"Bravo to everybody. I'm so proud to be here on behalf of NPR."
That was Susan Stamberg — a voice that became synonymous with public radio ever since she took on anchor duties in 1972 — wrapping up a radio reenactment before an audience at WUKY on the station's 75th anniversary in 2015.
You can hear the full audio here.
The first U.S. woman to anchor a nightly national news program, Stamberg recounted the formative years of National Public Radio in an interview with WUKY's Alan Lytle.
"We had no resources, a tiny little staff, and it was such tough and killer work," she remembered.
But the New Jersey native stuck it out, going from trailblazer to an authoritative news personality to a special correspondent focusing on sound-rich cultural stories.
Doomsayers have always been predicting the demise of radio as new technologies took its place, she said, but there's something irreplaceable about the medium.
"It's sound and it's stories being told through audio, and that will never go away," she said. "That's as primitive and primal as your mother's voice, the first thing that you hear, which is the sound of the human voice."
The observation was closely tied to the title often attached to Stamberg's name — a "founding mother" of NPR.