The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, All Things Considered, 10/14/1979MARCHING ON WASHINGTON
All Things Considered recorded the voices of speakers, protesters and onlookers at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and...

The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, All Things Considered, 10/14/1979

MARCHING ON WASHINGTON

All Things Considered recorded the voices of speakers, protesters and onlookers at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 1979. The march was one of the first large-scale national demonstrations for gay and lesbian rights. Organizers sought federal anti-discrimination laws to protect gay and lesbian individuals and advocated for the inclusion of sexual orientation as a protected status within the Civil Rights Act of 1954.


“Visibility is protection. Visibility is a way to legislation. And visibility is something that brings others out and gives them courage.”


-Demonstrator at the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights


http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/1979/10/19791014_atc_gayrights.mp3


The digital preservation of this audio has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Researcher Laura Garbes contributed to this post.

Image: Bettman / Getty Images / 1979.

Tractorcade, All Things Considered, 02/05/1979MARCHING ON WASHINGTON
In February 1979, All Things Considered visited the National Mall to record a spectacle known as Tractorcade. A convoy of farmers from the American Agriculture Movement drove their...

Tractorcade, All Things Considered, 02/05/1979

MARCHING ON WASHINGTON

In February 1979, All Things Considered visited the National Mall to record a spectacle known as Tractorcade. A convoy of farmers from the American Agriculture Movement drove their tractors thousands of miles in winter conditions from places like Texas, Ohio and Colorado, to rally in support of farmworkers’ rights to earn a living wage.

“The way we…bring our point across…is by bringing the tractor. The tractor is out of place in Washington, D.C.”

- A member of the 1979 tractor convoy



The digital preservation of this audio has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Researcher Laura Garbes contributed to this post.

Image: Bill Wilson / 1979. Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection © Washington Post.

The city of Washington, D.C. holds a symbolic place in American culture as a space to voice a diversity of ideas, views and agendas. @npr​ has reported on the political tradition of marching on Washington since 1971 when All Things Considered (ATC)...

The city of Washington, D.C. holds a symbolic place in American culture as a space to voice a diversity of ideas, views and agendas. @npr​ has reported on the political tradition of marching on Washington since 1971 when All Things Considered (ATC) debuted with a sound portrait of one of the largest anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in history.

We’re listening back through the archives and rediscovering stories about marches on Washington that reflect NPR’s original mission to represent a “genuine diversity of regions, values, and cultural and ethnic minorities which comprise American society [and]… speak with many voices and many dialects.

Image: U.S. Information Agency / National Archives & Records Administration / 1963. 

Options is an NPR radio program from the 1970s, “designed to help listeners understand the complexities of our time.” 

Listen above for a narrated taste of the show’s endearing hodgepodge of radio music, from reformatting intern Nicolo Scolieri, who worked with the RAD team to make archival audio accessible in this more digital age. 


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Music:

Don Voegeli- 
For many years, Voegeli’s work was NPR’s sound - proof that the young network had a place, a role in the future of radio.
Here’s a collection of the intros and outros, buttons and bridges, that Don Voegeli made over the years.
Thanks to Wisconsin Public Radio and the National Center for Audio Experimentation, what a history!

Here’s Susan Stamberg’s take on new sounds, and new ways for us to sound, shared by nprchives in 2017.
Apparently Voegeli’s music was controversial:

“Simply marvelous! Some folks can’t stand it!”

Julian Bream and John Williams- 
The lovely guitar piece from “The Next Billion Years: Man’s Future in a Cosmic Perspective” is Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.
Thanks to Paisley-Scotland for audio artwork. It was taken at Ben Lomond, the same mountain from the Bream and Williams record cover.
Beautiful!

Discovering the Neighborhood of Make-Believe in the NPR archives


In the 1978 Christmas Eve broadcast of NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered, Mr. Rogers explains his decision to invite Santa to his Neighborhood of Make-Believe — he wanted it on the record that Santa would never watch children while they’re sleeping. This nearly 40 year-old interview with the star of  Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the first delightfully unexpected discovery I made while searching through NPR’s in-house digital archive. The interview was contemplative and funny and, lucky for me, there was more. Mr. Rogers was interviewed on NPR over a dozen more times between 1975 and 2002. What’s special about these interviews is their incredibly slow pace. And it’s not just the way Mr. Rogers talks–it’s the way he reveals the thoughtfulness and deep compassion for the perspective of children that went into every creative choice on the show.  

Here are the greatest hits from nearly thirty years of NPR interviews with Mr. Rogers.

All Things Considered, 6/5/1975

Bob Edwards introduces him by saying, “Mr. Rogers is, for adults anyway, almost unbearably slow paced.”

