Stamberg’s ‘Soundtrack’ of ‘80s, ‘90s : Books: Her ‘Talk’ features about 85 of the 20,000 or so of the radio reporter’s interviews.

Susan Stamberg loves to retell the “Nancy” story.

Back in 1980, the veteran National Public Radio reporter had to wait for an hour--half of it spent in the freezing snow outside the Reagans’ Virginia home--before Nancy Reagan was ready to be interviewed.

But when the moment finally arrived, the soon-to-be First Lady hardly rushed to greet Stamberg. Instead, she slowly made her way across the large living room where the reporter was waiting by deliberately and methodically emptying several ashtrays scattered about.

“She emptied every ashtray in the room,” says Stamberg, who recounted the tale over dinner for days afterward. The writer is still not sure how to interpret it.

The anecdote also appears in Stamberg’s new book, “Talk,” which features transcriptions of about 85 of the 20,000 or so interviews she conducted for NPR between 1971 and 1991.

Stamberg anchored NPR’s popular news magazine “All Things Considered” for most of those years, marked by the feminist revolution, Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. She interviewed the famous--civil-rights figure Rosa Parks, Watergate’s John Ehrlichman, presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, chef Craig Claiborne--and the unsung, such as the young Czechs who helped reclaim their homeland in the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

The book, which includes Stamberg’s current reflections and a timeline of newsworthy events running along the top of each page, is something of a printed “soundtrack” of the “final decades of the 20th Century,” she said during a recent luncheon here to promote “Talk.”

With her throaty laugh, earthy, ingratiating charm and New York accent, the irreverent Stamberg became known as the voice of NPR, which broadcasts nationwide out of Washington. Today that voice is heard less often, but she still frequently anchors NPR’s Saturday morning “Weekend Edition” show and delivers intermittent in-depth reports since becoming a special correspondent in 1989.

Exuding the same warmth and vitality that comes across the airwaves, she sat down with a Diet Coke after the luncheon to discuss her book and her work.

“There’s something in almost every piece in that book that taught me something about life, a way to approach it or think about it,” Stamberg said.

Take the courageous words of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, for instance, whose uncompromising criticism of South African apartheid caused that government to ban one of her books. Stamberg asked Gordimer, visiting Washington from her home in Johannesburg, if she wasn’t “afraid to write” while living there.

“Gordimer said: ‘I always think that wherever you are, the ideal way to write is as if you were already dead. As if it didn’t matter what anybody said about what you write.’ I found that really quite astonishing.”

Then there was pragmatic advice from child psychologist Haim Ginott, whom Stamberg interviewed when her son Joshua, now 23, was a toddler.

“He talked about how you raise children,” she said, “and I listened hard and applied those lessons to my son.”

A 1976 interview with Ehrlichman was her toughest, ever.

“There was a sneer to him and a self-satisfaction and an unapproachability that I found very frightening,” she said. “I was so scared, I felt like I was sitting across the table from--I don’t want to say evil incarnate, because that’s almost overdramatic--but I was a nervous new broadcaster, and I felt that it shows in the interview, and I write about that in the book.”

“Talk” is also full of interviews with artists, Stamberg’s favorite conversations.

“They are the visionaries and the dreamers,” she said.

Though often obligated to cover breaking news, from the 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran to the 1991 floods in Bangladesh, Stamberg has always sought out uplifting stories, despite colleagues’ groans.

Every afternoon, as “All Things Considered” editors mapped out the evening’s broadcast, “I’m the one who went and looked at (the schedule) and said: ‘Where is the joy in this radio program?’ And they’d all stand around and go, ‘Oh, Susan .’ ”

She is also constantly seeking novel ways to do radio, and has led a gardening expert through her own ailing flower beds, toured the closet of former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella, and returned to her childhood neighborhood to observe how Manhattan had changed.

“I intend that in every encounter, something very creative will happen that hasn’t happened before,” she said. Her work as a journalist “is not parasitic; it’s an encounter--a mutual, I hope symbiotic, but sometimes confrontational encounter--that will produce some new insight. That’s why I’m there.”

Stamberg adopted that approach the moment she went on the air.

Raised by first generation Russian Americans who never finished high school, she had a few jobs in publishing after receiving an undergraduate degree from Barnard College in New York, where she studied English and sociology.

She never expected to go into radio.

“I didn’t grow up on TV,” said Stamberg, 54. “I grew up on radio. So to me, saying I wanted to be in radio was like saying I want to be a movie star. I mean, radio was the glamorous medium and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I might ever be able to do it.”

In the mid-’60s, however, she landed her first and only other radio job “just by luck” at a small public station in Washington.

She made her broadcast debut when “the weather girl got sick,” and, determined to spice up the weather, recited famous poetry about snow, rain or sleet with each report.

“The station manager said: ‘That is so weird,’ but I kept doing it, and finally toward the end, he said: ‘You know that poetry crap isn’t half bad.’ ”

At NPR, Stamberg hosted “All Things Considered” for 14 years. In 1987, she gave up the daily grind to anchor NPR’s Sunday “Morning Edition” show, then became NPR special correspondent.

She has published two other books. One is a 1992 collection of short stories by well-known authors. The other, printed about 10 years ago, is a compilation of reports done over a 10-year period by several “All Things Considered” contributors, which, unlike the new book, makes no attempt to put all the news in historical perspective, she said.

She loathes writing (“I’m a talker”) but wrote “Talk” largely because her husband of 31 years, Louis, said she would kick herself later if she did not. Because radio is “about as lasting as a butterfly’s cough,” she said, she also hoped to capture for posterity ideas and feelings of a momentous era.

“Things happen so quickly now,” Stamberg said. “We’re . . . being bombarded all the time by today, today, today, and we lose track of the context, where we came from, how we got to today. I hope the book gives that kind of context.”