Penny Nelson, Longtime KQED-FM Radio Host, Producer And Writer, Dies At 57

By SAM WHITING | San Francisco Chronicle

Penny Nelson was a primatologist working with chimps when she decided she belonged in public radio. She had no previous experience in broadcasting, but she had confidence and enthusiasm and talked her way into a position as guest host on the highly rated “Forum” and “The California Report” on KQED-FM.

Then she decided to become a literary agent for nonfiction authors. Juggling those two jobs and two sons, Nelson managed to still work with the chimps as a volunteer, eagerly making the 30-hour trip about a dozen times over several years.

Buoyant on air and seemingly unsinkable off air, Nelson was doing all of this and maintaining her black belt in aikido when a series of migraines turned out to be glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor considered the deadliest cancer. Nelson survived it for seven years while continuing to work, said her son, Jamie Hindery. But Nelson, a 20-year resident of Palo Alto, died March 19 in her hometown of Hillsboro, Oregon, where she had been under hospice care. She was 57.

“She was a wonderful person, very kindhearted and literate,” said Michael Krasny, the retired longtime host of “Forum.” “She was a great utility infielder because she could do everything at the station and was a welcome pinch hitter for me because she was an intellect, well versed and informed.”

Nelson worked at KQED-FM for 25 years as a news writer, producer and on-air personality. She was so good at it that the Commonwealth Club of California recruited her as an event host.

As a book agent working for Manus Literary & Associates, she was pragmatic. According to a tribute posted by KQED colleague Rachael Myrow, Nelson required prospective clients to make this pledge, to make sure they were in it for the right reasons:

  • I will not be interviewed by Oprah.
  • I will not make the New York Times bestseller list.
  • I will not make a million dollars.
  • I will not be able to quit my job.

Nelson worked only with nonfiction authors, dividing her manuscripts into 25 tote bags she’d haul around to read and try to sell whenever she had a minute.

“Penny was a gentle soul who was almost not aggressive enough for a cutthroat industry like publishing,” said author Debra Fine of Denver. Fine was an unknown talent when Nelson shepherded a complicated two-book deal, with 2003’s “The Fine Art of Small Talk” and “The Fine Art of the Big Talk” published in 2008.

“Her enthusiasm and passion for my project helped make it a success, and she was joyful right along with me,” Fine said. “She made me feel safe and comfortable and protected.”

Elizabeth Penny Nelson was born May 8, 1963, in Portland, Ore. When she was in grade school, her family moved to a farm in neighboring Hillsboro, and that’s where her love of animals took hold. She rode a horse named Don Juan, with two dogs trailing behind, and was as eager for the hay baling and shovel work that went with caring for horses.

At the Catlin Gabel School, she wrote a letter to her idol, primatologist Jane Goodall, for career advice. Goodall wrote back, advising her to start hanging out at her local zoo, which Nelson did, spending after-school hours at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. She bugged staff long enough to get an unpaid job cleaning the enclosures.

“I was a teenager then, and these were some of the best afternoons of my life — berry picking with the chimps — behind the zoo in the woods,” Nelson later wrote on her Facebook page, adding that it “set the trajectory for my whole life (so I don’t know how I got sidelined into the radio business!).”

After graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., in 1985, she was hired to work with the chimpanzees at Zoo Atlanta. She became their best friend, hand-feeding them grapes and seat-belting them into her car for trips to the park, where she’d walk them on leashes.

Nelson ended up in Panama, doing field research on bats for the Smithsonian. She collected dozens of specimens in bottles of formaldehyde, which she later used to decorate her homes throughout the years.

When she returned, she worked a friend-of-a-friend connection to get a job as a researcher for “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross at WHYY in Philadelphia, where she was mostly a tape runner. She still had energy to burn, so she took up the Japanese martial art of aikido, eventually rising to third-degree black belt.

In one training session, she was thrown to the mat with enough force to break her collarbone. When she was taken to the hospital, her attending physician found her so amusing that he asked whether he could introduce her to a friend. That’s how she later came to marry Michael Hindery, a hospital administrator, in 1995.

Hindery took a job with Stanford University Medical Center, and the couple moved to the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto. A contact at WHYY in Philadelphia referred Nelson to KQED in 1995.

“Her natural curiosity was infectious, and she loved people and ideas and really wanted to get to know whomever she was talking with,” said Holly Kernan, chief content officer at KQED, in an email. “She brought a deep humanity to every subject.”

For one of her typical KQED field reports, she got the idea to go out in search of potholes in a rainstorm.

“I don’t know how many more times my car can take that,” she said upon bouncing through one crater to an audible clunk and splash in the segment. “It’s like a video game. When you are driving, you are dodging potholes and chunks of asphalt. It’s crazy.”

When Nelson was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, she was given six to 18 months to live, so she set a goal of seeing her sons, Jamie and Misha, graduate from Palo Alto High. When she achieved that, she set her sights on college, and in 2019, she watched her youngest son, Misha, graduate Santa Clara University.

By then she had long been divorced from Hindery, and during the course of her illness made annual trips to Africa, either to visit her son Jamie, who was teaching there, or on safari, or to work with chimps as a conservation volunteer in Uganda.

During one trip, she and her safari guide, Benson Siyawareva, became a couple. Theirs was a transoceanic relationship that lasted five years.

Her last trip was to Kenya, in February 2020, to visit a friend from her high school days at the Portland Zoo. It was the COVID-19 pandemic, not the cancer, that prevented her from traveling again.

“Penny had this cancer for quite a while and showed a great deal of courage in what she endured,” Krasny said. “She always had a sunny disposition and can only be admired.”

Survivors include her  sons, Jamie Hindery of Palo Alto and Misha Hindery of San Francisco; mother, Paula Nelson; and brothers, Blake Nelson and Drew Nelson, all of Portland.