From a Washington Post story by Paul Farhi headlined “The windfall that transformed NPR 20 years ago”:

On a fall day 20 years ago, Kevin Klose got a phone call from a man named Dick Starmann. Klose, then president of NPR, knew Starmann as a top adviser to the widow of Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s into a global fast-food juggernaut. But he had no idea what was afoot.

“Are you sitting down?” Starmann asked Klose.