Weekday afternoon listeners are familiar with Elizabeth Caldwell’s voice with her calm delivery and thoughtful, measured tone. “This is Elizabeth Caldwell, KWGS News.”
But there’s also this certain quality to her voice, something that you can’t quite put your finger on...something enigmatic. A voice that belongs to someone who has lived a life.
Before joining the KWGS news team in 2020, Elizabeth Caldwell had spent time in far corners of the United States and the world.
A Florida-native, Elizabeth joined the Coast Guard after high school and served for four years. Shortly after, Elizabeth attended college in Virginia. She wrote for the university newspaper and upon graduation, moved to Kodiak, Alaska to work as a reporter for a local newspaper.
“So, I moved up to Alaska,” Elizabeth recounts. “It was like this big adventure.”
After some time though, that big adventure on an Alaskan island grew very expensive.
“By my late twenties, I wanted to find a career, so I thought I would be a teacher,” Elizabeth says. “So, I went to Japan.”
So, she went to Japan! There, Elizabeth taught English to Japanese students.
Elizabeth later returned to Florida and continued teaching English, commuting 45 minutes to the school and back. “I would always listen to NPR on my way to work,” Elizabeth says. “I would sit in the car and think, ‘If I could do another job, what would it be?’”
“Then, one day I listened to this podcast that this guy just did at his kitchen table. I thought, ‘You know what? Maybe I could do this.’”
“I bought a little recorder and a microphone, and I did my first project about these men who were hunting pythons in the Everglades because they're an invasive species.”
“I went out there with them and made a story about it,” Elizabeth recounts. “It wasn’t very good.”
After returning to school to finetune her audio-reporting skills, Elizabeth embarked on her first radio job: as a reporter at KWGS in Tulsa, OK.
"I like puzzles and putting things together and finding things out, so it was really a perfect job for me,” Elizabeth says. “From my first job in journalism [in Alaska] to this second daily journalism job, there was a huge gap, so I’ve learned a lot in Tulsa.”
Of all the places Elizabeth has lived, Tulsa is where she chose to settle and buy a house. When on the house hunt, Elizabeth had one very important thing in mind: walkability to work.
“I really don't like cars. I don't understand why we have to own these machines that we don't know how to fix. They're super expensive and dangerous,” Elizabeth says. “It's just nonsense to me.”
When Elizabeth isn’t walking from place to place, you can find her taking care of her two dogs, avoiding work on her new house, reading or playing cards. And if you’re down a player for your poker night, Elizabeth is always game.
You can hear Elizabeth anchoring All Things Considered, weekday afternoons on KWGS 89.5 FM.
