Month: January 2019

A few years before he was an Illinois state senator, long before he became a U.S. Senator and years before the nation elected him our first African-American president, Barack Obama was a law professor and community organizer.

…and the author of a book about his Kenyan father.

Barack Obama was born to a Kenyan father and an American mother in 1961, but his parents divorced when he was two years old.

Obama has said his father was little more than a myth to him, at the time of the elder Obama’s death in 1982.

Just before he went off to law school, Barack Obama traveled to Kenya to learn more about his father, and to try and put some perspective on his mixed-race heritage.

The result was his book “Dreams From My Father,” first published in 1995.

Although the book was biographical in tone, our future president blended his story with the politics of race in America:

“I certainly think that you have to know where you’ve been if you want to know
where you’re going. For someone who comes out of a family and a background that’s both black and white, that’s an especially important process that one has to go through.

“We live in a land of strangers. Blacks and whites don’t know each other, they don’t know their stories very well. Within my own family, even in the best-meaning family, there’s a tremendous scope for misunderstanding, for suspicion, for fear. Until I understood what those fears were,what those hopes were, and what those dreams were, I think I was destined to — potentially, at least — repeat some of the mistakes that my parents and grandparents had made.”

I responded: “All of that, decades after Dr. King and the civil rights movement. This seems almost incredible to me, at times, to think that this is all the progress we’ve been able to make?”

“Well, you know, it is frustrating, I think. I talk a lot in the book about my attempts to renew the dream that both of my parents had. I worked as a community organizer in Chicago, [and] was very active in low-income neighborhoods working on issues of crime and education
and employment, and seeing that in some ways certain portions of the African-American community are doing as bad, if not worse, and recognizing that my fate remained tied up with their fates. That my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country.

“Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifces, and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifces necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.”

When I interviewed him in 1995, Barack Obama had just turned 34 years old, and had never held elected office. But he was a skilled, persuasive and engaging interviewee — and a similarly gifted author.

“You know, I tell the story – just to take one of the clearest examples – of my grandmother, who loves me dearly and has made all kinds of sacrifices on my behalf, expressing at one point when I was a teenager her fear of black men on the streets. To discuss that honestly, and to discuss how that felt, to discuss how my grandmother felt, and then to be able to arrive at some sort of peace with that, some greater understanding and some forgiveness, I think was probably the most difficult part of writing it.”

“What was toughest was writing honestly and truthfully about the suspicions and hurts and failings of the people closest to me, and writing about those same failings and disappointments and blind spots in myself. I think whenever we talk about race there are all kinds of issues we’d like to skirt.

Now fast forward to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for President. I posted this interview on my website Eye on Books — and a few weeks later, was surprised to hear sound bites from it on the radio — on the Rush Limbaugh show. It turns out a conservative blogger had re-edited my interview to take certain phrases and nuances out of context, Rush heard it, and ran with it.

I suppose that could have been labeled “fake news.”

if you ever get frustrated or depressed thinking about the high hopes you had for your career, the career that appears to be going off in a completely different direction than you had in mind, remember what happened to a boy from New York who had a vision for his career, too.

It took him to a place he never imagined — and he changed the world.

By 1991 when i met and interviewed him, Stan Lee was a legend. Almost royalty.

The Stan Lee – Marvel Comics story went back decades.

“I think it was about 1939 or ’40, when I was just a stripling right out of high school.”

“Did you have any inkling at all of what was to come?” I askwed.

“None at all. I thought it would be a temporary job, which is why I changed my name. I wasn’t born Stan Lee. I can’t picture anybody being born Stan Lee. People would say to me, Stan Lee what? And I’m thinking of changing my last name to What, so when they ask me that, I can say, you’re right,and that’ll really throw ’em a curve. My name used to be Stanley Martin Lieber, a regular, normal name. And I always wanted to write that great American novel, and when I went to work for a comicbook company I didn’t want to use my name for these lowly comics. So I cut my first name in half — Stan Lee. But as the years went by, and I stayed there, everybody knew me as Stan Lee and finally it was easier to change my name legally, so I’m now Stan Lee, which is a very stupid name but I’m stuck with it.”

