Seminar of the Century

Art Linkletter

• Introduction by T Harv Eker
• Art Linkletter

Introduction by T Harv Eker

T Harv Eker: Okay. So I wanna get this deal going this afternoon because we have 2 outstanding presenters for you. Hey, have they been outstanding so far?

Audience: Yes!

T Harv Eker: Unbelievable, huh? Alright. So let's get everybody seated here. If I can call you down, come be over here and get seated so that you’re not disturbing as you come in. I appreciate that very much. That’ll be great. Okay. So, you met this gentleman this morning, and it was just very quickie for a specific reason, but you need to know who this gentleman is because it’s an honor, a true honor, to have him here. His background is as spectacular as any man I’ve ever met. He was actually abandoned as an orphan in the wilderness of North Saskatchewan in a tiny town called Moose Jaw. Anybody familiar with that?

Audience: Yes!

T Harv Eker: And since then, he has become a worldwide known broadcaster, having originated to the longest shows in broadcasting history, the first being People Are Funny. Raise your hands if you ever heard of that. Yes?

Audience: Yes!

T Harv Eker: He has also written 28, what’s the word, please?

Audience: Twenty-eight!

T Harv Eker: Twenty-eight books, the latest being a bestseller with Mark Victor Hansen, and that one’s called, How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life, and this is an encyclopedia of information guiding people of all ages towards a successful, happy life. Good or good?

Audience: Yes!

T Harv Eker: And this man knows, I mean, if you spend any time with him like I’ve fortunate to spend a little bit, you can actually, just being around him, he has an energy of wisdom, an energy of sincerity, an energy of heart, and he actually doesn’t say he is even a presenter. He is a conversationalist. What is he?

Audience: A conversationalist!

T Harv Eker: And he can talk to anybody at any point in time. He’s just a sweetheart. He has done work in Washington for over 40 years including working with the past four presidents in special capacities. He worked with Eisenhower for physical education, Nixon for drug abuse, Ford for education, and now President Bush as a member on Civil Council for Volunteering. He is a great-grandfather of 17 and a grandfather of nine, so he is very interested in our future, and especially in our Social Security methodology. And he is also a pied piper for America’s children, having interviewed over 27,000. How many, please?

Audience: Twenty-seven thousand!

T Harv Eker: Can you imagine that? Twenty-seven thousand kids for his TV show called Kids Say the Darndest Things. You know, I asked him his age, and I don’t know if he’s gonna tell you so I will. I said, “Art, how old are you?” And he said, “I’m celebrating the 45th anniversary of my 50th birthday.” How about a deserved, honorable incredible welcome, none other than Mr. Art Linkletter!

Art Linkletter

Hi! Hi! They’re gonna bring that up here.

I got it.

Thank you. Thank you.

Keep a little off to be careful.

When you’re 95, you’re entitled to sit down, rest. What a nice welcome. What a flattering introduction, just the way I wrote it. No, I didn’t, because he talked a little too long. When I have an audience like this, I can’t wait to get out here. This is how I live and breathe, and have for the last 70 years. And I’m one of the few who have gotten the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement Award, not just for a show but for a whole lifetime achievement, and I’m very proud of that.

Incidentally, I could use a little flattery this afternoon because this kind of thing happens to me: I got into the hotel. A white-haired old man on a cane shuffled over and he said, “You’re Art Linkletter?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Do you know me? Do you remember me?” I said, “No.” He said, “I was on your show when I was five.”

Where did it go? That’s what I wanna know? Where did it go? Of course, I’ve had all kinds of introductions. My favorite was one of my great-grandchildren, 10-year-old Ian, and he came up to me one day and he said, “Grandpa, could you come out to my school and talk to my class, so I can be a big shot out there?” I said, “Of course.” He said, “For nothing.” I said, “Yes, for nothing.” I do that sometimes.

And so we went out, and he got up. “Oh by the way,” he said, “What shall I say to introduce you?” I said, “Ian, I’ve interviewed 27,000 boys and girls your age. I’ve never told them what to say, and I’m very seldom disappointed in the original and something that I couldn’t have thought of if I’d wanted to. So you just say anything you want.” So he walked out in front of the kids. He said, “This is my great-grandfather, Art Linkletter. He’s gonna be 92 years of age, and he’s still alive.”

And that was a wonderful thing, to be alive. Because you see, as you get older, it’s not how old are you but how are you old? Some people are old at 40. Some people are young at 75. George Burns was 90 years of age when the judge asked him in a paternity suit, he said, “I don’t understand how a man of your age can satisfy a girl of 28.” And George said, “Well, about twice a month.” And he said, “When I was 65, I was still having pimples.”

But when you’re getting old, you have to figure out just exactly how you’re gonna make the most of it. There are gonna be people who are gonna be tough on you, and there are gonna be people who are gonna help you. And of all the things you wanna do, you wanna live as long as you can. And when people ask me what is my secret of living for 95 years, I say, “It’s very simple. Don’t die.”

