Noah Adams, a writer, broadcaster, and storyteller who hosted All Things Considered for 18 years, has died.
Adams died Friday at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, according to his wife, Neenah Ellis. He was 84.
He guided listeners through major events like Ronald Reagan's landslide electoral victories, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. But to the people who worked alongside him in the newsroom, Adams' journalism shone through in the softer features he reported.
Adams would ride trains across the country, or spend days in small towns talking to whoever he came across. He'd ask questions. He'd listen. He'd write down notes and observations. And then he'd produce long, thoughtful radio pieces that helped listeners understand and appreciate the world a little bit better.
"He was always observing," recalled Melissa Block, who produced pieces alongside Adams for years before hosting All Things Considered herself. "He would have a little reporter's notebook and he would be taking notes in shorthand. His writing is almost illegible – it would just be the vaguest sketches of things. But somehow, when we came back, he would capture the character of a place or a person or a town in the most vivid, rich, simple language. It was a complete picture based on his unbelievable powers of observation."
Adams, who was 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'd bopped around a series of jobs before falling into radio. He worked construction. He sold cars, as he recounted once in an on-air essay. 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.
For years, the show's staff has begun each morning with a long meeting about the day's news, and what should and should not be included in the two-hour broadcast. Like all meetings, it can be rote or boring, and many staffers can, at times, view it with some cynicism.
Adams never saw it that way. "You would pay attention to all the mysteries out in the world," he once recalled in an NPR essay looking back at his career. "You'd have a deep curiosity about the yearning. You'd notice who was in trouble, why? What does Washington mean?"
Listening carefully, and caring
Like most reporters, Adams yearned to get out of the newsroom and into the world. He tried to steer his reporting away from officials and politicians in Washington.
"He never liked talking to people who he knew had pre-programmed things to say," said Block. "He wanted people who were genuinely speaking from their heart and with conviction and sincerity. And that's how he was. That's how he approached things."
He'd also try to write and talk about dogs as much as possible, working them into scenes, and into interviews.
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. To get her comfortable, he started chatting about dogs.
The approach stood out to the producer Adams was working with that night: a young Ira Glass. "It's the fastest, most efficient warm up of a child," Glass remembered years later. "He's not talking down to her. And then he just launches into the interview."
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.
As Glass listened to the taping and studied Adams' approach, he realized how well and quickly Adams connected with the girl. How he framed 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 would repeatedly cite Adams and his interviewing style as an inspiration for the feel and tone of the public radio program he'd go on to 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 character on the air, as the host of All Things Considered, was this warm, mensch-y, chatty New York lady. And he was this sort 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 walked away from A Prairie Home Companion, and Adams went to Minnesota to launch a new variety show to replace it. "I remember [thinking] wow, the nerve!" said Glass.
The variety show didn't work out, and two years later, Adams was back at All Things Considered, where he was paired alongside Robert Siegel and Linda Wertheimer.
The two men brought different experiences and views of the world to the show. "Noah was a voice for our going to rural America, doing stories about what was happening in small towns far from the Interstate 95 corridor," said Siegel.
"He was a productive writer," said Siegel. "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 Appalachia, Following the New River North (2001), and The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur & Orville Wright, (2003).
Adams' writing for the 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 head of the cult that eventually committed 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.
One aspect of it was controversial: Adams narrated it not as a journalist, but as a fictional composite character presented as a survivor of the cult. His delivery was purposely flat, and filled with trauma.
To Siegel, the documentary was NPR as Noah Adams wanted it to be: "Experimental use of sound. Interesting writing. I think he aspired to our not just having tomorrow's front page on tonight, but to have the rich back-page [features]" he said.
Adams helped shape NPR at a moment when the network's identity was still malleable. At a time when it wasn't quite a fully professionalized and institutionalized news gathering operation, Adams wanted the network to live up to the ideals formed during that era, says Melissa Block.
"To really capture the character of the country and the voices of everyone in their own style, in their own perspective, from their own perspective," she explained, "and to pay attention to things that were outside of the centers of power."
Quietly, purposefully, with his notebook and his typewriter, that's what Noah Adams did.
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