Now I've Heard Everything

At most news organizations, the White House beat is a coveted plum assignment. But it's a difficult, stressful, and highly competitive job. Most correspondence last only a few years at best. One exception was UPI correspondent Helen Thomas. She covered the White House for over 50 years, and covered 10 presidents from Kennedy to Obama. I met her in 1999 when, at the age of 79, she wrote a memoir ca...

Where did modern humankind come from? Scientists,, scholars, and experts have been trying to find the answer for generations.  One of the most prominent among them was Kenyan-born Richard Leakey.  His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, we're also renowned paleoanthropologists whose work centered on finding the origins of modern humans. In 1977, Richard Leakey co-authored at groundbreaking b...

How and where do race, gender, class, art,  and capitalism come together? That question was at the heart of some 30 books written by author bell hooks. That was actually the pen name that Gloria Jean Watkins adopted for herself. But being a black female activist and feminist  also often made her a target. In her 1999 book Remembered Rapture hooks recalled some of her challenges as a writ...

Dexter Scott King was only 7 years old in 1968 when his father Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. But his memories of his late father remain sharp and crisp. And those deeply personal recollections sometimes contrast with the public views of Martin Luther King Jr. In 2003 at the age of 42, Dexter Scott King wrote a book called Growing Up King, and that's when I had a chance to meet him and ta...

When you think of America's great present-day chefs and restaurateurs, there are only a handful of names that immediately come to mind. And one of them is Wolfgang Puck. While he may be best known for his acclaimed Spago restaurant, Puck has also written a number of cookbooks, he's a TV and he's the official caterer for the Academy Awards.  I met him a little over thirty years ago, in the fal...

He earned a medical degree from Harvard, but instead of pursuing a career in medicine, Michael Crichton became a writer. And as a reader, I'm really glad he did. I had read some of Michael Crichton's books, and enjoyed the movie "The Andromeda Strain," that was based on one of them, but I had never interviewed him, until November 1990 when "Jurassic Park" was published. "Jurassic Park:" the movie...

Surrogate parenting has become commonplace in America and other countries. It has helped countless numbers of couples become parents. But it took until the late 1980s for an American Court to rule on the legal validity of surrogate motherhood. It came in the case of an infant girl dubbed Baby M.  A woman named Mary Beth Whitehead gave birth to baby M, after her eggs were fertilized by a man n...

You know we sometimes get so caught up in the minutiae of everyday life. Trying to protect our own little turf on this little planet that we lose sight of the big picture. I mean the really big picture. In the 1970s and '80s astronomer. Carl Sagan led the way in showing us the big picture with his book and TV show. Cosmos and then in 1994 his follow-up book called pale Blue. The interview you're a...

Songs recorded by Judy Collins have become some of America's most enduring favorites. With a debut album in 1961 at a debut concert about a year later and then a number one single shortly after Judy Collins became a fixture in American music, particularly the folk music genre. But with a musical upbringing that included everything from classical to country to folk to pop. Judy Collins resisted lab...

Back in the fall of 1993, when I had scheduled an interview with actor. William shatner, it was fascinating to watch the generational divide in the office where I worked. When he walked in, the oldest among us could be heard saying Captain Kirk is here! The next oldest we're saying TJ hooker is here! And the youngest, at that point in the early '90s, we're saying the guy from rescue 911 is here! W...

It was on a cold Christmas Eve night many years ago in New York that  a stray cat found a new, loving home. His rescuer was I then crusty 60 year old curmudgeon, an author and TV and radio critic named Cleveland Amory.  Well, Amory named his new furry white companion PPolar Bear.  And in 1987, when Amory wrote a book called The Cat Who Came For Christmas, Polar Bear became a celebri...

What would you do if a big corporation took over the company you built, then told you you had no more right to use your own name to sell the product you invented?  Welcome to Wally Amos’s world. The founder of Famous Amos Cookies eventually lost the company.  And then he lost the right to use his own name to sell cookies.  But the Florida native with the irrepressible sense of humor...

