Susan Stamberg, a mainstay at National Public Radio who would become the first woman to host a national news program, has died at the age of 87.
Stamberg died Thursday, NPR reported.
“A true humanitarian, she believed in the power of great journalism,” Stamberg’s son Josh said in a statement to NPR Friday. “Her life’s work was connection, through ideas and culture.”
Stamberg joined NPR in the early 1970s when it was getting off the ground as a network of radio stations across the country. During her career, she interviewed thousands of people, from prominent politicians and artists to the less well-known like White House chefs and people who work behind the scenes in Hollywood.
She even called up then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s dentist to ask him about his “notably toothy smile,” NPR reported.
“Our hearts go out to her family, all the public media colleagues who worked alongside her, but also the generations of journalists, editors, and producers who learned from her,” WBHM, Birmingham’s NPR affiliate, wrote in a social media post Thursday.
Stamberg visited the WBHM newsroom in 1981, joining organizers of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on air for a short guest stint.
“There wasn’t any music played…and nobody much cared…because Susan was fantastic,” the station wrote in an article about her visit.
She was well known for her controversial cranberry relish and for her thick New York City accent – or “more precisely ‘the Bronx,’” as WBHM put it.
She explained in an oral history interview with Oregon station KLCC in January that she didn’t have women in broadcast to model herself after when she became the host of “All Things Considered” in 1972.
“The only ones on were men, and the only thing I knew to do was imitate them,” she said.
She lowered her voice to sound authoritative. After a few days, Bill Siemering, the program manager, told her to be herself.
“And that was new too in its day, because everybody else, the women, were trained actors, and so they came with very careful accents and very careful delivery. They weren’t relaxed and natural,” she said. “So we made a new sound with radio as well, with NPR.”
She told KLCC that she coined the term “founding mother” to refer to herself and three other women who helped launch NPR: Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer.
“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,” she said.
Stamberg hosted “All Things Considered” for 14 years. She later became a cultural correspondent for “Morning Edition” and “Weekend Edition Saturday.” She retired in September.
In NPR’s obituary for Stamberg, host Scott Simon said she was “the first real human being” to ever host a regular evening newscast.
Stamberg was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, which said she was known for her “conversational style, intelligence, and knack for finding an interesting story.” She interviewed Nancy Reagan, Annie Liebowitz, Rosa Parks and James Baldwin, among thousands of others.
She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2020.
Stamberg was born Susan Levitt in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 but grew up in Manhattan. She met her husband, Louis Stamberg, while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She is survived by her son, Josh Stamberg, and her granddaughters, Vivian and Lena.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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