But there is more to it than that. As a matter of fact, I have recently been notified by my doctor that I’m good for another 50 years, only 10 of them alive. But I do plan on living to be a hundred. I’ve got a scheme. I notified one of my agents to book me for a paid professional speech in Washington, D.C. on July 17th when I get to be a hundred, and I’m gonna speak on my hundredth birthday, and that means I can’t break a contract, so I’m gonna live now five more years that I know about. That’s the way to do it.

So, today, we’re gonna talk about something not so much business. We’ll talk a little business because you’re here to learn ways to satisfy the urge to do better, be better, and get the things that we want out of life, and I think you’ve had some wonderful talks. My partner, Mr. Hansen, gave a thrilling talk this morning, and you worked harder than he did. He was having you say his speech, wasn’t he? How many say aye? Aye! Say no? No! Sit down, stand up, scream. God, the wind was flying with all of the work.

You don’t have to do anything except don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, throw up on your neighbor, not me. I have been doing this now for a lot years. I started in about 1915 when I was three years of age and my folks moved away from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where I was born, and we came to San Diego, California. What a wonderful move because then, I became a lifeguard, and I was a swimmer, and I had warm weather instead of the cold weather of the North.

I grew up as a Californian, and I never had a worry in the world except would we have enough money because he was—Oh, I jumped a little thing, and that is that I was abandoned there, and my own parents whom I never knew, never knew their name, never knew anything about them, had gone back to the big city where they came from and where it was embarrassing in those days to have a child when you weren’t married. Ha ha, how time has changed. Now, they give you a medal. And if it’s the same sex, they give you an honorarium.

But nevertheless, the little item in a Moose Jaw newspaper brought out some lookers to see who was available, and this old couple in their middle 50s, was a preacher and a shoemaker, childless, came down, and when they saw me, I hate to say this, they were captivated by my smile, my dry diapers, and a lot of other charming things, and I was adopted, and I became a preacher’s kid.

Now, I wanna tell you fellows, especially, since you are—are there any preacher’s kids here today? Uh-huh. Well, let me tell you about it. When you’re a preacher’s boy, everybody expects you to be kind of a sissy or a do-gooder Dewey, nicey-nicey guy, and I had a lot of fistfights to prove that I wasn’t, and I had a lot of other things that happened to me.

My father as a preacher prayed every mealtime for the food, and his preaching and his prayer could have won him a whole chapter in the Guinness Book of Records. To give you an idea of how long he talked every day three times a day, I was 14 years of age before a bite of really hot food passed through my lips. I would sit there with my eyes squinched closed watching the gravy congeal while he was praising the Lord, and later on whenever I talked to children, I often asked them whether or not they had prayers at mealtime. One little boy gave me a great answer. He said, “No, we don’t pray at mealtime. My mother’s a good cook,” which brings me to the subject of kids.

You know, I invented children in 1942. Now, children were around but they weren’t on radio, which was the big thing that I was in at that time. And radio meant that I, for the first person, had a child on the show who was not a singer, an actor, an acrobat or some kind of a special kid who knew everything about everything, just a plain ordinary kid, and here’s how it happened.

They had invented a new kind of a thing called the tape recorder. That was brand new. It was a great big machine like a refrigerator, and it looked like a recording machine. And I was home in San Francisco where I had a show on the air every Sunday night called Who’s Dancing Tonight? at the St. Francis Hotel, and I was practicing my voice to make it sound sexy, and I played it back.

And my son Jack, who is now 70, walked in the door. He’d come back from kindergarten, the first day he’d ever gone to school. So I said, “Come on over here, Jack,” and I put the microphone, it was about this big, I put it in front of him and I said, “Tell me what you did today, Jack.” He said, “I went to school for the first time.” I said, “How did you like it?” He said, “I ain’t goin’ back.”

I said, “Why aren’t you going back?” And he said, “Gee dad, I can’t read, I can’t write, and they won’t let me talk. Why should I go back?” But he went back, and I played that record on a San Francisco station, KFRC, on Sunday night, and what that did for me was mail came in from all around Northern California saying, “What a wonderful thing to hear a kid talking to his daddy about just anything instead of having a written script and all kinds of special show business things.”

And so I thought, “Well, that's a good idea. I better get a show.” But I only had one kid, so I went home to have a discussion with my wife. And I’m a pretty good salesman, so I said, “Honey, you know, in show business, there are two important people. There’s the performer and there's the producer. Now, I’m the performer and you’re gonna be the producer.” She said, “The producer of what?” I said, “More children. I have to have all kinds of children for a new program I’m gonna do.”

