Up at the crack of dawn. Get the kids up, fed and out the door on time, making sure they know you love them. That’s a daily routine for hundreds of Falls Church residents for most of the year, and if that isn’t enough (with all that goes with it) to constitute a full time job, then it should be.

But that’s where things just get started for so many of us whose lives are defined by the hectic pace of politics in the nation’s capital.

And so it is for one of our relatively new Falls Church residents whose name is already a household word for hundreds of thousands of Americans who tune into the Public Broadcasting System for their nightly news across the land and all the ships at sea.

Tamara Keith moved to the Little City of Falls Church in 2015 and she can’t get enough of it. She adores her new home and neighborhood, as she told the News-Press in an exclusive interview last week. If ever there was one, she is a true believer in everything Falls Church.

“We moved to Falls Church in 2015 and feel so lucky to live here. We love our neighbors and the greater Little City community,” she wrote in a follow up response to a question.

Her family’s two kids are rising 8th and 3rd graders “and we are big believers in FCCPS (Falls Church City Public Schools),” she wrote to us this week. The family home is near Lincoln Park, which she currently describes as “a very frustrating total disaster” because of ongoing renovations. We are confident that assessment is only temporary.

After the kids are off to school, she finds her way to the national headquarters of PBS on N. Capital St. in D.C., unless, of course, she is on a special assignment like when she travelled to China this summer for the president’s latest summit there. She is frequently featured on nightly broadcasts either reporting on a national affairs issue or providing commentary on one or another matter.

If the question is raised, as would be the case for many News-Press readers, how she got to where she is and at such a young age, the answer to that one is a story of the better side of what has made America great.

She is one of those people who was apparently born with a given vocational imperative, or put more simply, a job description. That became apparent as she entered her teenage years. Her parents being educators who wanted out of the big city, they chose to move from giant L.A. to rural Hanford County in the spacious California central valley, when she was a toddler. 

That’s where she grew up and the availability of opportunities there, while maybe more limited than in a metropolis, were nonetheless more accessible to the kind of driven young woman she was.

In the 6th grade, when asked to write an essay on what she wanted to become, she chose a volcanologist (one who studies volcanoes). But that soon changed and the next thing you knew, she was writing a letter to management at National Public Radio (NPR) asking for advice on how to grow up to be like them.

Having been a stringer for the Fresno Bee and Hanford Sentinel, she soon found herself with an opportunity to draft an essay for NPR on the occasion of receiving her high school degree and the rest, as they say, is history.

She attended U.C. Berkeley, majoring in philosophy. Philosophers, she noted, offered ways to reason and to think critically that were not attached to particular contemporary issues, and she liked that. Today, she is developing a podcast called Swing Shift that looks for ways that people can see each other in their shared humanity.

Regardless of party, she noted the system “keeps failing people,” and neither party is speaking to this concern. A key is to treat audiences with respect, she said, and to heal the broken contracts between systems of thinking and people. 

“People are craving authenticity,” she stated. “They don’t want to be depressed. We need to find more creative ways to reach our audiences. We are all human beings, after all.”

She’s been president of the White House Correspondents Association (2022-2023) and enjoyed a year as a special correspondent covering the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.

She is very optimistic about the future of her podcast, which she is preparing for inclusion in NPR’s programming in the coming months. Its key will be to explore understanding that is beyond differences. “All views are valid in their own place,” she said.

Even on those mornings when getting her kids ready for school may prove particularly challenging.