THE FIRST FORTY YEARS INTRODUCTION by Susan Stamberg
THE FIRST FORTY YEARS INTRODUCTION by Susan Stamberg Shiny little platters. Not even five inches across. How could they possibly contain the soundtrack of four decades? How could the phone calls, the encounters, the danger, the desperation, the exhilaration and big, big laughs from two score years be compressed onto a handful of CDs? If you’ve lived with NPR, as so many of us have for so many years, you’ll be astonished at how many of these reports and conversations and reveries you remember—or how many come back to you (like familiar songs) after hearing just a few seconds of sound. And you’ll be amazed by how much you’ve missed—loyal as you are, you were too busy that day, or too distracted, or out of town, or giving birth (guess that falls under the “too distracted” category). Many of you have integrated NPR into your daily lives; you feel personally connected with it. NPR has gotten you through some fairly dramatic moments. Not just important historical events, but personal moments as well. I’ve been told that a woman’s terror during a CAT scan was tamed by the voice of Ira Flatow on Science Friday being piped into the dreaded scanner tube. So much of life is here. War, from the horrors of Vietnam to the brutalities that evanescent medium—they came to life, then disappeared. Now, of Iraq. Politics, from the intrigue of Watergate to the drama of the Anita on these CDs, all the extraordinary people and places and sounds Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy.
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