Now I've Heard Everything

Do you remember The Dating Game? Or The Newlywed Game?  How about The Gong Show? They and many other TV game shows were all created by e same man: Chuck Barris. He was the king of game shows for many years until he retired in the 1980s and moved to France. A few years later, he wrote a memoir clled The Game Show King. And that's when I met him and interviewed him.

In 1969, a young Texas woman sought a legal abortion. But when she was unable to obtain one, she turned to two young lawyers for help. Those lawyers took Norma NcCorve's case to court, and eventually to the United States Supreme Court. Along the way, Norma NcCorvey became known in the court papers as "Jane Roe." Henry Wade was the local prosecutor she was suing, so the case became known as Roe v W...

In early November 1979, a group of students and militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking everyone inside hostage, including the chargé d'affaires, a career diplomat named Bruce Laingen. The militants were demanding the return of the exiled Shah of Iran, who was undergoing medical treatment in the U.S. But diplomatic and even military efforts to free thehstages failed, and they ended up...

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S. So I wanted to revisit an interview I did nearly 30 years ago with a woman whose actions helped propel Dr. King to national prominence. In December 1955, a young woman named Rosa Parks was on her way home after a long hard day at work. She was on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was ordered to the back of the bus so a white man could have her s...

Many people may think Leonard Nimoy's career started with Star Trek. But he was a serious actor for a number of years before that.  He even appearing in other science fiction shows. But of course it was Star Trek that propelled him not just to fame but to Iconic status. His portrayal of a half-human, half-Vulcan Spock practically launch a cottage industry. In 1975, Nimoy wrote a book called I...

In the summer of 1988 leaders of the Democratic party invited Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards to deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention. Richards delivered. all right, in a big way, targeting Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, who had just spent eight years as Ronald Reagan's vice president.  Richards delivered a takedown line that has lived forev...

It was on January 12th. 1971 -- 50 years ago -- that situation comedy changed in a big way, with the premiere of a controversial show called All in the Family. At the center of the show was an irascible middle-aged blue collar worker named Archie Bunker.  What made Archie so controversial, then and now, was how utterly unapologetic he was for his politically incorrect views.  Cast in the...

In 1993, a single mother with no legal training, no experikence as an attorney, helped bring a major corporation to its knees. Erin Brockovich joined attorney Ed Masry in suing Pacific Gas & Electric, which was accused of poisoning the water supply in a small California town called Hinkley. Soon, Hollywood heard about the story, and itwas turned into a major Motion Picture in 2000, starring Ju...

Don Knotts is perhaps best know as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show. But you also remember him as Ralph Furley from Three's Company. Maybe you remember him from The Apple Dumpling Gang movies, or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, or The Shakiest Gun in the West. Or The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Don Knotts had a decades-long entertainment career, which actually began soon after World Wa...

As we look for a place in the history books to put 2020, we also are taking a look back at Season Two of Now I've Heard Everything. And stay till the end, for preview of season 3, coming in Jauary! 

Did you know that December 21st is National Short Girl Appreciation Day?  Ever since 1984, one of America's favorite short girls has been Olympic gold medal gymnast Mary Lou Retton. At the age of just 16, Retton became the first Anerucab woman to ever win the gold medal in all-around gymnastics competition at theOlympics. She also won two silver medals, and two bronze medals. Her boundless en...

Next Monday, December 21, marks the 50th anniversary of a very strange day in White House history. It was on December 21, 1970 that the king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, showed up unannounced at the White House gate, asking for a personal meeting with President Richard M.Nixon. The man who put that meeting together that day was Nixon aide Egil "Bud" Krogh.  Officially, Krogh was head of t...

Regular listeners of Now I've Heard Everything know that I don't often get starstruck. But this was one of those times. If you grew up in the '60s, as I did, you may best remember Kitty Carlisle as a panelist on the game show "To Tell the Truth." But heracting career went back many decades before that. In fact, Kitty Carlisle was a featured performer in the 1935 Marx Brothers classic "A Night at t...

