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How do you interview a genius?

Well, for one thing, you don’t try to keep up with him, you just toss him what you hope are good questions .. then just sit back and enjoy the answers.

Such describes my first interview with the great Douglas Adams.

His fans dubbed him DNA — Douglas Noel Adams.

Born in 1952 in Cambridge, England, Adams became a radio and television writer after studying at St. John’s College.

But when his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was published in 1979, his career skyrocketed.

I first spoke with Douglas Adams in 1987 about his book “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.”

“I decided one day I was going to write a detective story, then I thought, no actually what I want to do is write a ghost story, and I particularly wanted to do the ghost story because I wanted to tell a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost, who always gets the bad press. Then I thought, no actually what I want to write is a computer thriller.

“And so it went on, and in the end I thought, well, I’ll put it all together — yes, it’s a ghost horror detective whodunit time travel romantic musical comedy epic. It’s a new genre, and this is the first and so far only book in the genre.

“You see, my previous books .. ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ once or twice I would find it in bookstores in the travel section. And then ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ you’d find sort of amongst the restaurant and hotel guides. ‘So Long and Thanks For All the Fish’ would end up in the cookery section.

“So I thought, well, if you do a ghost horror detective whodunit time travel romantic musical comedy epic, it can go in any part of the bookstore. They can put it where they like.”

I asked, “Have you ever stopped to think why your work is so popular?”

“If I did know, then I probably wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, so, no!” was his answer.

“It’s like trying to explain why a joke is funny,” I said.

“Yeah, right, yes!”

“To those who don’t know you, by reputation or by your work, or by having heard you or read you, who is Douglas Adams?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never met him,” Adams quipped. “Well, I suppose he’s the person who wrote ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. He’s spent ten years doing it, which I think he probably thinks is too long.”

But indeed, whether Adams could explain it or not, the Hitchhikers stories have become part of the culture.

“There were so many different version of it. People sort of kept saying, will you do a play version? We even did a bath towel in the end, so .. it started out as a radio show, then it became a book, a series of books, four books altogether. It was a four-book trilogy a trilogy for innumerates.

“There was a television series — I did the television series actually because I was told, and was astonished and horrified to learn, as I’m sure you will be when I tell you this, that there are people out there who neither read books nor listen to the radio.”

So I was curious: “What is one of your average days like, assuming your not on a book tour or doing interviews or giving lectures?”

“Well, I have a routine,” Adams replied. “The routine is, I wake up and try to think of a routine. And after a while I realize I’m not going to achieve a routine, or rather. by the time I’ve decided on what the routine for the day will be, I’m already two hours late in starting it. So it gets very confusing.

“By then I usually have to go out to lunch and think, well, I’ll spend the afternoon working out tomorrow’s routine.

“It’s funny — in England there was a regular magazine feature called, ‘A Life in the Day Of…’
A lot of people were asked just to say what their day is. And I remember reading a whole sequence of different writers, and each of them said, well, I wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get up, write a couple of chapters in my novel, then the post arrives and I deal with all the correspondence, then I take my wife or husband his or her breakfast, then I get down to do another couple of chapters of the novel, take the dog for a walk. then I sort of have a meeting with so-and-so…

“And this is absolutely terrifying, to think that people are actually able to do that! And I really thought I’m just not going to be able to make it as a writer, because I cannot do this. And after a while, I suddenly realized what was going on: the people who were writing this column were writers. They were making it up! It was complete fantasy.’

Douglas Noel Adams died of a heart attack in 2001.

Look up the stars tonight. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the difference between the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, or if you can’t see Venus. Maybe you’re not even sure where the moon is.

Doesn’t matter, says renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

As long as you understand that when you look into the sky, you’re essentially looking into a cosmic mirror.

Neil deGrasse Tyson didn’t exactly grow up with a boyhood fascination with the stars:

“I grew up in the city, and my first ‘night sky’ was the Hayden Planetarium. In fact, I thought it was a hoax. ‘I know how many stars there are, I saw them from the roof of my apartment in the Bronx!’ But I later learned, of course, that it was conveyed accurately. Thousands, countless thousands of stars in the sky.”

And it was when he realized how connected everything in the universe is that Tyson knew his life’s work.

