Malcolm Forbes hit the nail on the head when he said, The biggest mistake people make in life is not making a living at doing what they most enjoy.
Our guest tonight has made a profession, and in fact, he has made several professions of doing what he most enjoys. Art Linkletter is a true legend. He continues to show the world what is possible. He began his career at KGB Radio in San Diego more than 70 years ago and went on to host two of the longest running shows in broadcast history, House Party and People Are Funny. House Party ran for 25 years on CBS winning two Emmys along the way, while People Are Funny ran for 19 years on NBC.
Art is also a best-selling author, having written 23 books, including Kids Say the Darndest Things!, which is one of his several number one New York Best Sellers and is number 14 on the Publishing Industry List of the all time best selling
books.
Art, and our co-host tonight, Mark Victor Hansen, are just about to release a new book titled, How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life. We will get to hear more about that during this interview. If there are many of you who can’t wait to check it out, go to http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/art.
Art has received 17 Honorary Degrees and has served on a number of prestigious boards including President Nixon’s National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Prevention, President’s Reagan’s Commission on Fitness and Physical Education, as well as
the Board of Directors of MGM and Kaiser Hospitals. He was the United States Ambassador to Australia and named Commissioner General to the 150thAustralian Anniversary Celebration.
He has enjoyed many successes in business as well as every other arena he has entered. As Chairman of the Board of Linkletter Enterprises, Art oversees businesses involved in the building and management of public storehouses, office buildings,
real estate development, and various other businesses around the world.
Now, at the age of 94, Art continues to give over 75 speeches a year. He goes surfing in Hawaii and until last year, went skiing in Utah every year. He is an exemplary human being and, Art, we are so deeply honored to have you with us tonight.
Janet Attwood:
I am so excited and thrilled that one of my dearest friends, and the co-author of your upcoming book, Mark Victor Hansen, is my
co-host and will conduct tonight’s interview. I am sure all of our listeners know Mark is also co-creator of the bestselling non-fiction book series of all times, Chicken Soup For The Soul.
In a few days, he will be leading his famous Mega Book University in Orlando, Florida. You don’t want to miss it, and it you haven’t yet checked that out, be sure to go to http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/mega.
Mark Victor Hansen:
Well, as Janet said, Art and I have been great friends for a long time, older than either of us are! Hey, Art, your career has been so phenomenal. You are the statement of what’s possible. You are the poster boy. You have been involved in so many arenas. Tell our listeners what your role with passion has to do that is so important in your life and where is passion leading you today.
Art Linkletter: Passion involves complete absorption in life and what you like to do best, so that when you find what your passion is and you work at it, you develop a persistent course for success in life. Sometimes that passion does not show itself until
you are in your 60’s or 70’s. Other times, it shows up during your college days, your high school days, or your days when you are married, because passion is something that also brings up the other word that is so important in success.
That is your attitude. Your attitude brings people to you or sends them away from you. Your attitude is kind of based on my credo, my personal way of living that can be explained by four letters – DTRT. You will never guess what it is, Mark.
Mark Victor Hansen: What is it?
Art Linkletter: DTRT – Do the right thing.
Mark Victor Hansen: That’s good. I say it slightly different. I say, Think right, talk right, act right, and you get the right results, right here, right now. So, we are all right, right?
Art Linkletter: The right thing is something that is kind of born in a person who has an equality, has a curiosity, and a sense of humor about himself and, still at the same time, doesn’t want to hurt anybody, doesn’t want to take advantage of people and doesn’t boss them so that they are unhappy, and feels that the other person is entitled to your best side.
Mark Victor Hansen:
That’s all true. Art, many of our listeners remember your award-winning television shows. Will you tell a story or two about how you got involved in television?
Art Linkletter: Well, of course. I got involved in television because I was involved in radio. Radio preceded TV and I happened to be lucky enough to get a part-time job while I was studying to be an English professor at San Diego State Teaching College.
I was at the bottom of the Depression in 1933, and one out of every ten in the United States was out of employment. People were desperate and I was working my way through a free college. I didn’t have to pay to go, and I had a lot of jobs. I always had a lot of jobs. One of them was making Waldorf salads in the college cafeteria.
At that moment, in the kitchen, surrounded by all the noise and the clatter of other athletes, because I was an athlete, and with things going on, the phone rang and a stranger was on the line who I had never heard of before changed my entire life.
