JTA — When Susan Stamberg first sat behind the microphone to host a newfangled broadcasting venture called National Public Radio, in 1972, some board members had a concern: She sounded too Jewish.

Though that wasn’t quite how they tended to phrase it, recalled a colleague. Instead, NPR board members feared that the “All Things Considered” co-host was “too New York” for Midwest audiences.

“Besides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,” Jack Mitchell, an early producer on the daily afternoon program, told NPR. “Here is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it… And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those — because of the complaints from managers.”

Stamberg went on the air anyway and quickly became a defining personality for the nonprofit radio network. In subsequent decades, as NPR turned into a cultural juggernaut, Stamberg and her “New York” personality became something of its unofficial mascot. In the elevators of NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, her recorded voice guides visitors from floor to floor.

Stamberg died Thursday at age 87, leaving behind years of her bubbly conversations and an annual, love-it-or-hate-it recipe for her family’s “cranberry relish.”

As one of NPR’s “founding mothers” in the 1970s, she helped shape the network’s personality:........

© The Times of Israel