Memories of Art Linkletter

[Jerry Peterson]

Art who?

One wouldn’t have asked that a half-century ago. Then Art Linkletter was everywhere – on radio and television, in bookstores, he even appeared in two movies. Linkletter also was a regular on the lecture circuit. For a fee, he’d come to your organization’s convention and regale your members for 45 minutes with stories drawn from his life and his television shows.

The man was born 97 years ago in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He was adopted by an itinerant preacher and his wife, Fulton and Mary Linkletter. The family moved to San Diego, California, when Linkletter was five. He grew up there and eventually attended what is now San Diego State University, intending to become an English teacher. But the local radio station offered Linkletter an announcing job. He took it, he said, because it paid better than teaching would.

Linkletter jumped to a station in San Francisco and then Los Angeles where he hit it big when John Guedel created a radio show for him called People Are Funny, an audience participation show with contests and gags.

NBC executives liked Linkletter’s audition tape and bought the show, put it on in 1942. It became a monster success.

People Are Funny ran until 1960. On television, the program aired from 1954 to 1961.

Three years after Linkletter launched People Are Funny on NBC, he launched House Party on CBS, a gentler version of People Are Funny that aired five days a week on radio. House Party, too, moved to television, running from 1952 to 1969. The best and most popular segment featured Linkletter interviewing 5- to 10-year-olds kids. He would sit with them so he was on their eye level, and he would draw out from them the wildest things.

One boy said his father was a policeman, to which Linkletter asked, “What does he do as a policeman?”

“He arrests lots of burglars,” the boy said.

“Does your mother ever worry about the risks?” Linkletter asked.

“Naw, she thinks it’s great,” he answered. “He brings home rings and bracelets and jewelry almost every week.”

The boy’s parents probably wished television had never been invented.

Eventually parents began coaching their children before they went to the studio. When Linkletter found out, he came up with a question that he’d often ask: “What one thing did your parents tell you not to say?”

And all the juicy stuff would roll out.

Linkletter edited the best of these interviews into a book titled Kids Say the Darndest Things!, and Peanuts’ Charles Schulz illustrated it. A huge bestseller as was the sequel Kids Still Say the Darndest Things. Those books came out in 1957 and 1962.

Linkletter went on to write 17 books, including two autobiographies, Confessions of a Happy Man (1960) and I Didn’t Do It Alone (1980).

Life was not always good to Linkletter. His daughter, Diane, became a drug addict. He reached out to her time and again to no avail. She committed suicide in 1969 at age 20 – leaped to her death from her sixth-floor apartment.

Linkletter’s response was to go on an anti-drug crusade. He used his popularity to get families to look at what LSD and cocaine were doing to their adult children. He spoke out of his grief.

I met Linkletter a month after his daughter had killed herself, when he had come to Kansas City to speak to the National Association of Farm Broadcasters convention. We sat outside the ballroom for 20 minutes and talked – he talked – while my tape recorder ran. That was a difficult interview to edit.

There was no laughter here.

Linkletter cut a record, We Love You, Call Collect, before his daughter’s death. It featured a discussion of permissiveness in the society of the 1960s and included a rebuttal by Diane, called Dear Mom and Dad. The record was released after her suicide and sold 275,000 copies in eight weeks. It won a Grammy in 1970 for Best Spoken Word Recording.