Diamonds in the Dung Heap

By Don Gonyea

Published May 21, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

Maurice Crane, director of the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University since 1974.

G. Robert Vincent began recording voices in 1912 at the home of president Teddy Roosevelt. He went on to amass the nation's largest private collection of recordings of the famous and the not so famous.

Maurice Crane presides over a vast repository of the recorded voice. He's the curator of the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Reporting for Lost and Found Sound, NPR's Don Gonyea took the tour of the library and learned about the collection and the collector. The original collection was bequeathed by Robert Vincent; Crane has increased the tapes and records there 20 fold.

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Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

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