said, I don't just have one. I'm in the middle of that show. I said, I had a piece in the first half hour, we could do it as a two way in the third hour. And that's what we did. Nina, I want you to step back even further though because when you walked in the door at NPR they hired you Bob Zelnick hired you because you were known around town as a dogged reporter, and you were not a radio reporter once again even though it was 1974 and 1975 there still were not people aspiring to work in radio news right you you were used to the print world and you did not have a radio background. No, and I didn't know how to cut tape, and I didn't know how to use sound. And Susie Sandberg was the first person who taught me when you're on the air live on the radio don't cover your mouth like this. But, and I had a huge portfolio I covered. I covered, I didn't just cover the Supreme Court I covered the House and Senate judiciary committees, all scandals, some politics, and the Supreme Court, and by the way, the intelligence I think there are 10 reporters at NPR now, maybe more, but I did now. This was not in an era where we had digital and tweeting and several programs a day we had one program. And that made it possible to do a million things all the time. And, you know, and I was young and I was ambitious. And I didn't mind working. I didn't have a husband. I had boyfriends, but no husband, and I didn't mind working so kind of possible. Yeah. Did you all get the sense in those in the 70s that this is pre cookie and then we'll move on to cookie. Did you get the sense that you were creating something big or were you just excited to have this platform to to play with and to tell stories. Did you have that sense of the bigger picture that it could I think we started off being very, very ambitious with no resources. As Nina said, we had five reporters, I think we had a total staff, you'd know the number Lisa better than I, I've always said we had 68 staffers and 68 listeners. But I think I just read somewhere that maybe there were 90 on staff. Yeah, I can't. Very small to put on a daily 90 minutes a day is what we're doing. I mean, I, most of the working for the for the for the programs, most of them are working in the administrative administrative that's right. Right. I from the very beginning, I think evidence that the spray had big ambitions for the idea that we could create this in very difficult situations, circumstances. And it was fine. That was just a wonderful challenge. It was desperate. It was thrilling. It was hilarious. It was horrible. You know, but it had a future and we knew it and the ambitions were to be the radio version of the New York Times to be that good and that consistent and reliable. We had one of the former editors of the New York Times editing our program. Yeah, yeah. But it's so interesting to imagine that you were making calls and booking people or reporting stories for a network. You know, when you call from the New York Times, I used to work there at people answer your call, they call you right back. And NPR now today, obviously, you're all in that position where that wouldn't be a problem. But back then it wasn't a foregone conclusion that somebody was from the radio and they would say, what's that? And we used to have to in the beginning do a little tap dance with every phone call high and says the standard national public radio and brand new non-commercial network. And we have 60 stations and we do it again. And by then they probably hung up. It took forever. You better introduce the other guests. Yeah, who is who's like a great cat? That was Douglas. Douglas the cat. Okay, welcome. He is a kind of a large cat. He's a Maine Coon. The thing that I remember though, was that we did, we were terrified that we would not have any kind of audience. And we kept finding, excuse me. We got one now. We were terrified. It was very interesting that we would find that people had heard things that we did. I think we started out with very little faith that anyone would ever hear anything. And then we discovered that they were there. They were out there. One of the things that made a huge difference to NPR, not right away, but eventually was FM radio and cars. Another thing that made a huge difference was when people decided that their children could not necessarily, their children had to sit in the back seat in car seats, lashed to the seat so they couldn't get into the front seat and change the jet in the station. And that made a big difference. What a weird thing to, you know, to base your success on, but it was still making a difference. I thought that was a generation of kids who detested us. Because every night at five o'clock their mothers would say, shh, be quiet. And they'd turn up the radio because they wanted to hear it. But that's a huge swath of our listeners today is those children. That's right. And they do say, I know that if anything is going horribly wrong, I know where you are. Down at the end of the dial. If I tune in there, I'll hear those voices that don't sound, they don't yell at me. They'll just explain what was going on. The tone was important from day one, not to sound like commercial radio, not to screech or preach or voice from the mountain. Although you all became the voices from the mountaintop, which, you know, you got the last laugh since it used to be a bunch of guys doing that. So what was also interesting to me was to learn about how influential you became almost initially in the middle of the country, and