In fact Stan Lee never did write that great American novel. In fact his writing career didn’t seem to be going anywhere near the direction he’d hoped it would.

“I used to be embarrassed working in comics when I first started. My wife and I would go to a cocktail party and people would walk over and say, What do you do? And I would say, I’m a writer, and I would try to get away, but they would follow. What do you write? And I would still try to be evasive: well, stories for youngsters in magazines. What magazines?

And eventually, I would have to say ‘comicbooks,’ and they would avoid me like the plague after that. Now, of course,it’s totally different. At a pary, they see me, they push past Dan Quayle and Steven Spielberg and Secretary Baker. ‘There’s Stan Lee of Marvel’! Things have changed, obviously.

And here’s how Stan Lee and Marvel transformed a medium once the exclusive domain of children into something much richer:

“When we started changing comicbooks by making them, I like to think, more intelligent, we started using college-level and above vocabulary. I mean, if we want to use a word like misanthropic, or cauterize, we do. And we don’t worry about the reader, because weknow they learn what the word means through the use in the sentence, or if they have to look it up in the dictionary that’s not the worst thing that can happen.

“I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with parents who have said, We don’t understand it. We used to tell little Johnny not to read comics, and he did badly in English. Suddenly he’s been reading Marvel comics and now he’s getting A grades in Englsih.n W don’t understand it, but we’re delighted. And it’s been happening all over.”

And soon those childish comicbooks were finding a whole new — and, it turns out, exceedingly loyal — audience:

“When we started Marvel Comics, what with our college-level vocabulary, with the addition of some philosophy, satire, and more involved plots, better characterization, more realistics dialogue, we began to attract high school kids, and then college kids. For a period of fifteen years, from 1965 to about 1980 or so, I think I lectured in this country more than anybody else. I never went to less than two colleges a week, 52 weeks a year. And it was always talking about Marvel and the audiences got bigger and bigger.

“And one thing I noticed; these audiences that were really interested in Marvel comics, and comics in general, they were usually the more intelligent students. They were the ones studying literature, psychology, philosophy, science, And there were many, many teachers, also. And as I get older, the professors get younger. Sometimes I couldn’t tell the professors from the students! They dressed the same, with their little beards, their crewneck sweaters. You know, I’d be talking to a guy and say, what are you studying, son? [He’d say] Well, I teach philosophy.

Is there a competition between, say, Spiderman and Superman? Between Marvel’s superheroes and DC’s?

“Theoretically, yes, they are competitors, but our real competition .. it’s like the game of golf, where you’re supposed to compete against yourself. We compete against outselves. We’re always trying to top the last story we did. We do outsell the competition and we look at our own sales figures and figure, if we sold a million copes if this last month, maybe can sell a million and 100 thousand this month.

“The biggest problem we have .. you see, Marvel turns out, believe it or not, over a hundred separate titles every month. Month after month, a hundred new issues go out. The biggest problem we have is coming up with new ideas. How do we keep it fresh? How do we not get into cliches and stereotypes? So we almost don’t have time to worry about the competition.We’re just always working on our own product and trying to embellish it, trying to add new surprises, trying to put something in that’s going to keep the readers coming back.

And you know how much money some of those old, original Marvel comicbooks can fetch.

“It doesn’t surprise me, it frustrates me because I have never had the intelligence to save these old comics. we used to give these comics away. We gave the original artwork away. We never suspected it would ever have any value. So I’m one of the few people who doesn’t have any of the old books at all, and I hate to even talk about it ’cause it upsets me.”

Stan Lee passed away on November 12th, 2018. He was 95.

You may know him best as Helmsman Hikaru Sulu on “Star Trek,” or as an author or activist or wildly popular r and widely quoted and retweeted internet commentator.

As a small boy, however, actor George Takei was a political prisoner.

And if not for the actions of one man, we might have never heard of George Takei.,

“I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps.”

