Noah Adams in 2010.
Doby Photography/NPR
hide caption
Doby Photography/NPR
Noah Adams in 2010.
Doby Photography/NPR
Noah Adams, writer, broadcaster and storyteller who hosted All things considered for 18 years, died.
Adams died Friday at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, according to his wife, Neenah Ellis. He was 84 years old.
He guided his listeners through major events like Ronald Reagan’s landslide election victories, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But to the people who worked alongside him in the newsroom, Adams’ journalism shone through in the softer stories he reported.
Adams would take trains across the country or spend days in small towns talking to everyone he met. He would ask questions. He would listen. He wrote notes and observations. And then he produced long, thoughtful radio broadcasts that helped listeners understand and appreciate the world a little better.
“He was always observing,” recalls Melissa Block, who produced plays alongside Adams for years before hosting All things considered se. “He had a little journalist’s notebook and he took shorthand notes. His handwriting was almost illegible – they were just vague sketches of things. But somehow, when we returned, he captured the character of a place, a person or a city in the most vivid, richest, simplest language. It was a complete picture based on his incredible power of observation.”
Adams, born in Kentucky, came to NPR in the mid-1970s, when the network was still new and still figuring things out.
He was private – intensely private – but told people he had worked several jobs before getting into radio. He worked in construction. He sold cars, as he once recounted in an on-air essay. In 1972, he began working at University of Kentucky Public Radio. Three years later, he applied for a position as a production assistant on All things considered.
For years, the show’s team began each morning with a long meeting about the news of the day and what should and should not be included in the two-hour show. Like all meetings, it can be routine or boring, and many staff members may sometimes view it with some cynicism.
Adams never saw it that way. “You would pay attention to all the mysteries of the world,” he once recalled in an NPR essay looking back on his career. “You would be deeply curious about this desire. You would notice who was in trouble, why? What does Washington mean?”
Attentive and caring listening
Like most journalists, Adams longed to leave the newsroom and see the world. He tried to direct his reporting away from Washington officials and politicians.
“He never liked talking to people who he knew had pre-programmed things to say,” Block said. “He wanted people who truly spoke from the heart, with conviction and sincerity. And that’s who he was. That’s how he approached things.”
He also tried to write and talk about dogs as much as possible, incorporating them into scenes and interviews.
That’s how Adams began a memorable interview in 1987. He was talking to an 8-year-old girl named Betsy Walter, whose parents had divorced. To put her at ease, he started talking about dogs.
The approach made an impression on the producer Adams was working with that night: a young Ira Glass. “It’s the quickest and most effective warm-up for a child,” Glass recalled years later. “He doesn’t talk down to her. And then he just launches into the interview.”
Adams was so good that day – at putting Betsy at ease, at getting the quotes they wanted from the interview – that Glass took the tape of the entire interview home with him, to back it up.
As Glass listened to the recording and studied Adams’ approach, he realized how well and quickly Adams connected with the girl. How he phrased his questions in just the right way, so the interview became a conversation that produced memorable quotes about the pain and confusion of divorce.
Over the years, Glass repeatedly cited Adams and his interview style as inspiration for the mood and tone of the public radio program he would create: This American life.
Glass admitted that as a young producer, he was intimidated by Adams and his quiet confidence. “You know, he was paired with (co-host) Susan Stamberg,” Glass recalled. “And Susan Stamberg’s on-air character, as host of All things consideredwas this warm, mensch-y, talkative New York lady. And he was this kind of cool, traditional broadcaster next to her. »
A voice for rural America
In 1987, Adams left All things considered. Another public radio icon, Garrison Keillor, had moved away A Prairie Home Companionand Adams went to Minnesota to start a new variety show to replace it. “I remember (thinking) wow, the nerve!” Glass said.
The variety show didn’t work out and two years later, Adams was back at All things consideredwhere he was paired alongside Robert Siegel and Linda Wertheimer.
Both men brought different experiences and worldviews to the show. “Noah was a voice for our journey to rural America, reporting on what was happening in small towns far from the Interstate 95 corridor,” Siegel said.
“He was a productive writer,” Siegel said. “He admired good writing and good writers. And he tried to be as good as he could be.”
Adams wrote five books, including Piano lessons (1996) a memoir about a year he spent learning to play the piano at age 51, Far from the Appalachians, Follow the New River North (2001), and The Flyers: The Search for Wilbur and Orville Wright(2003).
Adams’ writing for radio reached its peak, according to Siegel and many others, in an extraordinary 1981 radio documentary called “Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown“.
Jim Jones, the cult leader who ultimately committed mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana, had recorded hundreds of hours of audio. NPR got their hands on it, and Adams, producer Deb Amos, and writer James Reston, Jr. turned it into an experimental documentary.
One aspect was controversial: Adams told it not as a journalist, but as a fictional composite character presented as a survivor of the cult. Her delivery was deliberately flat and filled with trauma.
For Siegel, the documentary was NPR the way Noah Adams wanted it: “Experimental use of sound.”
Adams helped shape NPR at a time when the network’s identity was still malleable. At a time when it was not yet a fully professionalized and institutionalized news-gathering operation, Adams wanted the network to live up to the ideals formed at that time, says Melissa Block.
“To really capture the character of the country and everyone’s voices in their own style, in their own perspective, from their own point of view,” she explained, “and paying attention to things that were outside of the centers of power.”
Quietly, deliberately, with his notebook and his typewriter, that’s what Noah Adams does…
Gn entert
