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The Reader’s Notebook
Weekdays (T-TH) at 9:06 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 5:44 p.m.

“The Reader’s Notebook” is a daily radio feature using general interest pieces, often of literary or historic significance. Topics will also include science, technology, philosophy, folklore and the arts.

The series is written and hosted by J. D. Reeder, a retired educator, historian, avid reader and regular writer, director, and performer with the Morehead Theatre Guild.

The segments air weekdays (M-TH) at 9:06 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 5:44 p.m. Each segment will include vignettes about writers, artists and other noteworthy people whose birthdays or other significant events coincide with the date of the program. 

Occasionally, word and phrase origins will be explored, often with a Kentucky connection or include poems and excerpts from other writings associated with the subject of the day.  Each episode will conclude with the phrase: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year,” a quotation from noted American poet and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Theme music for "The Reader's Notebook" provided by Todd Kozikowski ("Shadows of the Moon"/1997).

Podcast Link

  • Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
  • Margaretta Mary Winifred Scott was an English stage, screen and television actress whose career spanned over seventy years. She is best remembered for playing the eccentric widow Mrs. Pumphrey in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small.
  • John Uhler Lemmon III was an American actor. Considered equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to label him as "the most successful tragi-comedian of his age."
  • Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.
  • Aaron Burr was an American politician, businessman, lawyer, and Founding Father who served as the third vice president of the United States from 1801 to 1805 during Thomas Jefferson's first presidential term. He founded the Manhattan Company on September 1, 1799.
  • Frederick, Prince of Wales was the eldest son and heir apparent of King George II of Great Britain. He grew estranged from his parents, King George and Queen Caroline. Frederick was the father of King George III.
  • John Henry O'Hara was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8.
  • Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August, a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
  • English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.
  • Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears as the hero.