SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Noah Adams, the longtime host of this program, has died. He was 84 and had been ill for several years. He died Friday at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, according to his wife, Neenah Ellis, a longtime NPR producer. Adams hosted ALL THINGS CONSIDERED for 18 years, guiding listeners through major news stories.
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NOAH ADAMS: This is Special Coverage from NPR News.
RENÉE MONTAGNE: Today, the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan collapsed after being hit...
DETROW: But the people who worked alongside Adams remember him more for what he did on the quieter news days.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: The very first time I went out in the field with Noah, we went up in a Goodyear Blimp.
DETROW: Before she hosted ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Melissa Block was Noah Adams' producer.
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ADAMS: I'm surprised that sometimes the ship tilts up and tilts down.
BLOCK: And I just remember thinking, it can't get much better than this.
DETROW: Adams came to NPR in the mid-1970s, when the network was still new, still figuring things out. Adams was private, intensely private, but told people he had bopped around a series of jobs before falling into radio. He worked construction. He sold cars. In 1972, he started working at the public radio station at the University of Kentucky. Three years later, he applied for a job as a production assistant on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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ADAMS: I joined the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED staff and moved to Washington. And there, in the morning meeting, you would pay attention to all the mysteries out on the world. You'd have a deep curiosity about the yearning. You'd notice who was in trouble. Why? What does Washington mean?
DETROW: But Adams never particularly cared too much about what Washington meant. His main focus over the years was to get out of Washington.
BLOCK: He never liked talking to people who he knew had preprogrammed things to say. He wanted people who were genuinely speaking from their heart and with conviction and sincerity.
DETROW: Whether it was the Mountain West or, most frequently, his native Appalachia, Adams would roam the country having conversations and just looking around.
BLOCK: He was always observing, and he would have a little reporter's notebook, and he would be taking notes in shorthand. His writing is almost illegible. But somehow, when we came back, he would capture the character of a place in the most vivid, rich, simple language.
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ADAMS: The people of Parkesburg (ph) seem half a step and a smile faster to greet you than you'll find in the cities. They'll roll down their car windows and say, hey, you guys lost? And after I'd seen one fellow with a white beard around town a couple of times, I went up to him and said, are you the man I heard about who plays Uncle Sam in the parades? And he said, no, I'm the one who plays Santa Claus.
DETROW: He would also try to write and talk about dogs as much as possible. He'd work them into scenes and into interviews.
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ADAMS: Well, they don't like it. The dogs that don't like snow the first time, they just go out and they have a hard time with it. They have a hard time finding a place to use a bathroom in the snow, too. Did you notice?
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BETSY WALTER: No.
DETROW: It's how Adams began one memorable interview in 1987. He was talking to an 8-year-old girl named Betsy Walter whose parents had gotten divorced and who had dealt with that fact by writing letters to New York City Mayor Ed Koch and other public figures, asking for advice. Adams' approach stood out to the producer he was working with that night, a young Ira Glass.
IRA GLASS, BYLINE: It's the fastest, most efficient warm-up of a child, and he's not talking down to her. And, like - and then he just, like, launches into the interview.
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ADAMS: You wrote a letter to the mayor of New York, Mayor Koch.
BETSY: Right.
ADAMS: Tell me about that, please.
BETSY: Well, I wrote to him because my parents are getting divorced, and I really don't know who to turn to.
DETROW: Adams was so good that day at getting Betsy comfortable, at getting the quotes they wanted from the interview that Glass took the tape of the full interview home with him to save.
GLASS: He just instinctively, without having to think very hard about it, he knows how to ask these questions to get to this thing that is so sensitive, but he's reading the room, right? He understands the tone to take with her. He likes her and has a little connection with her. And so she has enough of a connection with him that she wants to answer. And then he gets into this very emotional thing.
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ADAMS: And in terms of their own divorce, do you understand it better now?
BETSY: No.
ADAMS: No. Why? What still don't you understand about that?
BETSY: Well, why did they have to go off and do it? And see, the most painful part is when I saw my dad packing up, and I really don't understand because, like, it's hard because they won't tell me what happened to them. And I really want them back together, and I don't understand why they can't.
DETROW: Over the years, in interview after interview, Glass would repeatedly cite Adams as an inspiration for the feel and tone of the public radio program he would go on to create, This American Life.
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GLASS: You know, he was paired with Susan Stamberg.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: Good evening. From National Public Radio in Washington, I'm Susan Stamberg.
ADAMS: And this is Noah Adams, with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
GLASS: Susan Stamberg's character on the air as the host of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED was she was this warm, menschy (ph), chatty New York lady, you know? And he was the sort of cool, traditional broadcaster next to her.
DETROW: Later on, Adams cohosted alongside Linda Wertheimer and Robert Siegel.
ROBERT SIEGEL, BYLINE: In the kind of political shorthand of the day, we were a nondiverse pair. We were two white guys hosting the program, but we'd really seen different parts of America. And Noah was a voice for our going to rural America.
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ADAMS: Three miles from Frankford, West Virginia, and far back into the frozen hollow, there's a ghost town, one of Appalachia's abandoned communities.
SIEGEL: He was a productive writer. He admired good writing and good writers.
DETROW: Adams wrote several books, including a bestselling memoir about learning to play the piano in his 50s. His writing reached its peak, though, according to Siegel and many others, in an extraordinary 1981 radio documentary called Father Cares: The Last Of Jonestown.
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HARRIET TROPP: I have a statement to make on behalf of People's Temple.
DETROW: Jim Jones, the head of the cult that eventually died by mass suicide in the jungle of Guyana, had recorded hundreds of hours of audio. NPR got its hands on it. And Adams, producer Deb Amos and author James Reston Jr. made it into an experimental documentary.
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JIM JONES: I got my claws (ph). I got compasses (ph). I got guns. I got dynamite.
SIEGEL: It's incredibly vivid. You feel like you've seen pictures.
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JONES: (Shouting, inaudible).
SIEGEL: You are transported somewhere, and you feel like it's as palpable to you as if you could see it.
DETROW: In 2015, Adams and Amos recounted the process in an interview with the audio storytelling website, Transom.
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DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: You know, it took us months to put this thing together. It's not like, you know, we had six weeks and did nothing else.
ADAMS: I think it was all done extra. We were all working different jobs at National Public Radio. And we didn't take, you know, six months away from those jobs to do this program. We just did it really. I mean, I'm not even sure we got paid for it.
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JONES: (Shouting, inaudible).
ADAMS: But then defectors from the People's Temple - traitors, Dad called them - started telling stories of manipulation and being...
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AMOS: I'm not sure if we could get away with any of that today in NPR. There's so many rules and political commissars, and here's how we do it, and we can't do that.
DETROW: To Robert Siegel, the documentary was NPR as Noah Adams wanted it to be.
SIEGEL: Experimental use of sound, interesting writing - I think that he aspired to our not just having tomorrow's front page on tonight, but to have the really - the rich back pages.
DETROW: Quietly, purposefully, with his notebook and his typewriter, that's what Noah Adams did.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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