It was the most beautiful, humble tableau of faith and religion I’d ever seen and the preacher would, after the singing, would say, “Dear God, we are gathered here on this mountain and we ask your blessing on these miners and their families. They would work in shifts trying to reach their brothers who were trapped.Īnd the snow is falling and the miners with, you know, the soot on their faces would gather around the smudge pot and pray for the survival of their friends who were trapped.Īnd I remember the song, the hymn, they sang was - I can only remember part of it - “What a friend we have in Jesus, everything to God in prayer.” And the sparks flew in the air, the snow was coming down. And we were by the smudge pot which is what the miners gathered around when they would come out of the mine.
So we used to have to - it was snowing and we had to keep the camera warm so that the oil didn’t freeze. I think there were like 28 miners trapped. I must have looked 19 or 12 and I don’t know if you can appreciate what it was like for me to be covering for CBS radio. DONAHUE: I was covering a mine disaster in Logan, West Virginia for a local television station at which place I was employed in Dayton, Ohio. And that was the backdrop of the answer he gave to that question about a turning point of insight. Phil Donahue grew up in a big Catholic family in Cleveland, studied at Notre Dame, and got into radio before he wandered into television. He’s still married to the actress Marlo Thomas, who he memorably met in public on his own set.
At 77, he still has the full handsome head of gray hair for which he was always recognizable. I met Phil Donahue at the 2013 Nantucket Project on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Above all, Phil Donahue’s choice of guests and topics respected the intelligence of the housewives of his audience, who themselves were in a coming upheaval. He presented a “gay man” to his audience as a human being. He engaged the emerging world of militant Black leaders. His very first guest was the controversial face of public atheism, Madalyn Murray O’Hair. But it wasn’t until I looked back at his work that I realized how substantive a lens it was on an entire era of social, personal and political transformation. I watched the Phil Donahue show when I was growing up. He had a front row seat on the world so many of us are now reliving through Mad Men. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Phil Donahue’s pioneering daytime talk show launched in 1967. TIPPETT: About your own moment? What was yours?
TIPPETT: Did anyone ever interview you and ask you that question? He had a professor who taught the students to think outside the box. And Turner’s, as I recall, was a professor at Brown. What did somebody say to you at one point in your life that changed your life? You could write your own or you could have someone write for you and you had, of course, final cut. DONAHUE: My wife wrote a book titled “The Right Words at the Right Time”. KRISTA TIPPETT: Well, I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and then I went to Brown which was a very strange move.