Updated March 04, 2025 at 15:00 PM ET
NPR has lost a friend who helped reporters, producers and editors remember the difference between Monet and Manet, Socrates and Sophocles.
Kee Malesky was a research librarian at NPR for more than 20 years. She died Sunday at the age of 74.
Malesky could tell you why the rockets in the "Star Spangled Banner" had a red glare.
"That's congreve rockets," she told NPR's Scott Simon in 2010. "If you've ever set off a bottle rocket in your backyard on the 4th of July, that's a small version of congreve rocket."
She also told Simon that watermelon is both a fruit and a vegetable.
"It's in the same family as cucumbers and gourds," she said.
Malesky also made sure we pronounced everything correctly.
In 2006, she helped NPR's Alex Chadwick with the pronunciation of a certain Italian city. Was it Turin or Torino?
"It's Turin," Malesky explained. "I did a little survey of other news organizations and discovered NBC and CNN will say Torino, but that most of the print media in the U.S. will say Turin, because that's the AP style."
"But isn't the real name of the city Torino?" Chadwick asked.
"Well, of course it is," Malesky responded. "She explained that some Russians call their capital Moskva, but we've never said that!"
Malesky started in the NPR Broadcast Library in the 1980s before the internet was a thing. NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg said Malesky was Google long before there was a Google.
"I always believed over the years that she knew everything," Stamberg said.
Stamberg said Malesky was not the stereotypical librarian gently shushing the noisy. She had a big personality — so much so that PBS created a fictional movie about her high school years called Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story. Malesky used her library skills like a detective to solve mysteries that intrigued her.
In 2010, Malesky took factoids she picked up while helping NPR reporters and put them into the book All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge.
Among the stories she explored was whether artist Vincent Van Gogh really cut off his own ear.
"German scholars who recently looked at the police reports, think that perhaps his good friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, cut off his ear. But the curator of the Van Gogh Museum is skeptical," Malesky told NPR's Scott Simon.
Kee Malesky left NPR in 2014. She's remembered for her love of facts. And here's an irrefutable one: she will be missed.
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