Her mother was 45 years old when she was born so the happy mom, pleased that the baby was OK, named her O. Kay. That’s the first fascinating anecdote about O. Kay Henderson, news director for Radio Iowa. The second is that politics has been a part of her life since the day she was born —which just happened to be Election Day in 1964. Her father, an election judge, even brought a ballot to her mom in the hospital so that she could vote (a legal practice back then).

“That was my entrance into the world,” Henderson said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Henderson grew up in a politically engaged home, she said, where she watched CBS anchor Walter Cronkite with her parents and often went to Des Moines with them to lobby on farm issues. Her dad, a farmer, was quite active in the Farm Bureau. “I remember going to political events at a very young age,” she said. In fact, she thinks there is a 1967 Des Moines Register photographof her as a toddler on the Senate floor.

Henderson was hooked on politics and radio by the time she got to college. As a sophomore at Iowa State University, she served as a statehouse correspondent for WOI-AM. She used to sit on the balcony and give play-by-play coverage of the legislators’ debates — the original live-blogging as it were.

The first time Henderson was live on the air, the Legislature was debating the legalization of the Iowa lottery system. “My full-time WOI supervisor, who provided primary coverage for the radio station, was out of town at a wedding,” she said. “I was the only one there so I got to go live on the air for six straight hours. … It was a great learning experience because, as you know, debates have long lulls or intervals while decisions are being made on the floor about amendments or the ebb and flow occurs. During those intervals when legislators were not on the floor, I had to fill that time.”

In June 1987, Henderson, having recently graduated college, became one of three founders of the Radio Iowa network newsroom, which is approaching its 20th anniversary; she became news director in 1994.

Henderson said that she liked radio as a medium more than newspapers or television. “I enjoy radio because the voices of news reporters paint a word picture in your mind and convey emotions in a way that quotes in a newspaper story can’t [do],” she said. “And in television, one gets lost in the pictures,and often the words float away to Pluto and no one can digest them.”

She called radio “a great joining of words and audio to paint those word pictures” and furthermore, “it was something I was good at.” Plus,“I just found that I had an affinity for it.”

Along with the job, technology has changed over the years. “I started on a manual typewriter,” she said. Now she uses a computer and digital recording for her sound work. “The transformation of the industry in which I work has been remarkable from a technological point of view.”

That change is also evident in the fact that Henderson, like others in the Iowa mainstream media, has a blog. “I enjoy blogging,” she said. “It gives me an outlet for telling people the rest of the story that I’m not able to tell them in 40-50 seconds on the radio. It allows me to sort of take people on the roller-coaster ride that is covering a political campaign.”

She finds blogging similar to her childhood when she would tell her parents what happened at school that day. “I imagine I’m sitting down with my parents and explaining them the pageantry, the verbiage, the whole package,” she said. “Painting a word picture for them.”

Henderson said she reads a lot of national and Iowa blogs. She mentioned Ben Smith’s and Jonathan Martin’s blogs at The Politico. She said “of course” she reads ABC’s The Note, as well as the New York Times blog, the Hotline blog and Time magazine'sblog. “I basically consume as much of the stuff that’s out there,” she said. “When I read blogs or read stories, what I’m trying to find out is the context of the campaign. And that’s what I try to bring to the listeners. I try to provide them context. These events don’t happen in a vacuum.”

She also mentioned several Iowa blogs she read, though she said she feared she had left some out. She said she used to read Krusty Konservative. She reads Bleeding Heartland, as well as John Deeth’s Blog and Political Forecast by Chris Woods; the latter two currently write for Iowa Independent.

Henderson is one of the top reporters in her field; she also happens to be one of the limited number of women covering politics nationwide. “Obviously it’s something that professional organizations talk about,” she said. “I talk about it with my peers.” Still, she said,the number of female political reporters is increasing, at least in Iowa. Only two female reporters covered the Iowa statehouse when she started, but now most of the legislative reporters here are women, she said.

Henderson said she's grateful her parents let her choose her own path. “I was born when my dad was 52, and it’s very unusual for someone in his generation to encourage a daughter in the ways he did,” she said. “I showed cattle. There were never any gender roles laid out. I think I was lucky that I was encouraged to pursue whatever career I chose. It just so happens that I chose a career in politics.”