Do you believe in angels? Does each of us have a guardian angel? What do angels really look like? Can they perform miracles?  Some thirty years ago a Washington DC-based author and psychic medium named Sophy Burnham wrote a book that became a major bestseller.  It was called A Book of Angels.  And that's when Sophie and I had the first of our several conversations over the next few...

Have you counted your blessings today? If you haven't, maybe you should. It might be good for your health. So says TV journalist. Deborah Norville.   In 2007, the anchor of inside edition wrote a book about gratitude, thankfulness, and how that can actually change. Not just your attitude, but you're very health. I have the chance to speak with her for a few minutes about that book.

The national football League is over 100 years old, and in that time, football fans have enjoyed some breathtaking games, spectacular plays, some of the most colorful athletes we've ever known, and more than a few  moments of spectator sport agony. In 1994,  The NFL participated in publishing a huge coffee table book reflecting on the first 75 years of the league. And to write the forwar...

Ms. Is turning 50 It was in December 1971 that a staff writer for the New Yorker named Gloria Steinem  created what would become, the following summer, Ms. Magazine. The December debut was actually an insert in the New Yorker,  and it instantly catapulted stynom to the forefront of the feminist movement. Fast forward to 1992. Gloria Steinem wrote a book called The Revolution Within, &nbs...

I don't know about you but every Christmas season one of the movies I have to watch is it's a Wonderful Life. The story of George Bailey, the small town building and loan manager who's given the chance to see what the world would be like without him is a Christmas classic. Almost 30 years ago now two guys came out with a book of trivia about the movie. One of them was Jimmy Hawkins, who played Tom...

For a generation, a handcrafted Longaberger basket is something of a home decor showpiece. Dave Longaberger founded the company in 1973, and by 1975 had hired his daughter Tammy to work there. When Dave died in 1999, Tami took over as president and CEO.  In 2001, a book that Dave Longaberger had written was finally published, and Tammy went on tour to promote it. That's when I met her. At the...

On a quiet Sunday in early December, millions of Americans went about their usual routines. Folks went to church. Children played out in the yard. Teenagers went to moves. Families went to dinner. People listen to football games on the radio. And then everything changed. On the radio came the horrible news that the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii had been attacked by forces from Japan A...

Fprty years ago this weekend  a U.S. Army general who was stationed at a NATO facility in Italy was kidnapped by a Marxist terrorist group known as the Red Brigades. General James Dozier spent the next 42 days in captivity, before a dramatic rescue. And, as you're about to hear in this interview, Dozier's rescue by Italian special forces actually help break the back of the Red Brigades. I met...

Does this song help put you in the Christmas spirit? That song was written by Mel Torme. He was born and raised in Chicago. He first sang in public and at age 4, wrote his first song at age 13, and was an actor in a radio show by his teens. From the 1940s through the 1990s, Mel Torme established himself as one of America's favorite and most popular singers, songwriters, and the Rangers. He acquire...

Chuck Norris doesn't drink coffee in the morning, he has a mug of nails. Chuck Norris can dribble a bowling ball. ChuckNorris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants. But a book is how I first met Chuck Norris 32 years ago, in early 1988. He had just written an autobiography and was on tour to promote it.  And it was one of the many times in my interview...

On this Thanksgiving Eve, we'll be talking a little turkey. And gravy, and mashed potatoes, and lots of other delicious stuff from the cookbook written by actress and cookbook author Jill St. John. In a long and successful acting career St. John was popular in movies and on television.   She was in Diamonds Are Forever as Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl. Later. though, she establis...

Perhaps no one other than maybe Martha Stewart has helped more Americans gain the confidence they need to do things around the house then Bob Vila has His popular home fixer upper show on PBS, this Old House, premiered in 1979, and for years afterward top millions of us how to do simple projects ourselves. And sometimes not so simple projects. I met him in 1986, when he published a reference book...

If you know Danica McKellar only as Winnie Cooper on TV's The Wonder Years, from the 1980s, what she has done since the show ended may surprise you. After The Wonder Years ended in the early 90s, Danica McKellar went to UCLA and got a degree in math. She now writes books about mathematics, and advocates for education.  In 2007 she wrote a book for Middle school-age girls, called Math Doesn't...