Classy with Jonathan Menjivar · Pineapple Street Studios and Audacy

A Classy (and Uncomfortable) Laugh with Terry Gross

June 21, 2023·35 min·3 clips

A producer touches Jonathan's thrift-store sweater and asks if it's cashmere, revealing his class discomfort at Terry Gross's radio show.

Jonathan Menjivar opens by describing his early years as a radio aspirant — working temp jobs in Chicago while building audio stories at home, eventually landing at WHYY in Philadelphia to work for Terry Gross after earning $12,000 freelancing in 2005. He describes Fresh Air as radio grad school, a place where he felt voices flowing through him as he edited tape. But the environment also produced a new class anxiety: not about money, since public radio paid little, but about shared cultural taste. A colleague pinching his thrift-store acrylic sweater and asking if it was cashmere becomes a symbol for this gap. Jonathan describes mimicking the people around him — reading The New Yorker, buying a designer shirt — and eventually, without realizing it, catching Terry Gross's distinctive laugh and snort. His wife Hillary is the one who notices. Jonathan frames this as going too far in the attempt to fit in. Terry's backstory begins in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, a working-class Jewish neighborhood where her father sold hat-making materials and her mother had been a secretary. Terry wanted out — she knew few women in her neighborhood who had jobs outside traditional women's professions. She attended the University at Buffalo, where she became an aspiring hippie, tried to model herself on disengagement, briefly fantasized about communes in Vermont, and eventually concluded none of that was really her. She briefly worked as a teacher, was fired, and then found public radio by volunteering at a Buffalo station called WBFO. She describes radio as giving her a literal voice and feeding her interest in books, ideas, and the women's movement. She hosted Fresh Air's local Philadelphia version starting in 1975, earning $10,000 a year, which felt like an enormous sum. The show went national in 1987. Jonathan asks whether Terry is aware of her role as a national tastemaker. She says yes and no, and reveals she monitors Twitter under an alias to see how the show registers. On her own class position, Terry says she drives a dented 2009 Hyundai Elantra and lives in a small house full of books and vinyl. When Jonathan tells Terry about the snort, she offers the explanation that he simply listened to a lot of her tape and people naturally mirror sounds they hear repeatedly. She also deflects the class framing by noting geography and generational context, before acknowledging she might be in denial. Jonathan pushes back gently and says the class element was real for him, that he talked differently than his parents and there was now a disconnect between them. Terry accepts Jonathan's account and says she feels bad for having been unaware, and Jonathan closes by saying Fresh Air gave him the tools to become who he wanted to be.

As heard by us

A thoughtful portrait of Terry Gross that treats radio craft as something earned, not just a backdrop.

This piece follows Terry Gross by way of the jobs, tape work, and freelance grind that shaped her before Fresh Air settled into place in Philadelphia. The old broadcasts and studio memories give it a lived-in feel.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for Terry Gross's radio origin story and the making of Fresh Air.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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