George Takei was a boy of four when the Japanese empire attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War Two. The U.S. government ordered Japanese-Americans into internment camps, and the Takei family of California was among those taken into custody.

“The problem America had was drawing that distinction between American citizens of Japanese ancestry and the Japanese nation, with which we were at war. Now, it didn’t happen with the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans, with whom we were also at war, because they didn’t look as different as Japanese-Americans did. So we were rounded up at gunpoint and forcibly taken to those camps.”

Two men saved George Takei, as he told me in 1994 — one was his father, whose guidance and belief in the ideals of the American system sustained him.

The other was a lawyer you’ve probably never heard of….

“My mother, in outrage, had renounced her American citizenship. She was born in Sacramento, California, she was an American citizen by virtue of her birth. But she was so outraged by the betrayal of America’s ideals by this country that she said, I am not a part of this. I’m not party to this. And we were in a camp where all this radical activity was going on. It was a very politically intense and coercive climate that led to my mother’s renunciation of her American citizenship.

“One man took on the case of these people that had renounced their American citizenship,a civil rights attorney named Wayne Collins. And I owe who I am today to this one man and his courage and his dedication to the ideals of the Constitution. If he hadn’t stepped in to fight for us, for my mother and her cause, we would have been on a boat headed for Japan in November of 1945.

Wayne Collins prevented that from happening. If he hadn’t, then I could be the same flesh and blood, I could be this me that you see in front of you, but I wouldn’t find my identity in in my name ‘George’ Takei. I probably wouldn’t be speaking with you in English.I probably wouldn’t hold the values and ideals and principles that I do. But for that man I am George Takei and who I am today.

Would you have been an actor, I asked?

“I don’t think that might have changed. However, my surroundings, circumstances, conditions might have been quite different. Yeah, it’s tantalizing, isn’t it? If Wayne Collins had not stepped in, America or the world may have been saved this actor! ”

After the war, it was tough for the talented George Takei to find any acting roles that were not severely stereotypical roles. That is, until he had a meeting with Gene Roddenberry, who was casting for his new TV show called “Star Trek.”

“He called me George ‘tah-KIGH,’ which is not an uncommon mispronunciation of my name. I told him that is a legitimate Japanese word which translates into English as ‘expensive.’ He immediately decided, no, he didn’t want to call me Mr. ‘tah-KIGH,’ and I told him that the proper pronunciation of my name, George ‘tah-KAY,’ rhymes with ‘okay.’ And he enthusiastically agreed that Takei was okay, and it was definitely not going to be ‘tah-KIGH.'”

And to this day millions of people — even thosed who don’t remember “Star Trek” — still consider George Takei “okay.”

In April of 1982, Great Britain went to war with Argentina, over a few islands claimed by both nations. The Falkland Islands War lasted 74 days, and ended with a British victory.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led her nation to that military victory.

Three months later, in the fall of 1982, my second daughter, Krystsl, was born.

Eleven years later the two of them finally met.

It was a gray, chilly and rainy Saturday in November, 1993 in Washington, D.C. when I met Margaret Thatcher.

I have to admit, I was in awe of the leader known the world over as “The Iron Lady.”

She’d written the first volume of her memoirs, a hefty book called “The Downing Street Years.”

“I was at Downing Street for eleven and a half years. They were exciting years. They were years when we restored Britain’s economy we restored her reputation in the world, we were instrumental in helping bring the Cold War to an end. The reunification of Germany happened in that time, which affected Europe very much. They really were astonishing years.”

By the way, it was actually the old Soviet Union’s official new s agency Tass that first used the term “Iron Lady”

“I think it was a right description! I had to be. It’s interesting, it was a description that was applied to me before I came into government. I’d made a very firm speech about the need for strong defensed against the Soviet Union. And they dubbed me the ‘Iron Lady.’ I think they, perhaps, got it right.”

