Remembering the life and work of NPR correspondent Ina Jaffe

NPR

Even if you were only half-listening to the radio, you always knew when NPR correspondent Ina Jaffe was on the air. Ina's rich alto voice made you listen — whether she was reporting on politics, a high profile criminal trial, or, toward the end of her career, describing the advances in aging for a beat she created because she saw the need for it.

She had been open about living with cancer the past few years. She died Thursday, with her husband Lenny Kleinfeld at her side. She was 75.

Ina had written about her experience with the disease with the same matter-of-fact approach she applied to her news stories. That’s how Ina was. Most of her colleagues will tell you Ina was a reporter’s reporter.

“She's very tough, “ said Renee Montagne, former Morning Edition host. She and Ina were friends and colleagues in NPR's Western Bureau in Southern California for decades.

Ina, she said, was a strong believer in accuracy.

“She was a tough journalist in the classic way,” Renee says. “She wanted you to tell her the truth and she wanted to get it right. She's an example for everybody.”

That insistence on getting it right led to tough questions for elected officials at all levels, and myriad public servants who wished Ina had been a little less exacting in her coverage of them.

Although she sounded as if she’d rolled out of the womb with a microphone in hand, Ina actually had another career before coming to NPR. Scott Simon, an old friend and host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, recalls he first met Ina when NPR opened its Chicago bureau in the late 1970s.

“I had not met her but I certainly had heard about her before that day,” says Scott. “She was part of the old Organic Theater group. She and her husband, Lenny Kleinfeld, had been part of that group, and I don't think she'd mind my mentioning it, but in one Mamet-ian play, she did a worthy scene with no clothes on!”

And Ina did that scene like she did her reporting: very matter-of-factly. No discomfort, it was what the job required, just do the job.

Jacki Lyden is a former NPR correspondent, and one of Ina's best friends. She says when Ina expressed an interest in working at NPR, she wondered initially whether the actor could make the jump from theater to hard news. Jacki soon realized she didn't need to worry: Ina's gift for dramatic narrative was a transferable skill.

“She knew that stories were real, as with the theater about putting on a show,” says Jacki. “Ina was an actor, and NPR was the stage, and she rang the curtain down all the way to becoming the aging correspondent.”

As NPR's correspondent on aging in America, Ina told stories about people’s experiences growing older with no cuteness or condescension.

And she supported everyone in their own searches to get it right. Fellow Chicagoan Sonari Glinton sat near Ina at NPR West in Culver City, Calif., for years. He covered the car industry and made national news when he reported on a Volkswagen scandal: the company had tinkered with its new diesel models to make the mileage artificially high. An angry VW publicist called to complain and Sonari says Ina overheard him trying to reason with the publicist.

“And she got up from her desk, walked around and said, 'Don't apologize for doing your job.' That is the thing I value most. The number of times she said ’Don't ask that question again,’ ‘Don't apologize for being a journalist. That's what I value about Ina as a friend and as a colleague,” Sonari says.

And there was no doubt she knew how to do her job. In 2011, Ina discovered that a large part of the Veterans Administration's West Los Angeles Medical Center campus was being leased to several businesses that had nothing to do with serving vets. That was land that was supposed to house some of the scores of homeless vets who were haunting the 400-acre campus.

Ina broke a series of stories that changed policy.

“They built housing in part because of the attention that got drawn to the Veterans Administration because of the work that Ina did over the years,” Sonari says.

That work, as well as other unrelated stories on her beat, won several awards. Not that you could see them on her desk — a legendary mess of notebooks, pens, half-drunk cups of tea and her beloved Chicago Cubs stuff — a pennant, stickers, you name it.

Scott Simon has a favorite memory of Ina from 1983, the night Harold Washington became Chicago's first Black mayor. Ina had covered Washington's campaign and was at his packed campaign headquarters, trying to reach the stage so she could set up her mic before the mayor-elect arrived for his victory party. At barely 5 feet tall, moving through that crowd was going to be a challenge.

“Suddenly somebody got the idea and said 'you know, we can lift you over there.’ And Ina was lifted off the ground by Harold Washington supporters and she was passed, hand over hand by friendly hands, over this crowd to be able to get to the podium and plug in her cable for the mic box,” says Scott. “And it was just a rapturous moment: all these happy, celebrating people! Ina, who knew just how to handle it, smiling down at the crowd, thanking them, slapping palms. I will just never forget her smile, from within this sea of hands and friendly shoulders. I'll just never forget her.”

I like thinking that a sea of hands and friendly shoulders is helping Ina on her next part of her journey, somewhere. And you can bet: she still won't be apologizing to anyone for doing her job.