Graham Nash is actually in the Rock and Roll Hal;l of Fame twice - once as a member of the '60s pop group The Hollies, and again for his work as a member of Crosby Stills and Nash. Nash been an icon in pop and rock music for decades -- and in 2002, he puboished a book about some of the best-known and mosticonic songs of our time, It was called "Off the Record," and I met Graham Nash when he was on...

While Molly Shannon may be best known for her six seasons on Saturday Night and her many many television and movie appearances, it turns out she is also a children's book author. In 2011, Shannon published a book called Tilly the trickster. It's about a young girl who loves to play practical jokes on people, ranging from her brother, to her parents, to her school mates. So, is there a little bit o...

Ed McMahon had a career in broadcasting that dated back to the 1940s. But perhaps nothing he did on television was as memorable as this: his 30-year on-are partnership with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. In 1998, McMahon wrote an autobiography, a mmoir of his decades in television entertainment. That's when I met him.

One night, 40 years ago this week, a young man approached musician John Lennon outside Lennon's Manhattan apartment building. The young man appeared to be asking for an autograph, but instead, shot and killed Lennon, who was just 40. A few years later, Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, wrote a book about her, her brother, and their mother, called John Lennon, My Brother.

Today we're wrapping up Celebrity Cookbook Week on Now I've Heard Everything. On Monday, we heard from actress Dawn Wells (Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island), then on Wednesday, musician-actor IsaacHayes. Today, one of my favorite comic actors from the '60s amd '70s,  Dom DeLuise may be best known for the many movies he made with Burt Reynolds, and Mel Brooks. I met him on a snowy Friday aftern...

It's Celebrity Cookbook Week here on Now I've Heard Everything. We continue today with a man who my younge listeners may kknow best for his work on South Park. But for decades, Isaac Hayes was a major figure in the Southern soul music label Stax Records, where he was a songwriter, a session musician and record a producer I met him 20 years ago, when he published a cookbook that brought together so...

It's Celebrity Cookbook Week on Now I've Heard Everything.  And we start with not only one of my favorite sitcom stars, but also one of my favorite cookbooks. Dawn Wells portrayed Kansas farm girl Mary Ann Summers on Gilligan's Island. Turns out, she was pretty handy with coconuts, bananas, and whatever else the castaways were able to find -- plus a few food items probably not normally found...

Berkeley Breathed is perhaps best known for his comic strips "Bloom County," "Outland," and "Opus."   But he's also a gifted children's book creator.  I first met him in 2003, upon publication of his book "Flawed Dogs." We tal;;kerd again in 2007 after he published "Mars Needs Moms," which later became a Disney animated film.  It's about a 9-year-old boy named Milo who comes to appr...

In the music business, backup singers often fade into the background.  Few achieve much fame on their own.  One who did was Cissy Houston. After a successful career backing up the likes of Elvis Preslet, Dionne Warick, and Aretha Franklin, Houston struck out on her own -- and won two Grammies. I met Cissy Houston in the spring of 1998, after she'd written her memoir. 

Alexa stopNot since Carl Sagan, perhaps, has there been a professional stargazer as engaging and as popular as Neil de Grasse Tyson. A witty, Charming personality who seems to know everything about astrophysics, Tyson has become a very popular TV host, public speaker, and podcaster. I met him in 2000, when he wrote a book for the light person, not the professional scientist. Science literacy is Ty...

If you're of a certain age, you remember where you were when something big and historical happened. For my parents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my children, it was the Challenger explosion. For me, it was the John F Kennedy assassination, on Nomb 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. But in the intervening decades, members of the president's Secret Service detail rarely spoke about that day, even among themselv...

Very few professional athletes are best remembered for the game, or the play, that ended their career. But Joe Theismann maybe one of them. It was on this date, November 18th, 1985 -- 35 years ago --  that Joe Theismann sustained a gruesome, career-ending injury before a national TV audience. I met him two years later, after he had written a book about his football career an d the play that e...