not in the big cities because of that very reason. They didn't have a lot of newspapers, but they had local papers, but they didn't have national newspapers there. And they waited for the weekly magazine and we were really dating ourselves. I mean, it's hard for people to understand this, but the accessibility of actually reliable information was scarce in many communities. So if there was a place you could just turn on the radio and find it out, it was a big deal. And when I came from a place like that, Carlsbad, New Mexico, home of the Carlsbad cavemen, and it was not possible to get up-to-date information anywhere but on the radio. And the local newspaper was a fabulous newspaper for local coverage, but not for national coverage. El Paso Times, which my parents subscribed to in the hope that they would learn something that wasn't in the Carlsbad current Argus, that paper was, it was just not very good. I read, I grew up reading the women's page and much later some gent who was from El Paso, he said, well, you know, the family that owns the El Paso Times wouldn't let the woman you're talking about wouldn't let her edit the paper. So she edited the women's page and it was much better than anything else in the paper. And it really, it really was. Now, I was not, of course, particularly sophisticated about news, but I did, I did get that part that this woman was making much more sense than a lot of the other people on that paper were. Yes. Yes. And still, none of you wanted to do the traditional women's news that was what you would have been relegated to if it hadn't been for NPR, with the exception, maybe Nina, you were able to buck that. My first newspaper job was for the Record American, which is in a first paper in Boston, known fully as the record. And there was a women's page which was strictly weddings, and not the vows section I mean what what the all the pearl things on the dress and all of that. It was a fashion, which was mainly press releases from the fashion industry and recipes. And I had no interest in that whatsoever. And I decided that the only way I was going to get in the real experience was to do a second shift for free. I volunteered to be the legman for everything from school board meetings, which were all about busing and they were very impossible. And I regularly went out with a guy who was the photographer at night, and yet all of the the radios in the car, the fire department, the police department, the state troopers, the Boston cops and we would have one disaster to another, which was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot that way. So my next job, I got to do more responsible things. But that's, that was my first training program. But Nina and I both learned the same lesson that if you are, if you're from an organization that does not have a lot of clout, then you have to do this in a different way, you have to do it personally. Both of us had a lot of contacts. We had made a lot of friends in the course of all the jobs we'd had. And we had, we knew people. And we knew, as Nina says, people in low places, we knew all kinds of people that we could go to to tell us what was happening. But the other thing when there was, but probably I think the single great advantage of coming up as a woman in that era is that we were pretty young things, and we would call a senator off the floor or whoever from whatever. And they thought we really weren't very bright and wouldn't understand what they were saying. And we would ask, you know, batter eyelids and ask questions and get the most amazing amount of information that I think probably wouldn't get today because all those guys would be on their guard. So when I was doing a story about lobbying, and, for example, once involving the new route for North, then Northwest Airlines to the Orient, most of the members of the commerce committee went on that trip, Radis. And there were only two people from the entire leadership that I could identify who didn't go. One was Mike Mansfield. Who was the majority leader? And he came off to talk to me and I said, you know, you didn't go and he said, Nope. And I said, Why didn't you go and said, Don't do those kinds of things. And the next person was Norris Cotton, for Republican from New Hampshire. And I said to him, Senator Cotton, Why didn't you go on this trip, expecting some beats. He said, Oriana, someone give me the trucks. One of the great things about covering the Congress has always been that these guys, they love to talk. And you know, there are there are 535 of them so they don't get to talk, they don't all get to talk all the time. And all of the big guys like the New York Times and CBS, they all go for the chairman of committees. And we were, you know, we were going a little bit farther down the line of the committees, making friends and learning things. Linda, can you talk a little bit about did you did you and Koki strategize or how did you and Koki strategize when you when she came out. Well, actually before we we talk about how you strategize can let's introduce Koki by saying that having Nina Koki's story about running her resume into the newsroom after retrieving it from Steve her husband on the streets. So, so Steve Roberts called me up I didn't know him, but he was just back in his wife Koki we're just back from Greece, the foreign assignment, and Judy Miller who had previously worked at NPR was working in the New York Times. You know, I think there might be an opening at NPR. And so he called me up