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Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Bob Edwards: Mr Rogers is, for adults anyway, almost unbearably slow-paced. Steven Banker asked Fred Rogers to account for the difference. 

Mr. Rogers: I think it depends who you are. I happen to be a person who is rather well-modulated in his way of speaking and in his way of dealing with feelings. And so consequently, I am myself. And I think maybe that’s the most important thing that I can be to children on television, is myself. 

All Things Considered, 12/12/1979

39 days into the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Mr. Rogers returns to All Things Considered to discuss with Susan Stamberg how parents can use this time to teach their children to, “develop empathy for all sorts of people.”

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NPR Archives

Susan Stamberg: A crisis situation presents a tremendous opportunity to really teach lessons in morals and values, doesn’t it? It’s a way to acknowledge the fact that there’s anger, but you can go beyond that and say, but this is the wrong way to express your anger. Taking prisoner is the wrong way.

Mr. Rogers: I have trouble with right and wrong. But I know what you’re saying. And I think that it’s more helpful to say, this is not the way we do it in our family. This is not the way we would do it in our country. And then go on to say how we as a family feel. And our notion of how we as a country feel is such and such. And this gives the kids a very secure sense of belonging to a family, to a country that has these ideals.

Morning Edition, 3/18/1983

Eight years after his initial interview with Mr. Rogers, Bob Edwards admits he has converted to the slow-speed philosophy of the Neighborhood.   

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Getty Images

Bob Edwards: I have a confession, I’m almost 36 years old and I enjoy your show. It’s not so much what you’re doing with children I mean I see that now as a father, it’s television and something is going on there. You use the medium so well.  

Mr. Rogers: Anybody likes to be in touch with somebody who’s honest. We all do… I think that the box, there’s a certain safety in the box. And I wonder — when children see me on the street they invariably say, how did you get out? And I try my best to explain what television is and that it’s a picture and that I’m a real person and that’s why I could be there at that moment. They think that you’re so big. And I invariably say to them, you know the scary things you may see on television, could never come and visit you.

Fresh Air, 11/13/2002

Mr. Rogers appears on NPR for the last time a year before he passed away in 2003. In this Fresh Air interview with Barbara Bogaev he reveals more about his life outside the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe” than in any of his previous appearances.

Mr. Rogers: I had every imaginable childhood disease, even scarlet fever, and so whenever I was quarantined—and you know, they used to quarantine people for chicken pox and all of those things—I would be in bed a lot, and I certainly knew what it was like to use the counterpane as my neighborhood of make-believe, if you will. But I had puppets.

Barbara Bogaev: You mean, the window? You would use what? Finger puppets or shadow puppets, or what?

Mr. Rogers: And things on the bed. I would put up my knees and they would be mountains, you know, covered with the sheet, and I’d have all these little figures moving around, and I’d make them talk. And I can still see my room, and I’m sure that was the beginning of a much later neighborhood of make-believe.

Sarah Wilson is a public history intern with NPR’s RAD team. She works with the RAD team to uncover NPR history and collect oral history interviews with notable current and former staff.

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On this day in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act. In his remarks upon signing the act, Johnson declared:

“I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all the people, stake a claim based upon the combined resources of communications. I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education…I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can rise.” 

At the time, “every means of sending and of storing information,” was envisioned primarily as public television, with radio advocates fighting to be included under the bill’s provisions. Fifty years later, consistent with President Johnson’s vision of a “great network for knowledge,” public media reaches the world through radio, television, podcasts, blogs, videos, social media posts and other multimedia productions.

Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library 

nprchives:

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We interrupt this Tumblr to bring you a special bulletin: in 1938, Martians invaded…New Jersey! At least, that was the plot of the now-infamous radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, directed and narrated by Orson Welles. 

On October 30, 1988, All Things Considered commemorated the 50th anniversary of the radio show by interspersing new interviews with excerpts from the radio drama. CBS publicity manager Hal Davis recalled, “Every phone began ringing at once and everybody was hysterical.”  CBS’s president, William Paley, claimed, “the whole country was bursting wide open.” 

In recent years, scholars have questioned claims of mass panic on the night of the broadcast, arguing that contemporary newspaper headlines exaggerated and sensationalized the response. However, the event prompted real panic and concern about the role of mass media in American society.  

As War of the Worlds radio dramatist Howard Koch told @npr​ in 1988, “I am disappointed in the gullibility of the American people, politically as well as in this instance, that they accept the most outrageous things as truth.”

Photo: New York Daily News front page October 31, 1938. Credit: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Happy Halloween from the NPRchives!