Happy Birthday To Us! ‘TTBOOK’ Turns 25!

Executive Producer Offers Reflections On Show's Origins

By
Jim Gill

“To the Best of Our Knowledge’ broadcast its first show 25 years ago — on Labor Day, 1990.

WPR’s then-director Jack Mitchell conceived of the idea for the program based on the concept of “academic journalism.” As one can imagine, much has changed since then.

But, a few of us from those early days are still around. Jim Fleming and Margaret Andreasen were the original co-hosts and then Jim took over as solo host after a couple of years. Anne Strainchamps and I were the first producers.

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Anne Strainchamps cutting tape.

The show originally aired five days a week on WPR’s Ideas Network — yes, it nearly killed us — so we pulled in some folks from around the station to help us edit tape. WPR old-timers will remember those people, including Ralph Johnson, Judy Rose and Tom Martin-Erickson. After a few years, Mary Lou Finnegan took over duties as our chief tape editor. Judith Strasser joined us as one of our regular interviewers. And our stalwart producers in that first decade were Molly Bentley and Debbie Bilder. Our technical director was Marv Nonn, until Caryl Owens took over in 2004. (I might add that we didn’t go digital until 2001, so we used an awful lot of splicing tape in those first 11 years.)

As best as I can remember, after two or three years and a lot of fine-tuning (that notion of academic journalism quickly faded), we started to syndicate the show nationally. Our first distributor was WFMT Radio in Chicago, and then, we signed on with Public Radio International.

For most of our first decade, “To the Best of Our Knowledge” aired daily on the WPR’s NPR News & Classical Music Network at 3 p.m. (Thursdays and Fridays were repeats), and we produced three new hours for national syndication each weekend. The production schedule was brutal, so we finally cut back to two hours and became a weekend show on WPR.

For me, it’s humbling to reflect on this history and think of all the people who worked on TTBOOK in those early years … and then the fabulous people who’ve joined the staff since then and who keep reinventing the show 25 years later.