“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.