A Reporter’s Life, Peter Jennings

The Book of the Week is “A Reporter’s Life, Peter Jennings” edited by Kate Darnton, Kayce Freed Jennings & Lynn Sherr, published in 2007. This is a compilation of selected contents of interviews with the late ABC anchorman and documentary writer Peter Jennings, of people who knew him.

Peter Jennings’ father was a famous Canadian radio broadcaster. He mentored and primed his son to be the larger-than-life information provider he became to millions of TV viewers. In 1963, Jennings began to co-anchor a fifteen-minute TV news show at dinner time, but his lack of formal education and experience became apparent after a while. So in November 1967, he went on-location, gathering news globally. In 1970, he began to open the ABC bureau in Beirut, a cosmopolitan city until the start of its civil war in 1975. In the interest of fairness, Jennings got the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He became an expert on the Middle East. This played a large role in why he was able to scoop the story of the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and get a tremendous career boost.

Jennings was the consummate passionate, professional workaholic perfectionist. He politely cajoled people into answering his questions instead of interrupting them or aggressively pushing for a “gotcha” response. He was into fact-checking– he preferred to get a story right and be second reporting it than get it wrong and report it first. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, which he acquired through reading and talking to everyone, everyone he met. This gave him background on any and all stories he gathered and reported on. In summer 1983, ABC’s ratings caught up to NBC’s and CBS’s, and overtook them for a long time.

In 1994, Jennings made people pay attention to the genocide in Bosnia. He hated tabloid stories. When he was pressured to do them, he would try to educate rather than just gossip. During the O.J. Simpson trial, he showed the race relations aspect of the story. Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information about one of TV’s best journalists of a bygone era.

Caribbean Time Bomb

The Book of the Week is “Caribbean Time Bomb” by Robert Coram, published in 1993. This is a book on Antigua describing the Bird family’s dictatorship in the second half of the twentieth century.

Antigua’s history is largely similar to that of Haiti– an eastern Caribbean island with sugar plantations, dictators and generous financial aid from the United States to ward off overtures from nearby Communist Cuba.

In 1674, Antigua became a colony of Great Britain, whose military kept slave uprisings at bay. Abolitionism in 1834 saw the slaves freed but they had no where else to go, and needed jobs. Therefore, plantation owners got away with paying them slave wages, and didn’t have to feed, house and clothe them.

In 1951, the unions extracted major concessions from management, thanks to V.C. Bird. However, in 1968, he had his law enforcement team spray tear gas at protesting workers. Tim Hector, a journalist/activist/newspaper publisher educated the workers on what to do.

In the 1970’s, Antigua’s economy switched from one based on sugar plantations to that on tourism. The nation achieved independence in 1981, but there was still plenty of black-on-black violence and racial tension with wealthy white tourists.

In the next few decades, the country became a source of huge scandals perpetrated by the government, some of which were clandestinely aided and abetted by the CIA. It also harbored foreign-national white-collar criminals on the run. There was excessive money to be made in infrastructure projects whose planners (corrupt government workers) lined their own pockets with public funds and fed their own egos.  There was no shortage of greed, incompetence, criminality, cost overruns and delays.

Read the book to learn of the Sovereign Order of New Aragon, the would-be aristocracy of Antigua’s sister island of Redonda, the environmental destruction of it and its other sister island, Barbuda, plus the reasons the Birds were able to maintain their stranglehold on power in Antigua for so long, despite its unbelievably bad financial condition.

Act One

The Book of the Week is “Act One” by Moss Hart, published in 1959.

In his teen years in the 1920’s, the author had a passionate desire to work in the theater on Broadway in some capacity. However, his childhood of dire poverty, limited formal education and dysfunctional family were hardships he had to overcome to achieve his dream.

It was a major triumph for him to snag the position of office boy for a booking agent by a random twist of fate. However, he tempted fate too early. He then tried his hand at acting. He was an eighteen-year-old playing the role of a sixty-year-old man. When that gig ended, another chance occurrence with an acquaintance led him to directing plays in the evenings, and slaving away as a social director at various summer camps for several years, while plugging away at the part of aspiring playwright.

Read the book to learn all the sordid tribulations Hart endured in order to find fortune and fame, as well as the secret to how he fixed the third act of his first Broadway play, and how he came to be assisted by one of the great playwrights of his generation.

My Wild World

The Book of the Week is “My Wild World” by Joan Embery With Denise Demong, published in 1980. This is the career memoir of an animal lover and trainer.
The San Diego Zoo was founded in 1916. In the late 1960’s, the author went to work for the Children’s Zoo there. An entry-level position normally involves lots of dirty work.
By early 1970, Embery was a public relations representative for the zoo. She went on numerous TV shows such as “What’s My Line” and “The Steve Allen Show” to promote the animals. One of her signature feats was training Carol the elephant to paint by holding a brush with her trunk.
Training animals is challenging and entertaining, but can also be a frustrating, dangerous business. Lots of behind-the-scenes work goes into simply displaying animals at a zoo; never mind animal shows. Many specialists are involved, including a lawyer (in the United States, of course), veterinarians, pathologists and behaviorists.

In 1969, the San Diego Zoo began to build the Wild Animal Park, a monorail ride for visitors that shows wild animals in their natural habitat. A major issue always associated with animals is finding sufficient space for housing them. The Siberian tiger can weigh as much as 800 lbs, and an elephant gains about 60 lbs a month when it is maturing. Various birth control methods are employed to minimize overbreeding.

In the early 1980’s, a computer database was initiated to the facilitate the exchange of animals among zoological establishments, to foster the reproduction of endangered animals.

Read the book to learn of the author’s experiences working and performing with, and serving as owner of, exotic animals such as pachyderms, reptiles, marsupials, predatory cats, and more.

Up Late With Joe Franklin

The Book of the Week is “Up Late With Joe Franklin” by Joe Franklin with R.J. Marx, published in 1995. This is the career memoir of an entertainment jockey.

Franklin started his career in radio, playing old records. He was a compulsive hoarder of them. When he moved to television, he introduced old movies. Then he became a late, late night talk show host. Although Franklin had popular shows that ran for years and years, fewer people have heard of him than of other talk show hosts because his shows ran at 1am or later.

Read the book to learn how Franklin achieved his entertainment success, and a little trivia about tens (out of hundreds) of the celebrity-guests Franklin had on his shows, which ones he interviewed before they were famous, and the ones he claims he made famous.