“For WUNC, I’m Fay Mitchell Henderson.”
I heard this signoff dozens of times as I carried out my duties as the Public Broadcast Preservation Fellow assigned to preserve at-risk media for WUNC, the National Public Radio affiliate serving central and eastern North Carolina.
The majority of the material I captured and digitized was public affairs programming from the 1970s and 1980s, a particularly vulnerable era for open-reel audiotape, thanks to the insidious duo of mold and sticky shed syndrome.
“For WUNC, I’m Fay Mitchell Henderson.”
I could have tuned out this rote signoff based on sheer repetition. But I’m a former journalist, a North Carolinian by choice if not by birth, and a ceaseless researcher always looking for the story within the story.
Instead of tuning out, I tuned in.
Lost and found
As I absorbed hours of in-depth news and features, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was Fay Mitchell Henderson? What was it like to be a young woman working as a journalist in a North Carolina in a period of major transition? Who was this person who interviewed people from all walks of life, asking probing questions about tough issues?
In the early 1990s, her voice disappeared from the recordings, as did the scribbled “FMH” from carefully labeled audiotape boxes. What happened to Fay Mitchell Henderson?
Fast-forward about six weeks. In December 2022, I found myself sitting in a Chapel Hill coffee shop across from the woman herself, now just Fay Mitchell, a youthful retiree filled with energy and stories, and looking forward to her long-dreamed-of trip to Africa in just a few weeks.
Over the course of our two-hour conversation, Mitchell painted a portrait of a scrappy public radio operation in Swain Hall, just steps away from the home of UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism program, from which she graduated in 1976.
In a cramped basement studio, she and her fellow WUNC staff members, including Gary Shivers and Barbara Sheets, were continually battling environmental conditions that weren’t conducive to long-term preservation, such as flooding and poor ventilation.
At the same time, they were producing groundbreaking programming. Mitchell recalled conducting interviews with historian John Hope Franklin, congresswoman Eva Clayton, and scholar Charmaine McKissick, all Black trailblazers in North Carolina.
She also recalled exchanges with Congressman Jesse Helms, a conservative polemicist, and Smedes York, a third-generation land developer in Raleigh. Also of note: an interview with a grand knight of the Ku Klux Klan. Mitchell shrugged when recounting this experience: He was perfectly courteous, he had a point to make, and he made it.
It was all part of the job.
Contextualizing history
I carried this conversation with me throughout the rest of the fellowship.
Inside each tape box, on yards upon yards of magnetic tape, hid more than one story.
Government and politics. Youths and mental health. Abortion and women’s rights. Nuclear energy. Toxic waste. Video games. Flora and fauna in the state’s ecosystem. Dwindling tobacco farms. The Greensboro Massacre – a particularly ugly chapter in North Carolina history. Road and airport development. Cultural and geographic identity. These are some of the stories we hear about on these recordings.
Then there are the stories within these stories. They center on the growing pains of a state that once ran on textile mills and tobacco fields evolving into a business incubator and innovation hub. They capture in real time, without the benefit of hindsight, efforts to grapple with change, to embrace North Carolina’s unique character and handle problems with grace and dignity.
The stories within the stories are why efforts to preserve WUNC programming are so vital.
The race against time
Through the Public Broadcast Preservation Fellowship, we are preserving material of significant historical value that lives on ¼-inch open reel magnetic tapes, an obsolete media format. Eventually, these tapes will be unplayable. The clock is ticking.
In addition to the tactile work of creating high-quality digital copies of WUNC programs, there is the intellectual work of cataloging and describing them fully, so people can locate them online and (hopefully) listen to them. The passage of time allows us to understand public affairs reporting in new ways, and this is reflected in these descriptions. Additionally, through this fellowship, we can strive for a level of detail and precision in archival cataloging that is often difficult to achieve in “real-world” conditions.
Even with the latitude given me during this fellowship, it is challenging work: verifying names, confirming event locations and dates, describing issues and events with clarity and nuance, and all while adhering to the archival standards set forth by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. It’s challenging but gratifying, especially knowing that this effort is a modest contribution to the mighty work of preserving the whole history of public programming in the United States.
Closer to home, I hope that I have done justice to the work of Fay Mitchell, her peers, and her successors, by ensuring that researchers, citizens, journalists, and other seekers can find answers to their questions and delight in discoveries about the North Carolina of decades past – far, far into the future.
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