“I’d like to believe that the universe is actually accessible at almost any level. There are things to know and understand that no matter your background, no matter your age, there are elements of it that you can extract and carry with you through the day and become enlightened for having done so.

“I’ll give you a perfect example: in the universe there are stars that forge heavy elements in in their core, elements such as carbon and nitrogen an d oxygen. These same stars blow up spread their guts first through interstellar space and occasionally through intergalactic space. But these guts, these enriched elements, enriched gas clouds, then make next-generation solar systems. Our solar system is just such a place, where we are enriched in these heavy elements — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen — and this is the stuff of life.

“In fact, we are not only of the universe, the universe is in us and you could justifiably declare us to be stardust. So the next time you’re walking your dog, you can tell your dog, or whoever might listen to you in the middle of the night, we are of the stars.”

I said, “It seems to confirm what all the touchy-feely New Age people have told us, that we are connected to everything.”

“Yeah, it does sound a little New Age-y, doesn’t it? I’ll concede that,”

As he told me nearly two decades ago, the universe is actually all around us. even in your home

“Remember when you’re sitting around the fireplace in the cold, and you look at the embers at the base of the flames and they’re glowing red hot? Well, they’re glowing for the same reason that ‘red super-giant’ stars glow red,

“And by the way, in the field of astronomy, of astrophysics, our whole vocabulary is quite transparent compared with other disciplines. For example, big red stars are ‘Red Giants.’ Little white stars are ‘White Dwarves.’ There are regions of space where, if you fall in, you don’t come out, and light doesn’t .. ‘black holes.’ Beginning of the universe? ‘Big Bang.’ This is official nomenclature. So I’d like to believe that to get close to the universe, at least the nomenclature’s not in your way. In fact, it’s even kind of fun.”

“There’s nothing, surprisingly, Latin there,” I suggested.

“Exactly! We didn’t go out of our way to put extras Latin roots to say something that could have been said in fewer syllables.”

But whether you think about it or not, says Neil deGrasse Tyson, science and the universe are, indeed, all around you.

“Every day that you’re alive, when you wake up and look at the world around you, there are reminders of how the universe works. If it’s not the fireplace poker poking at the red embers, it’s the bubbling oatmeal in your morning pot, that resembles the surface of the sun. The surface of the sun boils, just the same way oatmeal does — without the oatmeal.”

“It’d be a little overdone by now,” I said.

“Yeah, it’d be vaporized, actually. But there are so many common phenomena between what you experience in everyday life and the universe.”

If only we take the time to understand it, he says. Even then, back in 2000, Tyson was worried about Americans’ scientific literacy.

“Science literacy, in the era in which we live,the last thing we need is a scientifically illiterate public. There are too many issues, too many problems, too many things you’re going to have to vote on that relate to science and technology a d how it affects our lives.”

Oh, and today, Neil deGrasse Tyson is Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York where his first exposure to the stars took place all those years ago.

“Leave it to Beaver” is a piece of American culture. It’s been around for over sixty years, still seen daily in reruns on this channel or that network.

But you may not know how groundbreaking that innocent black and white sitcom actually was.

In 1983 Jerry Mathers — The Beaver — was one of the first celebrity interviews I ever did. And he did not disappoint this very happy Baby Boomer.

Jerry Mathers was 35 when I met him. “Leave it to Beaver” had been off the air for twenty years. Mathers was, at that point, very active in doing public appearances, giving folks the chance to get up close and personal with The Beav — although some wanted a little more than Jerry Mathers was able to deliver:

“I’m an individual. I know a lot of people expect me to, you know, come up and be exactly like an eight- or a ten-year-old. And that’s just not me, that’s a character, and if they can’t cope with that. that’s their problem, not mine.”

Jerry Mathers made sure it wasn’t his problem. He took care to make sure he didn’t lose his own identity.

“Any time you take on a character that people remember, it’s a .. they may come up and say, hi Bever or whatever, but there’s always your own identity as an actor, you always keep that. There are very, very few characters — in fact, I can’t think of one — who have ever suffered from that particular phenomenon, where they lose their identity. Maybe Bozo the Clown or somebody like that…:”

Now, little Jerry Mathers may have been too young to realize it at the time, but the TV show in which he was starring was, as it turns out, a valuable U.S. national asset.