Well, we worked that out and we had four more. So we had five children, but I had to had have more help than that. So, by now I’m down in Hollywood. I have a coast-to-coast show for General Electric five days a week on CBS called The House Party. It was the first magazine show that Oprah is now making 200 million dollars a week or whatever she gets, and I didn’t. But it was the idea of presenting things that housewives at home would like to see.

Well, the children had to be gotten from somewhere. I couldn’t provide all the children. It was exhausting. Pleasant, but exhausting. And so I went to the Board of Education and I said, “I’d like to go into the school system and take four children out of a different class every day picked by the teacher in the class, and we won’t rehearse them, we won’t tell them what to say, and we will give them, the school, a nice radio set and later a television set for the class.”

So, that's the way it worked. Now, I was at the mercy of the teacher for her to pick the right children for me so I would have good lively children. So I thought what I should do would be to write a letter, which was duplicated and sent to every teacher about a week before she picked the children. And what that letter said was this.

“Thank you very much for doing this educational and parental and family thing which is so very important to our civilization.” And I said, “I wish that you’d do me the favor and help yourself by picking the four children out of your class that you would most like to have out of the room for a few blessed hours.” I wanted the rascals. I didn’t want some little nerd who never said anything or did anything. I wanted the ones that were like I had been, with my hand up and always doing something, and I’ll give you an example of the kind of kid I got.

A 6-year-old boy arrived, and I said, “Why do you think the teacher picked you to be on the program today?” He said, ”I’m the smartest kid in the class.” I said, “The teacher tell you that?” He said, “No, I noticed it myself.” Now, when the kid gets home and tells his mother and dad that he’s been asked to be—and I gotta write a letter to thank you, approval, so that we may have him, they thought he was the brightest and the best and all the good things, and he probably was all those good things, but he was my guy.

And in the next 27 years, I tell you I had such a wonderful time learning the language of children, being a part of children’s lives. And I have written a book that was number one on the nonfiction bestseller list in the United States for two years called Kids Say the Darndest Things. There was never a show by that name. It was part of The House Party.

It was the last five minutes of the House Party, and I had kids from the kindergarten until the sixth grade. And in that spread of time, I had all the difference in the world, for maybe like the difference between somebody 16 and somebody 30, because they were learning so much between kindergarten and the other.

And of course, with all the wonderful things that they think of, I would often ask them, of course, how their mother and daddy met and fell in love. Did they ever hear about it? One of the boys, being in Hollywood, he said, “Which daddy do you want?” And I said, “We’ll take the last one.” “Well,” he said, “Oh, that one.” He said, “My mother was taking a bath that Saturday morning and the doorbell rang and I answered it, and there was a strange man there, and I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I wanna see your mother,’ so I let him.” I didn’t ask him how they fell in love but how they met.

Another one said, my mother was happily married, and she is married to a doctor. And I said, “What’s the best thing about that?” “Well,” he said, “Doctors are nice people but there’s one thing she doesn’t like about him being a doctor.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “She doesn’t like at midnight if the bell rings and the phone rings, and he has to get up out of bed and go get in bed with a patient.” He had the doctor pretty well figured, I think, on that.

And of course, I asked a little girl at one time, a 7-year-old girl, and I said, “Would you have any brothers and sisters?” She said, “Two brothers and a sister.” I said, “What’s the most fun for you around the house?” She said, “I get to wake up my little brother every morning.” I said, “What do you do?” She said, “I take the cat, I take it down to his bedroom and open the door and throw the cat in.” I said, “Well, how is that fun?” She said, “He sleeps with the dog.”

These were the wonderful, little homely things. And another little boy, I said to him, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” He said, “I have four brothers and three sisters.” “Wow,” I said, “That’s a gang. What’s the main problem in the house with that many children?” He said, “We only have one bathroom and there's not a lot of hot water in the morning, and every morning there's a big fight to see who gets in there before the hot water runs out.” Hasn’t that happened? And I said to him, “Do you like a hot shower?” He said, “I never had one.”

You see? So it wasn’t so much jokes as it was the realization that these kids, as all other kids, lived the things that were fun around the house. And that brought me, of course, to the attention of a lot of educators who were grateful that I was working with children, and in the last part of my life, I have been on the board of trustees of colleges and universities, in Springfield College in Massachusetts and the Pepperdine College in Southern California, and as a matter of fact, I have now talked at so many commencement addresses for colleges that I have 18 honorary doctorates.

Think of that. And when people ask me, what do I get with an honorary doctorate, in English and all the rest from all these universities, I’d say, “Well, it’s a wonderful thing. It gets me a letter every week from those 18 colleges asking for money.” That's what really happens. So it sounds great but it doesn’t do everything for me.

