Little Piston Illuminates Big Picture: NPR's Positive Story

"No rant, no rage, no hype" says a self-promo at National Public Radio, and that sums up about half of the reason I listen to NPR. The network's amiable staff also work hard to find positive human angles on the stories of the day.

Boy, did I need to hear Morning Edition's airing of "The Parable of the Piston" from NPR's Planet Money podcast.

To get a handle on the world-wide effort to combat this pandemic, reporters Kenny Malone and Karen Duffin looked at one tiny piece that will go into the hundreds of thousands of ventilators that must be produced over the next few weeks, and one man involved in that effort, Todd Olson.

[Photo: The piston. From the Twitter feed of NPR's Planet Money podcast.]

We first hear Olson in his apology. "I've been working till about 10, 11 o'clock at night, so you might just have to make me work till midnight." CEO of Twin City Die Castings Company, he's used to more predictable hours, making car parts for GM and Ford.

Then he received a call from GM to join in nationwide effort to supply some 700 different parts that go into a single ventilator. He was eager join a life-saving mission called "Project V" (for "Ventilator"), joking that the name made him feel "like James Bond."

For the reporters, he explained the technical considerations to make a mold for these small integral parts, and the risk if the measurements were off by a fraction of a millimeter. As the reporters recorded him, he described the very first piston off the assembly line. He's ecstatic when it works. Then we hear...

OLSON: Well, those are the first piston parts for Project V - part of history right now. I'm going to get out of their way here. They've got some work to do. And...

MALONE: OK. How are you feeling right now?

OLSON: I'm feeling awesome. This is pretty cool. We've been in business a hundred years, and this might well be our biggest moment in a hundred years.

MALONE: That is quite a statement, Todd.

OLSON: Yep.

So, that little piece of history fits into the big picture of hundreds of thousands of people behind the front lines of the battle against the pandemic. NPR and our local station WABE have been playing us interviews with a truck driver proud of carrying loads of sanitizer and paper products where they're needed, and a nurse who understands why people "part like oil on water" when he steps into the grocery store wearing his (clean) scrubs. These are alleviating my anxiety and weariness with bad news.

Addendum: A few days later, NPR's Here and Now featured a music critic's classical picks for pick-me-ups, all from Russia. After some Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, she played Stravinsky's Firebird. After some percussive early parts of the ballet, she skipped to the finale, when "this solo horn rises from the orchestra." I started to tear up. As the music swelled, the interviewer Robin Young narrated what she imagined, everyone's throwing open their windows and coming out into the warmth, COVID-19 gone. I was sobbing. Does any other radio station do that? Nah. (And, of course, thank you, Stravinsky.)

Other recent responses to stories on NPR:

• "Trans Eye for a Bible Guy" (03/2020) appreciates an episode of It's Been a Minute featuring Sam Sanders' interview with the author of "Dear Prudence" program about the observation that the Bible is full of people who are, in a way, "trans."
• "Look into Residente" (03/2020) reports on Maria Hinajosa's extensive interview with this Puerto Rican hip-hop artist on her wonderful program Latino USA.
• "Christmas Present: Rosemary Clooney on Fresh Air" (12/2019) responds to a re-broadcast of a wonderful on-stage interview between Terry Gross and the famous singer in the late 1990s.