Noah Adams, Voice of NPR's 'All Things Considered' for 18 Years, Dies at 84
Adams guided listeners through the Berlin Wall's fall and the Sept. 11 attacks, but colleagues say he did his best work riding trains and talking to people in small towns.
Noah Adams, a writer, broadcaster and storyteller who hosted NPR's All Things Considered for 18 years, has died. He was 84. Adams died Friday at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, according to his wife, Neenah Ellis.
He guided listeners through some of the biggest news events of his era, including Ronald Reagan's landslide election victories, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But to the people who worked beside him in the newsroom, his journalism shone brightest in the softer features he reported himself. Adams would ride trains across the country, or spend days in small towns talking to whoever he met. He asked questions. He listened. He wrote down notes and observations, then produced long, thoughtful radio pieces that helped listeners understand and appreciate the world a little better.
"He was always observing," recalled Melissa Block, who produced pieces with 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 was born in Kentucky and came to NPR in the mid-1970s, when the network was still new and still figuring things out. He was intensely private, but told people he had bounced through a series of jobs before falling into radio. He worked construction. He sold cars, as he once recounted in an on-air essay. In 1972 he began 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.
The show's staff starts each morning with a long meeting about the day's news and what belongs in the two-hour broadcast. Like any meeting, it can feel rote, and many staffers view it with some cynicism. Adams never did. "You would pay attention to all the mysteries out in the world," he said in an NPR essay looking back on his career. "You'd have a deep curiosity about the yearning. You'd notice who was in trouble, why? What does Washington mean?"
Like most reporters, he wanted to get out of the newsroom and into the world, and he steered his reporting away from officials and politicians in Washington. "He never liked talking to people who he knew had pre-programmed things to say," Block said. "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 also tried to write and talk about dogs as often as he could, working them into scenes and interviews. That is how he opened a memorable 1987 interview with an 8-year-old girl named Betsy Walter, whose parents had divorced. To put her at ease, he started chatting about dogs. The producer working with him that night was a young Ira Glass, who later said it was "the fastest, most efficient warm up of a child." Glass was so struck by the tape that he took the full interview home to keep. Over the years he repeatedly cited Adams and his interviewing style as an inspiration for the feel and tone of This American Life, the program he went on to create.