“Leave it to Beaver” was filmed during the Cold War years, and it was the first actual situation comedy to go outside the United States. Before that, things like ‘The Untouchables’ and all the westerns .. so the gangsters and the western pictures were all going .. because that’s the thing people would buy in, say, Japan and Europe and Africa. So the writers were very. very conscious that they were presenting an image of the United States to foreign lands that hadn’t seen it before.”

And that’s not the only way “Leave it to Beaver” was making television history:

“The very first show we ever did was banned by the censors. Those were the days, of course, 1957, when even married couples in beds three feet apart. The very first show has the boys getting an alligator, called ‘Captain Jack,’ and they want to hide it from their parents, and they put it in the toilet tank.

“At that time you were not allowed to show bathrooms, let alone toilet tanks, on TV, so it was banned by the censors. But they fought it, and they won, and in fact ‘Leave it to Beaver’ was the first show to show a bathroom on commercial TV.”

Of course, when “Leave it to Beaver” first aired, most Americans had two or three or maybe four channels to choose from for their entertainment. By 1983, Jerry Mathers was among those beginning to lament 500 channels and nothing to watch:

“The problem is that we’re inundated right now with so much commercial television, through the use of the networks, and cable, and of course now the VCRs where you can go out and rent movies of any kind.

“So for the most part you have a much broader screen to view, and I think it’s just like anything else. When there’s only one or two books, and that’s the only thing available to you, you will read them, and no matter what they are, you’re a lot more appreciative. When you walk into a library, and there’s suddenly thousands of books, you become a lot more selective.“

And today we’re more selective than ever — but somehow, when the Cleaver family appears on screen, millions still watch.

Fifty-two years ago today, an American sports tradition was born.

Super Bowl One on January 15th, 1967 pitted the Green Bay Packers against the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Packers won, as quarterback Bart Starr was named the game’s Most Valuable Player.

But early on, it was anything but certain that Starr would even make it in the NFL.

Bart Starr was born in Alabama in 1934. He was good at ,many sports, including baseball as well as football, but his ambition was to someday be part of the NFL. But as he told me in 1987, there were big obstacles in his way:

“I was injured my final two years of college, and quite frankly had some serious doubts as to whether I would be able to play professional football, which had been a dream of mine from the time I started in college. Believe it or not, I really wanted to play professional football. I wasn’t sure I could. I worked extremely hard to make it in the pros. I was a 17th-round draft choice, and the odds of making it are against you.:

But Bart Starr was well-trained in how to handle challenge and adversity.

I said, “You say that you were prepared for the hard-driving Vince Lombardi by your childhood.:

“Bill, I was, because I had grown up under the very firm ‘iron hand,’ if you will, of a tough master sergeant. And when media people like you would ask me through the years if it were difficult to play for Coach Lombardi, I’d say, no, it was a piece of cake! And they’d look at me like I was nuts. And then I would quickly say, growing up and playing for a Ben Starr was tough! And that’s what I meant by it.

“He was tough, he was extremely tough. And only after our first son arrived did he become more of a teddy bear. It was amazing what those grandchildren did to him, and for him.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iWQqArRDTdk

In spite of his upbringing under the master sergeant, Bart Starr had to probe himself in the NFL, and to Coach Vince Lombardi:

“My first couple of years, Bill, were a struggle. He wasn’t convinced that I was his quarterback. I had to earn his trust and his respect and his confidence, and that was fine. I did all that. And I think that made the relationship even stronger.

“Plus, I stood up to him at a time when I felt that I needed to, and I believe that earned me even more respect from him. He had just blistered me in front of the team at a practice session one day, for an interception which really wasn’t a clean interception. The ball was tipped, which can happen, and was picked off, and he just leveled me, verbally.

“So i asked to see him after the practice session, and went inside and said, Look, Coach, I can take the chewing if I have that coming, fine. But when you have seen later that it might have been a mistake, you apologize to me here in the privacy of your office, but you blistered me in front of my teammates. If you are asking me to be the kind of leader that you say you are, apologize to me out therein front of them. Or, don’t blister me in front of them, chew me out in here if I have it coming, but do it privately.