He introduced himself as Lincoln Dollar, the manager of the CBS radio station in San Diego, KGB, and he had been following my career through some of the faculty that did programs down there on their free time. He also had been reading about
me because I had written in college a musical comedy and I was, I don’t want to seem to be boasting, president of my fraternity, president of the basketball team, and president of the men students, and on and on.
He said, I’ve been hearing nothing but good about you out there and I just called you on the chance that you might like to be a part-time radio announcer. Well, that was absolutely unthinking in my own mind. I didn’t even have a radio set. But, whatever he said, I said, I’ll be there. At that time, you didn’t ask for stock options, retirement plans, health plans, and pensions. You said, Tell me where to go and I will be there. You didn’t even ask what you were going to get. So, I became a part-time radio announcer and that led, over the next seven years, to my departing from the professorial course that I was studying to
become a college professor of English.
Being on the radio, I discovered that I could adlib shows with ease and humor and fun. I didn’t need writers. All I needed was people, because my business was people.
We had a show that was called, The Man on the Street. That was the newest thing in the entertainment world because there had never been a microphone. There was no production. There were no big prizes. There were no trick questions. There was
no rehearsal. You walked up to a guy on the street, you said, Hello. Who are you? What do you do? What do you think? Where are you going? What do you think about this? How do you so and so.
That started me off on the program which led eventually to television, which was People Are Funny. I proved that people are funny for 19 years.
Mark Victor Hansen: Wasn’t that fun? What is the best story you remember from People Are Funny?
Art Linkletter: Well, there was this show where I picked guests out of the audience before I went on the air. Don’t forget that at that time everything was live. Nothing was taped. If anything went wrong, you had to correct it. I had gone into the audience,
picked somebody out, and asked them whatever.
There was a grey-haired guy sitting there and he was waving a cigar at me. I couldn’t imagine what he would want, so I walked over and I said, What’s that for? He said, I just became a father and I am 68. I said, Well, that’s fascinating, and I talked to him about it, what he thought, and so forth. Then I thought to myself, I wonder who the oldest father in the United States is with a baby born in the last year? I made the announcement over coast to coast. My people in the booth didn’t know what I was doing. I was just making it up. So, I said, Anybody over 68? We’ll find out who is the oldest new father.
Mark Victor Hansen: What did you find?
Art Linkletter: The winner three weeks later was 104 years old from Chicago, where I have always mistrusted the water! He had a 32 year old, school-teacher bride that he had married when he was 98. Between the time of 98 and 104, he had had four children, which was wonderful. But, think of this, at the age of 100, he became he father of twins. I consider that to be bragging rights or else he stuttered.
Anyway, the interview with the old guy was really wonderful and the key note of the talk was What is the best thing about being 104, outside of being a father. He said, There is so little peer pressure.
Mark Victor Hansen: Can I hitchhike on that. Art and I got to interview everybody for our new book, How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life. The oldest living woman is 114, and Art is irascible and unstoppable, and said, Do you have any
wrinkles? She said, Yeah, one. I sit on it. The other thing is how do you live to be 114? She said, I quit smoking at 113.
Art, everybody knows you because of Kids Say The Darndest Things. You’ve got your great friend, Bill Cosby, doing that show right now. There is also the best selling book in American publishing history and it came out of your TV show that featured kids. Why were kids your passion?
Art Linkletter: I loved kids. I was going to be a school teacher and work with kids. I had, at that time, a number of children of my own and I just happened on a very interesting thing. I had a show in San Francisco, locally, on the radio called Who’s
Dancing Tonight at the St. Francis Hotel. I was home practicing on a recording machine so that I would sound sexy when I got on the air. The machine was just about the size of a small refrigerator. Everything was bigger in those days. It was a wax reader. You cut a piece of wax that came up like a tape.
I was home practicing and my son, Jack, who is now 69, came home at the age of five or six from kindergarten. I brought him over to the machine and I said, Tell me, Jack, what did you do today? He said, I was in school. First day in school. Boy, it was great fun. I said, What was the best thing about it? He said, I decided I’m not going back. I said, Well, why did you make that decision? Well, he said, the teacher told me that I couldn’t read, I couldn’t write, and I can’t talk, so why should I go back?