Thatcher was a close friend and political ally of President Ronald Reagan — and she was very proud of what they were able to accomplish:

“Had we said at the beginning — for example, when Ron Reagan won the election in 1980 and I in 1979 — look, we’re going to be so firm and we think we’ll get to know what makes Russia tick, that in ten years, eleven or twelve years, you will see whole of Russia, the whole part of the Soviet Union collapses, and the Cold War come to an end, East European nations be free, people would have looked at us and said, you’re scatty! But it happened.”

And, like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher had a sharp wit:

I said, “In your book, you do explain that you had a wonderful retort for those who asked you all th male interviewers that you are not still getting that question on this book tour.”

“No,” she replied. “I haven’t had it at all. I said in answer to that question, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t experienced the alternative.”ose years what it felt like to be a woman prime minister. I hope, on behalf of my fellow American

Margaret Thatcher was also keenly aware of the history that surrounded her every day she went to work:

“And I used to sometimes walk around it with American visitors, very conscious that some wrong decisions had been taken in that house with regard to the colonies. And I used to say to some of my visitors, you know, if there had been a woman then, in 1776, I’m sure it would have been handled ver much better than it was, and all of history might have been changed.“

Now, let me tell you about that meeting between Margaret Thatcher and my daughter Krystal.

I always felt that it was a valuable experience for both of my daughters — Krissie and her older sister Jennie — for me to bring them with me on certain days when I was going to meet an important personality. They’ve met Jimmy Carter and Dan Rather and Alex Trebek and William Shatner. I’ll tell the story of Reba McEntire someday soon here on Now I’ve Heard Everything.

So on that gray rainy Saturday, Krissie and I arrived at DC’s historic Henley Park Hotel. We made our way upstairs to Mrs. Thatcher’s suite, and the introductions were made. Mrs. Thatcher was genuinely pleased to meet my 11 year old and greeted her with a warm smile.

Now, my mistrust of the batteries in my cassette recorder led to one of the most magical moments of my life.

The whole concept of battery power is so you don’t have to plug in a device. But because I didn’t want to take any chance of losing this very important interview, I wanted to plug it into a wall socket.

The Henley Park is an old historic hotel, and finding an outlet proved a little more challenging than I had expected. I finally found one behind some heavy drapes.

And as I turned back around, I saw Mrs. Thatcher, engaged in sweet conversation with Krissie. Picture this: the Prime Minister, the Iron Lady, bent slightly at the waist as she leans gently forward to engage with my daughter.

Krissie now recalls: “I was so in awe of what was happening, and the fact that person was real in front of me. You kind of talked her up. When you told me she was a prime minister, I’m like, I don’t know what that means. So I didn’t understand the level of her until I saw all these people, like the things in their ears and everything. I’m like, this is weird. I was probably just too shocked to even remember what she said.”

Now, a few years later, when she was in high school, Krissie had occasion to tell the story:

“They brought up Margaret Thatcher, and I said, I’ve met her. And they’re like, no you didn’t! And the teacher was like, no you .. we need to get back to class. And I kept laughing, no, I really did [meet her]. The teacher was like, you need to stop. This is inappropriate. Then later on, after they realized .. there was no Google back then, but word got around. I guess maybe Mom talked to someone who talked o someone, and everyone after that was like, You’ve met famous people?! But, yeah, I got in trouble for meeting Margaret Thatcher!”

Oh, and one more thing — that was the day Krissie launched her own inyerviewing career. She interviewed me:

My only regret from that day? I didn’t bring a camera. But in 1993, nobody was doing selfies.

One of the greatest figures in the history of the music business in America was not, himself, a musician.

But when he sat down before a radio microphone his power to engage and entertain helped promote countless musicians to the prominence they enjoyed.

Wolfman Jack, he called himself. The Wolfman, who rose to broadcast stardom on a simple premise: give the people great music.

So why did I have to ask him that one fateful question?

-------------------------

Wolfman Jack was born Robert Weston Smith in 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. When he was a child his parents divorced, and his dad bought him a radio to try to keep him out of trouble.

The music he heard on that radio changed his life.

