Listeners to Rochester's public radio station WXXI, may recognize Brenda Tremblay of Brockport, not only by her soft, easy to listen to on-air voice, but also for her insightful and superbly produced feature stories about local people and events. Occasionally her mini audio 'documentaries' are picked up by National Public Radio and syndicated nationally by the NPR network. Most of her reporting is heard on WXXI AM 1370 where she spends 80 percent of her time on local news and feature reports about regional personalities, cultural events. Ten percent of her time is spent producing stories for NPR. She also hosts classical music programs on FM 91.5. It was her background in classical music that got her started. "I grew up in Albion," Tremblay says, "my parents, Sid and Etha Bolton, still live there. They are both musicians. My father, Sid, was an instrumental music teacher in the Albion schools and my mother is a pianist and has accompanied some really top-notch musicians. She also gave piano lessons in our home. I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and did one year of piano in college, but my heart wasn't really in it -- I guess I was just too lazy to practice." But after graduating from Houghton College, where she earned a degree in English, Tremblay had a hard time finding a job as a high school English teacher. On a whim she sent a resume to WXXI, emphasizing her classical music background. "I was in the right place at the right time, because when I applied they had an opening. I'd never heard of National Public Radio, there was no NPR in Albion unless you had a really good antenna. But I got the job and I fell in love with it. I got lucky." At first, Brenda was traffic and operations manager -- collecting, sorting and delivering tapes to the right studio so the right bits and pieces were at hand for on-air staff to play at the right time. She admits that after a year she started to get bored and determined to start producing stories on her own. "I set myself a goal. Within a year I wanted to get a piece on NPR's Morning Edition. I called them up five or six times with lame story ideas. I can hardly believe they kept returning my calls. Then, I was chosen to be in a program they had for young producers where they shepherded us through the whole process. They helped me focus the story, talk to the right people, put together the piece, edit, prepare it and ... it happened!" "My first national story was about the poet ee cummings, tied to his 100th birthday. Throughout his career, cummings had close ties to Rochester; he made frequent trips to the city to visit friends and patrons and collaborate with colleagues including Rochester composer David Diamond. (see David Diamond biography). Following her first success on Morning Edition, Tremblay went on to produce many other popular stories. One of those provoked a huge number of letters to NPR. It was about Charles Howard, a western New Yorker who played Santa Claus in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade from the 1930s into the late 50s. Howard retired to Albion and started a Santa Claus school, open to the public which became, for a while, a popular tourist destination. "I also do serious stuff," Tremblay jokes, recalling huge national interest in her report about Cynthia Wiggins, the Buffalo teenager who was hit by a bus on her way to work at a suburban mall. Her original report on that tragic accident was broadcast by another radio show called "Living on Earth," and was picked up and excerpted by Morning Edition. Soccer Mom So she went back to work, half-time, and is grateful that WXXI was able and willing to accommodate her. "They were very nice to me," she says, "they let me set my own hours, they gave me a lot of fluidity." Tremblay's two other children are Gavin, 3, and Jack, 5. With three children and a husband to look after she says, "Sometimes I feel like I have spinning plates in the air and I try to keep them all spinning, some days it's an effort to keep everything going." Despite the pressures of being a working mother, keeping family and career online, Brenda finds time to be the organist at St. Luke's Church in Brockport. She says she volunteered when the church's organist quit and they missed music in the church. "I can bang out the hymns," she modestly told the minister, David Robison. And bang them out she did, well enough it seems to be asked to take on the part-time paid position. Today, despite constant juggling of family, career and community activities, she says, "It's a great life. I really can't think of anything else I'd rather do. I really like radio. I don't have to dress up or wear makeup. I can age gracefully unlike some other women in the media." •"But the thing I love the most is the intimacy of radio, the fact that people can do other things while they're listening, they can be driving in their car, or gardening, or doing dishes or chopping vegetables. It's somehow more noble, or something, and more imaginative -- it's all happening inside their heads." Note: Listen to Tremblay's story about Charles Howard's Santa Claus school by logging on to: http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1068145. On NPR's site (www.npr.org) find other Brenda Tremblay stories including: •Chautauqua Book Club Marks 125th Anniversary - 08-10-03 - This year marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of the oldest continuous book club in the United States. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, was established by a Methodist minister as a four-year correspondence course. •Video Game Degrees - 05-22-02 - Report on new programs at RIT and other universities which focus on teaching students how to design computer games. •Farmers Fight New York School Boards Over Apples - 01-01-03 - New York state apple growers are fighting to make local school boards more picky about the apples they serve to students. The quality, they say, is fine, but the apples are being imported most likely from Washington state. A show about nothing One of Brenda Tremblay's most recent reports done exclusively for NPR was also about nothing. Tremblay says she enthusiastically pitched her ideas for the story saying, "it's right up the block, you should see what's happening! Governor Cuomo is going up and down it giving out money to (villages and) towns that upgrade and fix the banks and build facilities for visitors. They're trying to promote it as a tourist attraction." Silence. Then her editor said, "That's not what we want. We want a story about what people do on the Erie Canal." "I said, 'they don't really do anything,' " Tremblay said. "That's the story we want," the editor said. "So, I took my microphone and walked down Main Street in Brockport and went up the stairs where the guys watch for the boats that go through and I started talking to Jim Neal who had been working up there on the bridge for decades." "It turned out to be a fascinating story because at the end of my interview with him he says, 'Oh yeah, these boats keep going all the way to Buffalo, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.' The guy saw himself as a link in this vast waterway stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico. Even today, I never go by that bridge without thinking about that." "Then I walked on and talked to some boaters who were tied up at the dock area in Brockport. One couple had a little dog with them. They said they weren't going anywhere in particular, weren't doing much in Brockport, weren't planning on any sightseeing or other activities." "It was a perfect interview for my story about nothing." To listen to the story log on to: http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1055349. About David Diamond In 1936, he was commissioned to compose the music for a ballet for a scenario based on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" written by poet ee cummings. The collaboration cemented his personal relationship with Cummings and led to a life-long friendship. In 1937, Diamond joined the class of the renowned teacher, Nadia Boulanger, in Paris where he met Igor Stravinsky, Ravel, and many composers and musicians destined for fame. As a young composer, Diamond received an impressive number of awards including the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and a National Academy of Arts and Letters Grant, "in recognition of his outstanding gift among the youngest generation of composers, and for the high quality of his achievement as demonstrated in orchestral works, chamber music, and songs." Diamond became professor of composition at The Julliard School in New York in 1973. He continued to teach there well into the 1990s. In 1995, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in a ceremony at the White House. Diamond lives in Rochester. |