I put that record on the program that following Sunday night and mail came in from all over the northern California, saying, What a wonderful thing hearing a kid just talking to somebody about his dreams and hopes and this, that and the other… Most of the kids on the air at that time were either young geniuses who could multiply 400 by 686, or play a number on the violin while riding a unicycle – you know, professional kids.
There were actors, but no kids, just kids, talking about stuff. I asked one little boy, Well, you don’t seem to be having any fun today. He said, Well, my dog died and I don’t feel very good. I said to him, He’s waiting for you up in heaven. Think of that. He looked up at me and said, What would God want with a dead dog? That led me to talking to kids.
Of all of the people, children and grownups, I have talked to, probably I am best known for being the guy who invented Kids and talked to them for 26 years, 27,000 children, all from a very interesting age from five to 10. The reason that is interesting is that at that time, their whole world is their mother and dad and their family.
Then after 10, they began to get outside friends. Then, they became teenagers and their brain stopped working completely for four or five years. Then, they met some girl you never heard of and they want to get married. But, I had them while they were in the formation period. They were using words they didn’t know what the meaning of them was. I asked one kid, Does your dog have a pedigree? He stopped and thought a minute and said, I don’t think so. We had it cut off two weeks ago.
That gives you an idea of what led me into finding out people, old people, young people, others, talk to somebody who has a sense of humor and a curiosity and can literally conduct a conversation.
Mark Victor Hansen: Were the studios scared of you doing the kids because they could say anything because you were live?
Art Linkletter: No, they weren’t scared at all. At that time, incidentally, in 1935, or so, on radio you couldn’t use the word pregnant on the air. I have to laugh when I think about that because today they show you how it happens, in color. But anyway,
they let all of the kids’ strange sayings go right by, never cut into me and never took them off the air.
You know, like a little kid comes to his school and he says to the teacher, I saw a dead cat on the ground. She said, How did you know it was dead? He said, I pissed in its ear. The teacher said, You what? He says, I leaned over and I went pssst.
Mark Victor Hansen: How did you go from being so successful in the media to becoming the great business person that you are?
Art Linkletter: Well, as I began to make more money and I got into the high tax bracket finally, I discovered I had a partner, a big partner, and he kept taking more and more. That partner was Uncle Sam, and the loving agency that I was in constan touch with was the Bureau of Internal Revenue, trying to figure out how to keep some of the money I was making.
I began to look around and invest some of the money that I had left after paying taxes and I also began to be on Boards of Directors of the sponsors who sponsored me on the air. I was on the Board of Directors of a big insurance company and a big food company. Well, Kellogg’s is pretty big, isn’t it? Campbell’s Soup and all kinds of companies. Sitting on those boards fascinated me.
I was brought up with no money. I was an orphan you know, abandoned, and then picked up by a nice old preacher and his wife and they had no money. I never had any money. I began to see what business was like and it fascinated me, so I started getting into business. I had plenty of time because I didn’t have to rehearse. I didn’t have to have long meetings where they were fixing the program. It just came out of my mouth and out of the people’s minds who I was talking to, so I had a lot of time.
You know in Hollywood, people have a show on the air, got there seven o’clock in the morning and work until ten o’clock at night often. I dropped in fifteen minutes before the audience was ready, did the show, and then left.
I got into businesses. I have been in about 40 businesses over about the last 65 years and learned what you have to learn, which is it is exciting, it is creative, it is risky, and it is always changing. Changing is the zest that I get out of life. I don’t like to do anything over and over the same way, so business makes you constantly challenged to satisfy the wishes of your customers or whoever it is
you are doing business with.
Mark Victor Hansen: What are the two or three most exciting businesses you have been in? Tell us about your solar energy company.
Art Linkletter: There was one very exciting business that I was in. I met at a party in Hollywood, the Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, on his way to a meeting in London. He was telling me about all the advantages of putting money into anything in Australia.
I went to Australia and I found that it was like the United States in about 1810. There were all kinds of things going on, wonderful opportunities. I bought almost 1,000,000 acres of land in the Outback and started a whole sheep farm. Here I am a city boy, never been a farmer and I had all these acres. I paid $.20 an acre so it was only $200,000, but I ran this place like an empire.
I built a school, I started a little village there in the Outback, and I had that place for 30 years. It was really a marvelous opportunity to suddenly step back in time like our forefathers when they were coming west in the United States. In Australia, they were still doing things very simply. The flying doctor would still come in if you telephoned him. The dentist came in. He had a foot pedal to
grind your teeth under a tree. All of these things went on. That was one of the most interesting and, eventually, one of the most profitable things that I ever was in.
