From Noah’s Ark Writer to Bestseller

It was a warm September day in San Diego, California, where I was enrolled in a freshman English class at California State Normal College. It was my first hesitant step towards becoming an English professor at some distant, unknown university, and my teacher was reading from my maiden effort at creating literature.

I lay still in the dim, dark recess of the ancient, smelling boxcar. Through the black, threatening shadows, I could make out the burly, muscular shape of a fellow hobo coming towards me . . .

Miss Florence Smith paused to look over the class in my direction. I fearfully awaited her criticism.

“Mr. Linkletter,” she said admiringly, “you are a born Noah’s Ark writer. I’ve never seen a better example. Did anyone ever tell you that before?”

“No,” I replied, “and I don’t even know what a Noah’s Ark writer is.”

“Your adjectives come in two by two!”

And thus began my painful climb towards being a writer.

Under her tutelage, with many a crumpled paper ball of discarded efforts filling my wastebasket, I entered the California Phi Beta Kappa Essay Contest for State Colleges two years later and was astounded when my entry won third prize.

And a year after that, I was tentatively (and temporarily) nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

Fortunately (or, unfortunately) this honor was withdrawn when it was discovered that I was not a U.S. citizen because my adopted parents had not completed their citizenship application.

However, in the meanwhile, encouraged by this wonderful teacher, I had written a weekly humor column in the Aztec college newspaper, and then at the urging of my classmates, wrote the Annual Musical Comedy produced by the junior class.

I had never seen a musical comedy, or even read about one, when I confidently accepted the challenge. I immediately went to the library, looked up a recent Broadway hit, Of Thee I Sing, Baby, and after a quick read, optimistically assumed I could do as well.

The play did not win a Pulitzer Prize, much to my disappointment, but it did attract the attention of a young man in the audience who was the manager of the local KGB radio station.

Several weeks later, while making Waldorf salads in the kitchen of the college cafeteria (one of a half dozen jobs that got me through college during the depression), I answered the telephone and had a life-changing conversation with Mr. Lincoln Dellar who offered me a job as a part-time radio announcer at KGB.

How many times in the next sixty years have I recalled this unexpected phone call. And how often have I reflected that life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

Two years later, after my graduation in 1934, I had moved ahead to executive positions as radio program director at KGB, and then radio director of the San Diego Centennial World’s Fair, and the Broadcast Director of the Texas Centennial World’s Fair in Dallas in 1936.

Two months before the Texas fair opened, the main attraction at the centennial was floundering with a bad script and production problems. The show was a huge outdoor presentation called “The Cavalcade of Texas.” It had been crafted by a university history professor who had little knowledge or experience with show business.

To my astonishment, the officials of the fair came to me and asked if I could rewrite and restage this gigantic production involving a 300-foot stage, 180 actors, a herd of 200 cows and a real turn-of-the-century train. Recalling my college “leap of faith,” I sprang to my typewriter and turned out a new play and suggested new kinds of staging never tried before. It was a success beyond my dreams.

The following year, I wrote a second cavalcade, “Texas Under Six Flags,” and then moved on to the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco to write and co-produce the “Cavalcade of the Golden West.”

Hollywood beckoned and I was invited by the famed MGM producer-director, Mervyn LeRoy, to an interview where he promised to get in touch with me soon with a long-term writing contract to make movies.

After this thrilling interview, I waited, and waited, . . . and waited . . . for the promised call. It never came.

Undaunted, I went on to write and co-produce (with my lifelong partner, John Guedel) two triumphant, long-lived radio and TV shows, People Are Funny, which ran on NBC weekly for nineteen years, and House Party, shown five times a week for twenty-six years on CBS.

In 1947, with all of our network shows in the top TV brackets, with two Emmy Awards, four nominations, and a Grammy Award for a talk record, I was finally ready to climb the Matterhorn of the writing world—a book! This was a long-time dream of mine, but no publisher was pushing me to try. All of my other leaps into writing had been inspired by the faith and persuasion of my teacher, my classmates, and my show business jobs. This time it was to be up to me!

So without a contract or an agent, I wrote a humorous, non-fiction, backstage book about my misadventures on People Are Funny. I mailed the manuscript to ten publishers. To my surprise and delight, Doubleday & Company sent me a contract which specified, among other things, that I personally would actively promote the book on the radio network. (Later I learned that was the only reason I got the contract.) After nine months of writing and rewriting my first book, it went on sale and did a glorious dive into the tank. I think we sold 4,500 books, most of them to my fans and family. So much for book writing.

Then several years later, I had a call from an agent in New York, named Berney Geis. He explained that his wife kept telling him about an afternoon show where a guy named Art Linkletter interviewed children. She thought it would make a good book. So did he. And finally after some serious arm-twisting, so did I.

Six million copies later and number one on the national nonfiction list for almost two years, I began to take this book-writing business seriously.

Fast forward to 2000, and my list of books is now twenty-four, all published by nationally known companies.

Somewhere, I hope, Miss Florence Smith is looking down on me, and saying, “Mr. Linkletter, you have begun to show some real talent.”

Art Linkletter