I'm Susan Stamberg, I'm a special correspondent at National Public Radio, and during the March on Washington I was doing and learning my very first job in broadcasting, which was as a producer at WAMU-FM, which is located on the campus of the American University. And it was one of some twelve stations that made up a network that was the precursor of National Public Radio. It was a skinny little network, twelve FM stations that went up and down the East Coast and Washington was sort of the news and events arm of that.

I was a very lowly producer; I was really learning my radio chops then, at WAMU. But it was when I made my skinny little network radio debut, because before the March, they sent me out to a news conference that the chief of police in Washington was holding, about what security would be like here on the day of the March. And we were somewhere over –I remember the funny part - either near the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, but I was new enough in town, that once it came my turn to be on the air and report to this network of twelve stations what the police and security plans for the city were, I kept saying “the Lincoln Monument” and “the Washington Memorial,” and George Geesey, who was the anchor to whom I was speaking - I was at some remote location and he was back at the station - kept correcting me in the subtlest, nicest way: "Yes, Susan, so the Lincoln Memorial, the plan is there," and I would say, "Yes George, the Lincoln Monument is where they're planning to have the x" - I was so nervous that I was completely deaf to the fact that I was making mistakes! Oddly enough, that’s my - and its pathetic, isn’t it? - It’s my most vivid memory.

But that was before the March. I was producing a weekly news and public affairs talk program, and so that would have been my job on that day, would be to line up people to make comments about it. It was a program called Viewpoint: Washington. It had a colon in the title, Viewpoint-colon-Washington, because I was almost straight out of college and any paper I ever wrote at Barnard College in New York had a colon in it, so I figured, "Keep it up! Put a colon in the title of this first broadcast you’re doing, and it will do well!" We did do pretty well, too!

I could remember the time leading up to the March, and really why going to cover that police chief’s news conference was important - people were really frightened. This was maybe the opportunity for protests in Washington; we knew thousands and thousands of people coming to town. Maybe a chance for violence, as well; we knew that people were angry and they were coming here to express their anger, and so that whole idea of security, and what police patrolling would be like was very important. And these were the days before the huge anti-war marches that filled the Mall, and filled Washington starting in the later sixties against the Vietnam War.

So we didn't know those huge kinds of demonstrations, and that's what I remember very well, was the nervousness throughout the town, I was living here, and at the station as well as to how would we handle this if anything really difficult or confrontational broke out. And the lasting impression from that day was how absent any of that was from anything that happened in the course of that protest. It was like a Sunday picnic and people came dressed to the nines, all the demonstrators, and excited about being there together, excited about being heard, thrilled to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. address the crowd and all the other people who spoke.

Mostly I was in a control room or on the telephone, that was my job at WAMU, as I remember making telephone calls to put commentators and analysts on the air in the course of the day, lining up people to be interviewed either by George Geesey in Washington, or there were other people in the different stations. I know it was just a technical feat, really of some proportions than in those pre-satellite days when you were taking vans and driving trucks around this town and setting up mini-studios inside those vans and running long, long, long, long cables and lines from microphones that reporters who were dispatched in various places around town and along the Mall. You had to be able to broadcast them; it was through these funny looking lines! Now everything is so totally portable, and digitized, and also satellited, that you don't need all that complicated stringing. But then we certainly did. So those logistics, those technical logistics - I was involved in none of that, but I realize how enormous that was.

As far as whose idea, I'm sure it was the suits of the Educational Radio Network who came up with that idea, they knew that it was an enormous event that was going to be taking place, and it was very news making. And we had spent our time, and were spending our time in those days being as good a news operation as we could. We certainly had a lot of on-site commentators and people observing and people reporting what it was that they were seeing. The Good Humor man pulls up, you tell everybody that and also what kind of flavors he’s offering and what it costs! But they were skilled at that! That’s where I learned to do things like that. I don’t think ever as well as those guys were doing it, but nonetheless, I was an avid student of what they were doing.

That’s a great regret, you know, I was hoping really to be able to be on the site and be in the middle of that crowd and get the feeling of it. No, I was way up at another end of Washington D.C., a far corner almost on the Maryland border, far from the National Mall and yet I felt I was there because the broadcast was so wonderful! You know, the quality of our sound was terrific, I could hear it all, I could hear the noise of the crowd, I could hear the power of the speakers and the singers and performers and musicians. And so in a way I had the illusion that I was there. Of course, this is one of radio’s great strengths, without having been physically there.

I think everybody involved that day knew how important this was. This was a first. To have that kind interracial demonstration of solidarity behind the idea of desegregation. I can't remember anything like that on that level in my lifetime. I mean there were plenty of protests in the south during the big days of the civil rights movement, but nothing on the scope on that national theatre which is what the National Mall is. So yes, I certainly knew it was an historic event and I knew it would be something that would be a watershed for the country and that we would be talking about forever. Yeah, it was clear. I was thinking in those days there was no such thing as C-SPAN, there was no CNN, and there was no 24-hour news service, and as far as I know we were the only organization to be doing essentially gavel to gavel coverage of this. It was fifteen hours worth of broadcasting and so it became the record of the day, and nobody else could provide that. I’m sure the big commercial television networks were on it, and I'm sure they devoted many hours to it, but no one possibly could've done the full fifteen as we did and allow the people to speak for themselves. To do so much from the podium, it is now the record of the day.