The thing right now that is the number one spot on my business list is called Solargenix. Solargenix is a method of extracting the heat of the sun as it comes down out of the sky and heating water up to 700 degrees. When you have water over 350
degrees, you can make steam. When you can make steam, you can be connected to big machinery, which creates energy. Energy today is one of the most sought after, one of the most priceless qualities you can have.
The sun costs you no money. You have all the heat coming in. We have the patents that protect the collecting machinery we have and are now building. I have been in this now for the last six years, starting with just being a spokesman for the
company. I am now Chairman of the Board of one part of the company and appearing at such things as the ground-breaking for a $250,000,000 solar power plant.
With a partner in Spain, we are now spreading all over the world. In the next five or ten years, this will be one of the principal sources of pollution-free energy brought to the places in the world were they have sun.
Mark Victor Hansen: Why aren’t we getting more media on all the good that you are doing. I know how to look it up because I am your close friend. Most people don’t know that you do pollution-free energy.
Art Linkletter: Well, it’s because we are a small company now and we have never been on board of the New York Stock Exchange. So, people don’t really have a wide interest in investing because they can’t. We aren’t looking for money.
We have just sold our very first huge plant and while it got some publicity, the main publicity it got was in world of energy. We are now a very much in demand company. You won’t read about us for a while until we get bigger. We have multi-million dollar deals going in Spain, in Australia, and here in the United States.
Mark Victor Hansen: It is in Nevada, isn’t it?
Art Linkletter: So far,
it is in Nevada. But, we can take the four western states: Nevada, New Mexico,
Arizona, and California. And by taking some of that desert land out there, like
a hundred square miles, we could produce enough power to run all the electricity
needed in the United States.
Mark Victor Hansen: Do you see that happening?
Art Linkletter: I dream about that happening.
Mark Victor Hansen: Why does that wind you up?
Art Linkletter: It’s exciting; it’s meaningful. It’s going to help make the air cleaner and better, because the fossil fuels which this current civilization has been depending on for over 150 years has polluted the air with coal, with oil, with some gas. It is now coming to the place where we are going to have to do something or else we are going to have a change in the climate and we are not going to be as healthy as we could be.
Mark Victor Hansen: You re singing my song, as you know. So that’s one of your passions. What are some of your other passions expressed to a 94 year old because, if you guys don’t mind, not only have Art and I done a book, but Thomas Nelson, our publisher, one of the world’s biggest, has sold 300 million bibles. They are a pretty serious company, a multi-million dollar company. They want us also to do a day in the life of a 94 year old. Art and I have agreed that the title I am going to put on
it is Yes, I’m Still Alive because people walk up to my dear friend, Art, and what do they say to you, Art?
Art Linkletter: They say a lot of funny things. They say, Didn’t you used to be Art Linkletter?
Mark Victor Hansen: Or, You look like Art Linkletter, but he’s dead a long time.
Art Linkletter: One ady said, Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Art Linkletter? I said, People do all the time. She said. I bet it makes you mad, doesn’t it.
Mark Victor Hansen: So what are your passions other than Solargenix, sir?
Art Linkletter: My principal passion in life, all together and all around, is my family. I am a guy who is an abandoned orphan, never had brothers or sisters, never knew who my parents were, and I was determined to have a whole bunch of kids, and a
wonderful wife. I found one and I have kept her for 70 years. We had five children, eight grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren, and now we have some husbands and wives that have extended the family. So, I get them all together,
which I do every year for a week, so that they all know each other.
They come from all over, from Indonesia, New York City, Washington, all kinds of places. I bring them to a place like a resort and we take over the place and spend the whole week together. That is my joy in life.
I like to see those kids develop and start in businesses. All of my grandchildren have businesses and I am a partner in every single one of them. I help them financially, by turning up, giving them the wisdom of an old pro in the business of capitals system.
I have a wonderful wife whom I adore. We have never had an argument in 70 years that was serious. We have traveled all over the world. We have traveled to every part of the country where I am going to speak, Africa, Russia, India, China, South America. We just came back from the maiden voyage on the Queen Mary II, and I lectured on the ship. Then, of course, that family keeps me on my toes.