and I said bringing her resume and I met him outside of my recollection as I met him down on the street. He said he brought it into the abdomen. But I got it. I didn't know any either of them and Linda said to me, I want the best Koki box who else can be named Koki. And they had gone to college together they had not been close friends that they had been in college. Yes. And so, and I took it right away to Jim Russell. And I, our boss and I said, you know, you need more people and here's somebody who has she been a stranger to CBS, and her father was Hale Boggs, and her mother was Linda Boggs. Her father had been the whip, the democratic whip. And I said, you know, you have to pay some attention to her and he brought her in. We all, Koki and I both came in with real thinking that we would be hired shortly if we did well. Well, in those days NPR had, they kept everybody like us on the screen for months and months and months before they finally hired us. And that's that way if the Koki is it is that way for me. But I had a, I had a, my, my concern about Koki and I did have a concern was that she was by the most of the things that I have spent, you know, a couple of years learning. She knew when she was about seven. She knew how the Congress works. She knew a tremendous number of people in the Congress. She could identify the chairman of committees and knew what they did. And there was just a lot that made me, I didn't feel that I didn't know as much as she did, but I did feel that she had better friends than I did. And I was concerned. But the thing that made the difference for us was that Koki never really had a sort of a super competitive nature about, you know, her own colleagues. She was competitive about getting stories. She was competitive about loss of things. But she was not, you know, she didn't feel that it was necessary to stiff arm your best friend. And first you sat next to you in the, in the gallery in order to get where you wanted to go. So whenever we had a problem, we worked it out. And I think it's, you know, I think that's a kind of a female thing to do. I think women do. She really has the art of that. She had the art of, she had the art of, I have to tell that I've made it to major contributions along these lines. Well, as Nina explained, I told them not to cover her mouth. And with Koki, she came and had broadcast from when they were living, living in Greece for CBS. So when she came to us, and we've talked about the natural voice that Bill Simmering, I guess, encouraged in me to just to be yourself and talk this way to a big radio audience. Don't think it is big, just a few. But Koki didn't do that, having broadcast from overseas. She yelled and she shouted as if she was moving through this cable that went under the water, which is what she was doing. So when she came here, I took her aside. I said, you know, you don't have to shout that. It's like the old days when you made a call to California and you lived in New York and you shouted because the phone line was so bad. I think that was no longer necessary. And she could speak in a rather softer way. And she did. So these were two of my major contributions I believe. Among many, among many. But I do absolutely think that because there was that that NPR was the very first place where I saw working out, other than other than the women's college that I went to, where I saw working out what we had always heard feminists say about women, that women were just not going to not going to be fighting all the time they were going to be trying to get where they were going together, that there was a different a different way of a different thing of doing things now. Nina Totenberg, who is one of the most aggressive reporters I've ever known, Nina Totenberg and Koki and I sat in a little place in the corner there was there were there were four desks and we were in three of them. And every once in a while they'd put someone in the fourth one and they always they always left. They couldn't take it. We were, we were always joking carrying on talking to each other, and they just felt this is I gotta get out of here. There was only one guy that collegialities is really is and was very very important. Yeah, and I think it's I think NPR NPR had a tremendous. It was it was a fabulous thing to find that you could actually operate in a collegial way, and you would not be that you would not suffer from it. You would in fact be. Everything would be much better for you in terms of the work as well as in terms of your own personal life. We were all in that we were all in generally same age group. We had the same kinds of problems. You know, you, you would. I would come in and say, I don't understand why Steve made me cry last night, and I'd say, well, are you going away. That's it. And or vice versa. It was just, it was a great benefit to have every place I ever worked until I worked at NPR, I was the only one, or sometimes occasionally one of two, with somebody else being this fourth section or the book section or something like that. And it was a big difference for a lot of other women who had experienced many of the same things that I had experienced and was experiencing. And it was a, you know, the women at NPR became my closest friends. Yeah. But this is, we haven't mentioned a big reason for all of this. And that its name is Bill Siemens, who was our first program director. I didn't know that. Manager and the one who who created conceived of of all things considered what what shape the