“When Alan Freed originally came on the air, he had a Cleveland show where he played nothing but rhythm and blues. And I’m talking about, he went back and got the old stuff. And this old Minnie Smith record that she sang, ‘I’m gonna rock you, baby, I’m gonna roll you all night long.’ Well, he tookd the ‘rock’ and ‘roll’ of that.

“I remember when Elvis came out with his first record, Heartbreak Hotel. He was probably the only white artist on the whole program. It was quite unusual to have a white artist doing rock and roll back in those days, you know?”

“And he went on this big, powerful station in New York, WINS, and called himself Moondog. He had all the Moondoggies out there. And he called it rock and roll, but he was really playing rhythm and blues.

Young Bob Smith knew that he wanted to be on thr radio, too. But. that would have to come later.

“When I was a kid I did a lot of door to door selling. Sold encyclopedias, and I sold Fuller brushes. It was my big thing. I could sell a lot of brushes. You knock on the door: ‘Hello, this is your friendly Fuller Brush man. I’ve got a gift for you!’

“I remember this one time, this lady came to the door, and she had one of these negligee kind of bathrobes, and she stood there at the door ane gave me big smile – and all of a sudden it dropped to the floor and she was nekkid! Nekkid standing right there in front of me, just a young boy.

“‘Yeah, I’m a Fuller Brush guy, how you doing?’ And she said, ‘Come on in. I want you to meet my friends.’I walked in, and all her friends were nekkid! They were doin’ snarlin’s and stuff like that, and rippin’ off things, you know? I said, ‘Well, it’s real nice, I guess you guys don’t need any brushes.”

Eventually he did get that radio job, and became a legend. So much so, that when George Lucas was making a movie about the early ’60s, he called Wolfman to come and be a part of “American Graffiti”….

“I woke up, I remember, on a Monday morning and they told me they wanted me to go down to Universal Studios to put me in a movie. I said, wow! And I went down there, and it was George Lucas sitting behind a desk in this old trailer. George said, ‘Listen, I want you to kiij at this script.’ I opened it up. and Wolfgman was on every page.

“I said, ‘George, you probably think I got money, right? And you want me to help you finance this picture?’ I said, ‘I sure appreciate it, man, but I ain’t that wealthy.’ ‘No, we want tyou to be in the movie, Wolfman. We want you in the picture. You’re a vital force in this movie.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you very much.’

“I think the deal was like, $3.000. I did the scene with Richard Dreyfuss. Never got to meet the other folks, Harrison Ford and those people. Never met them. Still to this day I’ve never met ’em.”

That brings us to June 30th, 1995, the day I met and interviewed Wolfman Jack./ He was 57 years old, but I remember that he looked pale and rather pasty that day. I didn’t give it that much thought at the time.

That was a Friday. That weekend I kind of unplugged from the news, so I had no idea what my workmates were talking about, come Monday morning.

“Bill, what did you do to Wolfman?” they said, asking in that sly voice that implies some kind of wrongdoing or misdeed on my part.

“What do you mean, what did I do to him? ” I said. “I interviewed him.” I was still clueless — until one of my co-workers piped up.

“You know he died, right?”

“What?!?”

It turns out that a few hours after our interview, Wolfman did his usual Friday night oldies radio show, then went home. He got out of his car, suffered a heart attack, and died in his own driveway.

And then it occurred to me. Mine must have been his last interview. A quick phone call to his media escort confirmed it. I was, indeed, the last person to interview him.

Then, in the next instant, my own heart stopped for a moment as I remembered one of the questions I had asked him during that interview:

“I always wonder, when somebody comes in whose life story has taken them that positive road when they could just as easily have gone the negative way. have burned out, maybe even been dead by now. Why aren’t you dead by now?”

Yes, you heard that right. Just hours before his untimely death, I asked the great, the legendary, the seemingly immortal Wolfman Jack why he’s still around…

“I don’t know. I guess the Lord loves me and wants to keeo me around to take care of His children, because I seem to be able to convince people to have a good time and be able to do the things they like to do in a positive way.”

Now, I’m not necessarily superstitious, but it was a long time before I asked anyone else that question.

I didn’t, after all, want to become known as the serial-killing interviewer.