“He did after that. He never berated me in front of the team ever again, and we developed a very strong longlasting relationship.”

Their partnership led to great things — and string of championship titles — for the Green Bay Packers.

“As you know, we won five in seven years. No one’s ever done that. And those bring back a lot of great memories.”

“You really had a dynasty,” I said.

“We did,” Starr replied. “I don’t like that term, but I guess in a sense we certainly did.”

But not all great things end well. Starr’s release by the Packers after a long career as player then head coach was something that still bothered him years later:

“It was not handled with class, and I regret that because it’s a good organization. I had a love affair with that organization for many, many years. Because of that incident, my relationship with the organization and the team is a damaged one, and it’s something I regret.”:

Now the NFL annually awards the Bart Starr Award, to a player of outstanding character.

Back in my parents’ day, men with a tattoo had probably been in World War Two. The only women with tattoos, you found only at the carnival.

But times have changed and now two decades into the 21st century it seems like everybody is getting some ink.

Many are getting tats from one of the country’s best-known artists, Kat Von D. And in two interviews with her about a decade ago, I learned so much about ink, and about Kat Von D.

“People now are coming to view tattooing as an art form, so it’s a lot easier just to get tattooed for more personal reasons versus being a carny or a sailor or all of the negative stigmas that are associated with tattooing, like criminal lifestyle, things like that,”

“Well, in your own case,” I asked her, “what prompts you? I mean, your entire body is art.”

“I’m heavily influenced by music,” Von D said. “I think that hanging out with a lot of punk rock kids when I was really young, being around the tattoos, I guess that subculture was pretty influential.”

Today, Kat Von D is the one who’s “pretty influential.” Her own reality TV show on TLC, “L.A. Ink,” cemented her reputation as a top artist. But it also thrust her into a harsh spotlight. She kept a journal, which eventually she turned into a bestselling book:

“I’ve always been pretty open about, like, my struggles with depression and other issues that everybody else, a lot of people have. For me it was a form of therapy to be able to write about the people that I tattoo and the stories they bring along with their tattoos.

“At the time I was just doing it because I realized I was taking a lot of these stories home with me at the end of the day, and I wasn’t letting it go. I think it didn’t help with my depression.”

But she did deal with it, as she helped many of her clients with their own demons:

“There’s definitely like, I guess, I don’t want to say like a shamanistic-like therapeutic side to tattooing, but I figured it out: I know that people just want to be heard sometimes. I know, for me, I just need somebody to listen, to feel better, you know? When people come in to get tattoos, they’re not getting tattoos because they’re bored, they’re getting tattoos because it’s a monumental thing to them, and it’s a special moment.

“If you’re in an intimate setting with another person who you can, like, let go of some of these demons and share .. I’m not a therapist, so I’m not going to judge you and I’m not going to diagnose you, so I think that’s why people feel a lot more comfortable. I think it makes perfect sense.”

There is a very common theme linking many of the tattoos Kat Von D has created: death/

“That’s actually one thing that I’ve always said, is that I think death is the only thing we all have in common. Whether you’ve experienced it directly or indirectly, everybody knows what it feels like to lose something that you love.

“A lot of people have a hard time talking about it. I think the more that we talk about it and understand what death is, the better we’re actually able to live life. It’s not a negative thing. It’s not a Debbie Downer, I don’t think.”

Becoming a celebrity in her own right has forced her to make her inked skin a little thicker. All kinds of gossip gets written about her:

“I think it’s pretty hard to embarrass me. I don’t ever feel uncomfortable. I think my biggest battle is not feeling defeated, or killing my spirit over other people’s negativity. Without sounding too preachy, I just feel like we live in a world where we build a lot of people up in order to break them down to make ourselves feel better, when the answer’s inside you.

“You don’t have to put other people down in order to do that. I think everybody’s a beautiful person. I wish people would just kind of leave me alone when it comes to that whole thing. Some days I do better at it than others, but in the end, I think the real fans see past the bullshit. Who I’m dating or who I’m not dating, and whether I’m pregnant with alien twins or not .. I’m probably not what they thought I was about.”

By the way, full disclosure: I have no tattoos, at least none that aren’t medical-related. And no, I’m not going to tell you or show you where THEY are.

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.