program should be and what it sounds should be. And he from the beginning kind of women, talented women, and gave us things to do important pieces of work. And that helped to create the fun. If they had hired executive. You know, you got to be truthful about this. The reason we were so many women. Yes. Act of Bill Siemens. We were cheap. Is we were cheap. What did Frank Bankowitz say with the third president of NPR, his, his line, get more bang for the buck with the broad. Never do our faces. To my face, he said it. I would have kicked him. You not only found solace and energy from each other, you were helping women, you created your own old girls network in DC. Now, again, today, a woman hearing this who's working will say of course, but that was not an of course when you were doing it back when you started banding together and having lunch and helping each other find jobs. Yeah. Yeah. So what was that like you just saw each other and recognized in each other that you needed to team up to stick up for each other, but we also needed to stick up for other for younger women. You know, when there started to be, I'm embarrassed to say this, but, you know, sometimes a young woman would come to me who was, let's say 10 or 15 years younger than I by the time we're talking about in the early 2000s, or much more even and say, you know, so and so said I look nice in my dress. And I'd say you really want to die on this hill, because you're going to have to fight some other fights. And today, I would never say that. But then that was really nice. And if somebody came to me and said, he keeps touching me funny, we were on the warpath. Then we were on the warpath. That was a hill worth dying over. It was fortunate for us that we had that we had some stature in the company at that point. Yeah, we could, we could go the higher and so we could go to the high and spread the word. But the one that was so gifted at this was cookie. I mean, she she created women's old, young, old middle aged whatever networks, wherever she went. That's the way ever she met when she had that sense of somebody needed meeting something. She knew what it was she knew how to figure it out and she knew what to do about it. That was really she's so at that. You all together became this force at work, but for you had fun together to and Nina alluded to this you all helped each other personally. Can you talk a little bit just the pines of Rome the fact that you would have dinner other all the time and help each other with with life's tribulations also carried through obviously to work as well. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, we would go to the movies and I really do think that cookie and Linda and their spouses went even more than I did, but we went regularly to the movies, the three of us in our spouses and eventually sometimes Susan you know that after my husband died they folded me into that is really. So they had a rule and after my first husband died. Also, they had what they call the widow rule, which is, or I don't know what I think was called the widow rule, which is if you're even a temporary widow like this for the week down. Everybody else pays your share. What's my share. No, you don't pay the worthimers and the Roberts is pay. And then, and then I, you know, then we were able to do that for for Susan to and for other people as well. It was a very special and sometimes if we ever go back to the movies it'll be special. I would have another restaurant. I would have another restaurant. We were never allowed to make a suggestion that maybe another restaurant might be good to dry up a week. Cokey was Cokey did really have a tremendous amount of influence on all of us in terms of kindness and taking care of people. In fact, it's a sort of a standard joke, and among us and among her family, that people every once in a while will say what would Cokey do. Oh, yes. And you get these, you get these very funny answers about what would Cokey do and why, but it is true that she was, I don't know, maybe we should maybe we should get in touch with a cardinal and suggest, you know, that she should be salivated. Listen, she's the only person I know who could sit on a set at ABC with a bunch of cardinals and hold them start holding their feet to the fire about about the sex scandal that had begun to unfold in the church. The guys would have asked that and she I remember sitting there saying the mothers want to know what are you going to do about this. Wow. I think we've lost our Linda she was messing with the camera. The cat might have come over and show me what to do. Oh wait, there she is. Okay, feel around on the top of your computer and you'll feel a bump and see if it needs to be moved. Or else if you see the little zoom icon just click on it. Okay. I'll, I'm trying. I was just trying to tune up the sound. Maybe someone in the audience could give us a ring. Any engineers. We're all very technically sophisticated here. What would Koki think of zoom what you must have talked about the last year what Koki would have thought about everything in the last year, the pandemic, the election. She missed it. Yeah. She did it relentlessly and never quit, which was also her nature. Much like our energizer bunny here is token bird. Yeah. When you, when you think I've heard you say that your father lived to triple digit one, we're never going to stop working. Do you really, you really can. The thing is, he was a great concert violinist and then a teacher in the last probably