Part 43: Into the Studio

It was nearly 4 a.m. by the time I returned to my rented room on the second floor of the Murray’s home in Woodlawn. I was too wired to sleep, so I drank coffee and listened to my tape.

At 8:30 a.m., I called All Things Considered and told the editor what I had. Come down to our studio, she said.

I showered, changed into fresh clothes, and drove to NPR headquarters in Washington, DC. By the time I arrived around 10 a.m., ATC host Susan Stamberg had already interviewed Jeff Jerome by telephone.

I met Renee Montagne, who produced the segment. The first thing Montagne did was take me to an audio engineer who dubbed my cassette onto quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape. The engineer fiddled with dials and switches to clean up the audio, removing hiss and enhancing the sound as much as possible.

The best part, when we saw the Poe Toaster, was marred by the presence of a furiously steaming radiator that sounded like a chugging locomotive. Little could be done about that.

Montagne sat me down at a typewriter and had me write an introduction that explained what the Poe Toaster was about and set up the piece. My first draft was two or three paragraphs, maybe 200 words. We rewrote it over and over, reading the text aloud to time it. The intro should be no more than 30 seconds, she said.

That kind of pressure forces you to weigh every word carefully, to pack in as much information in as few words as possible. You think of better ways of expressing an idea, look for words that are unnecessary. And you want it to sound pleasant when spoken aloud.

We spent most of the rest of the day together in an editing booth. First she selected about three minutes of highlights out of about an hour of material that I recorded. She also had a second reel containing Stamberg’s phone interview with Jerome.

Here’s how it worked before the digital age: lengths of audio tape were pulled by hand across the play head, producing in an unsophisticated ear such as mine an unintelligible low wuuurrr. You can tell what people are saying if you pull the tape faster—forward and backward until you locate the right spot. Montagne cut the tape in the gap between words with a single-edge razor. Pieces of audio were spliced with adhesive tape.

Montagne’s fingers worked blazingly fast—wuuurrr, cut, splice, wuuurrr, cut, splice. When not cutting, she held the razor blade between her lips. She cut and rearranged, then rearranged again. There were dozens of pieces of audio tape, some to keep and some to discard. I struggled to keep track.

Activity in the newsroom intensified through the day, reaching a crescendo in the mid-afternoon. The minutes before airtime are a maelstrom of activity, with staffers hustling tape and hammering away at typewriters, a lot of yelling and rushing. The exquisite production quality and notoriously laconic affect for which NPR is known belies the chaos behind the scenes. From the inside, it seems amazing that they pull it off at all.

Somebody gave us a countdown for our segment: ten minutes to go, five minutes, three minutes. Montagne worked furiously to shorten and tighten the segment, working within seconds of air time. The tape was grabbed from her hands and cued up for broadcast.

At 5:25 p.m., I sat outside the soundproof anchor’s booth in the ATC newsroom and listened while Stamberg read my introduction on the air, followed by the tape that Montagne produced.

When the segment ended three minutes and 50 seconds later, I slumped into a chair and watched passively as mayhem swirled around me in the ATC newsroom. All of the tension drained from my body, and the effects of 36 hours without sleep began to sink in.

My bloodstream coursed with caffeine and adrenaline and endorphins. I felt lightheaded, almost woozy, intoxicated by the unreality of being in a place I never imagined I’d ever belong and the thrill of having documented something that nobody else had ever done. It was a peak experience. It was bliss.

They say that an addict is hooked the very first time a narcotic hits the vein. All subsequent uses of a drug are futile and ultimately self-destructive attempts to achieve that same state of euphoria.

At that moment, I was hooked on journalism.

Note: A portion of the January 19, 1983 "All Things Considered" segment can be heard in the video. Permission from National Public Radio to use the entire segment is still pending.

Other Parts of the Poe Toaster Tale:

I.
II.
III.
Next: Revealing Secrets