Mark Victor Hansen: Do you know any other 94 year old who is as active as you? You and I interviewed 38 superstars, one of your great friends, Jack LaLanne, who is 92 and can still do 200 pushups in 2 minutes. Do you know of anyone else as active as you and Jack LaLanne.?
Art Linkletter: Well, let me think. No, I don’t. I know some very prominent 94 year olds who are very successful and do their business well or their profession greatly, but not very many who have had as many lives as I’ve had. I’ve had three different lives,
have written three different autobiographies.
Mark Victor Hansen: Talk about that for a second because you say to write one every 20 years.
Art Linkletter: Well, every 20 years in my life, or right around there, my life changes. The first 20 years, I was a poor kid living with people who didn’t know how to make money or keep it. He was a minister and he was busy saving souls. In fact, he saved souls every day of the week because when he wasn’t preaching on Sunday, he was a shoemaker. So, you can save souls the whole seven days.
But anyway, the point is that the first 20 years of my life, I had to work for everything I got. I graduated from high school at 16. I was too young and I didn’t want to start some college that I couldn’t afford to go to anyway, so I became a hobo and rode the freight trains. I was a sailor on ships, and for a couple of years, I was just wandering around the world making my living and learning how to be independent, how to walk into a town with no contacts and very little talent and make out. So, that was the first 20 years.
The second 20, I discovered radio, television, movies, and all the good things of life. I became well-to-do, wealthy, became famous in the United States and also in parts of the world where they published English things.
Then, about 25 years ago, I had a terrible tragedy that changed my life again. I had a beautiful daughter, 20 years old, who took her life under the influence of LSD during one of the many drug epidemics we were suffering through at that time and today, too. When that happened, it struck a blow to my heart as it would to any parent.
She leaped from her apartment building and my great friend and mentor, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a hugely popular minister from the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, called me from the other coast to tell me that he thought that the Lord
had some new plans for me.
I said, What do you mean? He said, The country knows you as a part of the American family. You have been coming into their homes for over 30 years on all three networks, and you are not an actor, you are not a singer, and you are not a professional clown, or anything. You are just a guy who likes to talk to people. So, they feel like you are one of them.
He said, They need your help because a drug epidemic is developing in the country and the American kids who already have everything want more. They want to be feeling good all of the time and they found out taking drugs maybe gave them a kick in
the pants so to speak, mentally and socially, without knowing what the price of that was going to be. He said, You can help talk as no policeman, no sociologist, no doctor can talk. You are a man who has just suffered a terrible tragedy and you want to talk to the kids and their parents about what drugs can do to a family and to a person.
I took him seriously and, after I talked to Lois, I began to find out everything I could from important people about what drugs are because I didn’t know anything about them at all. Then I began to lecture on drugs and that took me into a whole new world, a world of hurting people, a world of crime. I talked to prisons. I talked to missionaries.
Mark Victor Hansen: Did you ever get to talk to any drug lords.
Art Linkletter: Oh, yes, sure I did.
Mark Victor Hansen: What did they tell you, go stick it?
Art Linkletter: No, they knew that I was talking the truth. You see there are many different kinds of drug lords. There are the mean old merchants who are just thugs taking advantage of this opportunity to make money. Then there are ones who have become
drug addicts themselves, and they get into the business of supplying it. That’s
an entirely different group.
Then there are the ones who are in prison and who are suffering the Justice Department’s penalties for being into drugs. When I talked to them in the penitentiaries, they were very sympathetic.
They knew I was trying to do everybody good. I wasn’t blaming them. I wasn’t demeaning them. I wasn’t criticizing them. I was saying that it’s a terrible thing and it is easy to become hooked on drugs, so let’s talk about a way to get out of it. They had respect for me and they knew that I was speaking the truth.
So that took me into a whole new world. After many years of working in the drug abuse business, I began writing books, of course, along about then.
I began also doing things in education and I was making enough money in my lectures and so forth to become chairman of a big, international Alzheimer Research Foundation for the poor older people who are losing their minds. Then I began to work in the universities and speaking to the young people about life, what is success, what is happiness. It is not necessarily money, fame, or power. It is finding what you love to do, being with the people you love to be with, and doing something that matters. So that in brief were the three different signs.
When you showed up on the field to do this new book, Making the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life, I was prepared because I had been through all of the things as a person, not as somebody who read about it, but, as a person. I had been intimately connected with everything that has to do with making your life meaningful.