more of a teacher in the last 15 years. Although we performed until it is 90s. But, but I, I do and not do not consider myself really a great teacher. It doesn't interest me terribly except person to person, not person to class, or even small class. Yeah. So I don't imagine I could do it till I'm 101. Otherwise, I could be at the microphone, you know, I mean, I got this microphone right here at home. I'd be holding it right now. Be for yourself, girl. But I don't think I can do that when I'm on my time. And I, I'm counting on you, Nina. I could do guest appearances, I think, but I don't think I could keep the kind of schedule that increasingly news organizations have younger people and younger people. And this young person's game never ever stops. So many platforms, social media, digital radio. Oh yes and so and so would like you on tonight on CNN or MSNBC or even Fox. I've done those gigs too. I'll do them if I possibly can. It's good for a reporter to be seen and heard right you don't turn down people unless it's just not possible. But as you get older, having to a learn all of this stuff extra and the pandemic hasn't helped a lot. But you get tired. I mean, it's just it's wearing so I'm not, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon but I'm not, but I am a realist. You can't keep working at this forever. It's a very useful thing you could say. S O R R Y. And you can get to know. Sorry. No, I know. No. You can say look at you just did. We've got just five minutes left. Just and I know I won't even ask Nina about her ever writing a book. The other women had many books but you know you're not going to write a book because you're too busy on deadline. I didn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. But so, so how can we wrap for the future generations who will see this archival tape at this moment in time that NPR is turning 50 where things are better for women they're not perfect. What would you say what would be your final words? Well, we've seen we're seeing some new things happening, like the podcasts and all kinds of strange new things that I don't know, you know, I mean I'm not doing any of that stuff. But I'm willing to admit that it might be worth doing. I think that there are, you know, there will be things that will open up for all people and young women will if they've, you know, got the stuff they will get into it and do it. I think it's, you know, I think it may be something different from what we did. Yeah. I mean, I depended upon all these things behind me all the books. It's a whole new world out there now in that area. I think it's so I think I think that they will have challenges that we can't imagine. You know, I think it's a wonder, it's wonderful work. I think it's exciting. And it's fun. It's hard work. I have a niece who won a Pulitzer this year. She was the first radio Pulitzer, and she started wondering about what I do for a living that looked like it was so much fun when she was about eight years old. And I, so it is very hard work, but if you can do it, you're going to have a ball. I agree. I agree. I can't think of a better way to understand and see the world and feel that you are making a difference, making things clearer for other people who may not follow it as carefully. I have to tell you a very quick story about my granddaughter who tomorrow turns 13. And she, I didn't ask her what do you want to do when you grow up because to me it's a boring question. But she told me that she's going to law school, and then she's going to be on the Supreme Court. And I said, Vivian, that's wonderful, you know, bless you forward and courage. But I think, you know, the Supreme Court, there's just a handful of them. They sit in their rooms most days and they're reading and they're writing, they're doing work. Okay, it's lonely work, collegial, but lonely. Why don't you think about being president? Because that way you have many, many more people to talk to every day. You're a sociable girl, you go along and you like to be with people. And she said, okay, Zuzu, I'll think about that. That's the future. Well, I do think, I do think that it's a, it's a fabulous, it's a fabulous thing not to do the same thing every day. And I have to always learn about what it is you're going to do that day that you don't know. I mean, it just keeps your brain exercised. And I think it's that is a wonderful thing. Well, I have had a wonderful year during the pandemic, which was a horrible year investigating your lives and stitching together the story of public radio. Set against the backdrop of 70s feminism and your lives. So it's been an honor and a privilege and I'm so grateful to the archives for hosting us this evening. And again, grateful to you for your time and and graciousness and joining me tonight and spreading the word because history really matters and archives matter a lot. So thank you. Lisa, is you wrote this book in a year or less? Some something like a year ish. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I can imagine writing a book. She's real good at it. It's a terrific book. Congratulations to you on it. It is a good book. It is. It's very compelling. Thank you. It's certainly not comprehensive. I hope there are many more to come, but it was very exciting to stitch, stitch it all together and I hope people will read it. And hopefully we'll all meet up at the archive sometime or maybe by the declaration. Yes, yes. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Lisa. Yes, thank you.