David Isay was starting out in medical school, wandering through New York's Greenwich Village one day, when he happened upon a storefront museum of drug addiction, run by husband-and-wife ex-junkies.
Isay had never been a reporter, but he knew this was a story waiting to be told. He called every TV station in town and got nowhere. He called every radio station; same result. Except at the tiny, volunteer-run, left-wing Pacifica Radio station, where the news director told Isay to get a tape recorder and do the story himself.
He did. It got on the news. A traveling producer from National Public Radio happened to hear it and picked it up for national broadcast. David Isay was 22 and he had just found himself a career and a calling.
A decade later, Isay is the conscience and the sizzle of radio storytelling. He operates on his own out of New York City, producing half-hour nonfiction dramas that could not exist in any other medium. The voices in Isay's pieces reach out and grab you. Surrounded by the lush, sometimes grating sounds of places and people you can barely believe still exist, Isay's characters are the underdogs, the edgy loners and lost souls who populate the best novels. But they are real, and Isay has somehow persuaded them to tell their tales.
Isay's latest gem will be broadcast Friday on NPR's "All Things Considered," which occasionally hands the independent producer half an hour to do his thing. This one, "The Sunshine Hotel: Last of the Bowery Flops," is narrated by Nathan Smith, the gravel-voiced manager of a skid row flophouse where undesirables and incorrigibles find shelter for $4.50 a night.
It's a startling story, and that alone is remarkable in a time in which the explosion of news and pseudo-news media has hardened us against surprise. But that is Isay's gift, and whether he is documenting the story of Joe Franklin, the ancient New York TV and radio variety show host; or that of Dan Field, a Jewish matchmaker in Manhattan; or that of LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, the Chicago teenagers who chronicled their lives on the streets of the South Side in "Ghetto Life 101," Isay takes his listeners on journeys brimming with heart and cleansed of cynicism.
Doing so takes a lot of time, enormous patience and an openness that is immediately apparent to anyone who meets Isay. He looks like an earnest, gentle med student; he is the son of a psychiatrist, a Connecticut prep school kid who moved to New York at age 15 and became intrigued by the city and its characters.
