Now I've Heard Everything

If you've ever eaten that Wendy's, and most of us have, you probably know that the chain was founded by a guy named Dave Thomas. He needed a first daughter. And you probably remember his TV commercials: But here's what you may not know about Dave Thomas. He was born during the Great Depression. Later he was adopted, but his homelife was so unstable, he dropped out of high school and struck out on...

-------------------------- In the US, we take labor unions for granted. To many, it seems like they have always been around. But in 1980, labor unions in countries under the grip of the Soviet Union we're totally hostile to labor unions. That's why it made huge news 40 years ago this week, when workers in the Gdansk shipyards of Poland formed a labor union called solidarity. With the implicit bles...

Today's episode is for my baby boomers. Because we all remember June Lockhart, whether it's from Lassie, Lost in Space, or even Petticoat Junction. June Lockhart, child of Hollywood parents, has been a fixture classic TV for decades. She typically played a firm but loving mom, someone we can all relate to.  I met her in 2001, after she'd written a memoir.

Do you remember where you were 19 years ago today? Richard Picciotto will always remember that as the day he thought he would die. Indeed, he almost did. PIcciotto was a New York City Fire Department battalion chief that day, and he was inside the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the South Tower collapsed. Half an hour later, he was still inside the North Tower when it, too, collapsed.

Whoopi Goldberg has been entertaining us for almost 40 years, in movies like "The Color Purple," "Ghost," and "Sister Act" as well as TV's "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and of course, on ABC's "The View." I met her in 1997, after she wrote a book called "Book."  It was a kind of stream-of-consciousness effort, with chapters each having a single syllable word as their title. And our interv...

Happy Labor Day! This is the national holiday set aside to recognize the efforts and contributions of America's Workforce.  So I want to revisit my interview almost a quarter-century ago with the man who was America's top labor leader for 14 years.  John Sweeney was president of the AFL-CIO. I met him in 1996, about a year after he assumed the presidency of the Union.

In 21 seasons with his hometown Baltimore Orioles,Cal Ripken racked up some very enivable numbers: 3,184 hits. 431 home runs. 1,695 runs batted in.  A 19time All-Star, and two-time American League Most Valuable Plater. But perhaps his greatest number was 2,632.  That's w many consecutive games Ripken played in,shattering the Lou Gehrig record of 2,130,  25 years ago this weekend.

It was 46 years ago this week that NBC TV viewers first heard that theme music introducing a series called "Littel House on the Prairie." For the next eight years, it was a perennial viewer favorite. One of the stars of the series was Melissa Anderson -- known in those years as "Melissa Sue Anderson"; she'll explain why, in this interview.  Anderson played "Mary," one member of the Ingalls fa...

What is it like, growing up in what some say was the most famous family of the twentieth century? Reeve Lindbergh knows. She was born in 1945 to Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  Her father was "Lucky Lindy" the aviator who made history in 1927 as the first pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a solo flight.

By 1991 when i met and interviewed him, Stan Lee -- the genius behind Marvel Comics -- was a legend.  Almost royalty. And as he told me then, the Stan Lee - Marvel Comics story actually went back decades.  Together they transformed a medium that was at one time the exclusive domain of children into a much richer art form.

As public scandals go, this one might seem pretty benign, by today's low bar.  But in 1984, it was a big story when it was revealed thatthe authoirities had broken up a high-priced Manhattan escort service that was being run by a woman named Sydney Biddle Barrows. Now, when a New York Post reporter uncovered the fact that the 32-year-old Barrows is from the Biddle family of Philadelphia, and...

Last week Democrats nominated Joe Biden for president. This week, Republicans will renominate Donald Trump, for a second term. Let's go back 56 years, to July1964, when the GOP nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. When I met him in 1988, the country was in the midst of the George H.W. Bush vs Michael Dukakis race. And as you're about to hear, Goldwater had some very specific ideas about that...

Years before her husband Al was elected vice president of the United States, Tipper Gore established a reputation of her own, as a social issues advocate. And her issue, in the late 80s, was protecting America's children from sex and violence in the media. She was co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center, which led the effort to require warning labels if on media contained profanity, sexual...

Tomorrow, August 20th, is National Radio Day. Yoday, we're going to revisit my interview 25 years ago with one of the greatest radio personalities of all time. And I'm going to let you hear the question I asked him that day, and the answer he gave me, that has haunted me to this day.  I'm talking about the great Wolfman Jack, one of the greatest figures in the history of the music business in...

The 2020 Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week. It'll look a lot different from any past convention, though, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Let's go back 48 years, to 1972, when the Democratic party nominated South Dakota Senator George McGovern as their standard-bearer. Running on a liberal, anti-war platform, McGovern lost badly to Republican incumbent Richard Nixon...

Irish-born redhead Maureen O'Hara knew from an early age she wanted to act.  After years of training, she was finally "discovered," if you will, as ayoung woman  by Charles Laughton, considered one of thye world's finest actors.   Her first movie came in 1938, and it launched an award-winning career that spanned decades.  I met her in 2004. She had just written a memoir that in...

or decades the USSR -- the Soviet UInion -- was a major world power, but it was held together largely through force and intimidation. Things began to unravel in the late 1980s -- the momentum built after President Ronald Reagan delivered these words at the Berlin Wall:  The wall did come down two years later, and two years after that, the Soviet Union came to an end. Watching it all, from a f...

She burst onto the American television scene in the late 1980s, when she hosted her own show on the fledgling Fox network.  And Tracey Ullman has been a favorite in this country ever since. Her Fox show ended in 1990, and she next appeared on American television in 1996, on the HBO series Tracey Takes On. I met her in early 1998, when she published a book that was companion to the HBO series....

Mrs. Fields Cookies can be found in hundreds of cities across America, and around the world.  It's one of the largest names in the snack food industry. It all started back in 1977, when Debbi Fields and her husband started a small business selling homemade-style cookies. It grew into a major enterprise, which Debbi Fields sold in 1993. When I met her in 1996, she had just published a book of...

Tomorrow, August 6th, is the 75th anniversary of the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon in war, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. At the controls of the B-29 called the Enola Gay was a young pilot named Paul Tibbetts. After the war, Tibbetts returned to a very humble and private life in Ohio. As the 1990s were drawing to a close, Chicago Tribune columnist and author Bob Gre...

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

One of the most popular, and most iconic series from the early days of television was "The Adventures of Superman," which ran from 1952 to 1958. George Reeves was Superman / Clark Kent.  Jack Larson played young photographer Jimmy Olson, and Noel Neill was reporter Lois Lane.  But, like so many TV stars, Neill saw her career take a new and unexpected path, and not necessarily the path sh...

In all of major league baseball history, going back well over a hundred years, there has been only a handful of pitchers who have won30 or more games in a single season. That very short list includes names like Cy Young, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Dizzy Dean. And .. the last to do it -- righthander Denny McLain.

If you know Jim Gaffigan's comedy, you know he has a big family, five kids.   He was one of six kids, his wife was one of nine.  So they know big famililes. I met Jim in 2013, when he wrote a memoir that was funny and poignant and reflective -- as was our interview.

Sam Huff was such a force in the National Football League in the 1950s and ’60s that CBS television produced a special called “The Violent World of Sam Huff.”  One of the first middle linebackers in the NFL, Huff was one of the game’s toughest competitors, first for the New York Giants, later for the Washington Redskins. Huff played in six NFL Championship Games and was inducted into the Coll...