“The voice we woke up to.” That’s NPR’s Susan Stamberg speaking of Bob Edwards, who for just short of a quarter century was the host of “Morning Edition,” until the bosses gave him the shove in 2004.
Heart failure and complications of bladder cancer gave Edwards his final push on Saturday. He was 76.
I spent a lot of years getting the news from Edwards and his people courtesy of one NPR affiliate or another. KRCC-FM in Bibleburg; KUAZ in Tucson; one or another of the three stations I could get in Corvallis, Ore. (KOAC, KOPB, or KLCC); KCFR in Denver; and others along the long and winding road between newspapers.
“Morning Edition” became particularly important in Corvallis, where I was working for an afternoon paper for the first and last time. Edwards and the NPR news crew gave me a head’s-up as to what might await me when I staggered hungover into the Gazette-Times newsroom at stupid-thirty and started scanning the wires for nightmares to pour into the holes around the ads.
You’d never have known he was from Kentucky (like me, he shed any original-equipment accent). Unlike me, he was drafted and did a hitch in the Army, in South Korea.
Edwards wrote books, hosted a program on SiriusFM, and — according to his wife, Windsor Johnston, a reporter and news anchor for NPR — never got over his dismissal from that outfit, where just four years earlier his work had been honored and described by a Peabody awards committee as “two hours of daily in-depth news and entertainment expertly helmed by a man who embodies the essence of excellence in radio.”
“He was a stickler for even the tiniest of details and lived by the philosophy that ‘less is more,’” Ms. Johnston wrote on Facebook. “He helped pave the way for the younger generation of journalists who continue to make NPR what it is today.”
That’s a helluva mic drop. Peace to him, and to his friends, family, and loyal listeners.
Mad Blog Media 
I’ve missed him since they showed him the door. His favorite story was his cranberry relish recipe.
You take one can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce. Open can at both ends. Serve
Haw. Giving the raspberry to Susan Stamberg and her mother-in-law’s recipe he was.
Jill and I saw him somewhere maybe Seattle? He discussed his book about Edward Murrow. And further passings yesterday included Tim Rutledge, the man behind ‘cross in Seattle and memorialized in a recent Escape Collective piece about his Giro participation in ’84.
Tim Rutledge went west? I hadn’t heard. Man, he was the nicest guy. I can’t remember when I first met him — either one of the times I covered cyclocross nats in Seattle in the mid-Nineties or at Interbike when he was with SBS and all wound up about his blue-collar special, the 1996 Redline frameset. But we spoke now and then, mostly about ’cross, when I had something in that vein to scribble about for some cage-liner.
Tim was one of the first folks to lend a hand to the American Cyclo-cross Foundation, a little one-lung op’ that Charles Pelkey and I put together back in the Nineties to help send Yanks across the pond to race against the Euros. Like I said, the nicest guy. Here’s a piece CX Magazine did on him. And here’s a brief obit from BRAIN.
Dammit. All the wrong people are shoving off.
I have never forgiven the suits at NPR for his heave-ho. The Morning Edition lost its luster. The weekly? conversations with Red Barber are fondly recalled.
Yeah, I think that marked NPR’s first cautious step onto the Road to Genial Irrelevance. The news coverage seems a lot softer to me, and I no longer keep the local affiliate on in the background throughout the day, though we still support KRCC and KUNM.
Agree that NPR has gone a little too poodle-ish on the news. But I had NPR on in the background when 6 January hit the fan. I was working from home that day and had the LANL computer set up in the kitchen near the coffee pot. Suddenly, work seemed secondary.
I once got into a big hissy fit with KUNM, an NPR affiliate, over Marisa DeMarco’s biased reporting and I shot off an email to the news director. I think NPR is at times a little biased. But then again, who cares what an aging, middle of the road Democrat thinks? Get off my lawn.
https://northmesamutts.blogspot.com/2017/05/hecklers-veto-at-unm-round-2-kunm-piles.html
We still support 3 stations, KUNM, KSFR, and KANW.
Damn. What a story to wake up to. NPR has never been the same.