I wanna tell you a little bit about this business of traveling as I did in my lifetime and doing shows so often that I had in my audience every day eight to nine million people. This was before we had satellites, direct television, all kinds of independent networks, the five networks themselves. There were only two networks when I started, CBS and NBC, and there were just a few independent stations. But by the time I was going full steam, we had all these stations and we had tremendous audiences. Every day I had a seven- to eight-million audience, and on Friday night for people who are funny, I had 15 million people.

And so in the 67 years that I worked on the television and the radio, I reached billions of people who got to know my voice and my figure and my life and everything about me as well as they did their own families. I appreciated that, and it made me lead a very careful life because I knew that people were looking up to me. There were lots of bad things happening in Hollywood during those years, and I was a kind of a good citizen.

And I wrote 28 books, as I say, and among them books about my life as a preacher’s kid and books about my life as an ardent worker in the churches and in education. So this has been my life, and it has been a wonderful life to know, but now that I’m 95, and I’m meeting people as I always do going down the street that they say very, very nice things to me.

It’s a reward for me knowing that I did the best I could with a small talent because I wasn’t a singer, I wasn’t a musician, I wasn’t a comedian, and I wasn’t an actor, and I have movies to prove that. But I did a lot of stuff that nobody else had ever done before. In radio, I was the only one who on a special event day, Navy Day in San Diego—I was radio director of the San Diego World’s Fair.

I was 25 years of age, and on Navy Day we were gonna bring the Pacific Coast Fleet of the United States Navy into San Diego Harbor. It was a live broadcast and I got the permission from CBS in New York to be the producer. Well, the fleet was to come in past Point Loma and anchor in various places in the harbor on the morning of the show, live.

But at 7:30 in the morning, I was awakened and I was told that a fog had come in just off the coast, and the fleet was anchored off the coast of California and was not going to come in. We needed that publicity. We needed the ticket-selling for the fair that was on, and we needed to have the program doing a lot of good for the community and for the fleet. So I made a decision, which you will not believe, but I made it.

I said to our crew, “We know how the ships are gonna come in. We’re on radio. Nobody can see. Let's bring the fleet into the harbor.” So we brought the whole damn fleet into the harbor, and there were people living on Point Loma who were going out of their minds because they knew it was happening because it was on radio, but they could look right out the window at the harbor and nothing was going in.

Now, of course, the press didn’t like that at all, and the next morning I had a telephone call from the admiral of the Pacific Fleet to get the hell down to Coronado and to his office. I walked in, and the admiral was a tough old bird, of course, and he said, “Linkletter, what in the hell were you thinking about?” I’d had the time to think a little. I said, “I was thinking of the pride of the Navy. In the middle west of the country are millions of taxpayers giving tax money to pay for the Navy. It couldn’t get in to its own harbor on account of just a few clouds? I wasn’t gonna let that happen.”

And I’ll never forget, he looked at me, he wrinkled his brow, and he said, “Don’t do it again.” And so I’m the only person who was not an admiral to bring the fleet into the harbor when you could do that. We did all kinds of things on the radio because you couldn’t see. If a stunt wasn’t working, we described it. Say, we introduced a lady to a skunk to give it a big surprise and she didn’t react in any way, she did on the radio.

And so I did this for all these years, and then came television. And television spoiled that fun on the radio, but it gave us all kinds of other wonderful experiences. People Are Funny was the second show. The other one was Truth or Consequences with Ralph Edwards that used people who were volunteers to go out and prove that people were funny, where the people who could be put in awkward positions could somehow get out of them. It was not as bad as the Survivors where they sent them to some islands supposedly with alligators and things, but it was all real.

The people I picked were right out of the audience. They came right up. We sent them out to do outrageous stunts. We at one time actually rented and bought a house that was gonna be for sale, set up a realty company, took prospective tenants until we found the couple we liked where the girl worked in a Broadway Hollywood department store, and we did all of that before we ever got them to win a contest that would give them a ticket to my show.

And then I picked them out, and then we rented the house to them, and they didn’t know what was gonna happen. We also had to have them have a weekend in San Francisco, and while they were gone, we stole the house. And it was gone, and when they came back they were told they could come down be on the show, the first time they even knew they were on a show because the contest was run by the Broadway Hollywood where the girl worked, had nothing to do with the show.

They came down and I said, “Anybody been out of town for the week?” They put their hands up. I said, “Go on out there because people are funny, and see if you locked the doors, had all the windows shut, had all the lights off, turned off the water, and for each thing that you did right we’re gonna give you a hundred dollars.”

So then we had cameras out there, and when they got out there and there was nothing but pipes sticking up where their house was, I never saw such a look in my life on people’s faces. They knew they were had and they came back, and we said, “Well,” we played it straight, we said, “Somebody must have stolen the house. So we’ll give you a year’s free rent on a better house in San Fernando Valley if you can find your house.”

And they said, “Where would we go to find our house?” I said, “Go to the police department to the Department of Missing Houses.” Well, they could do no good. And so for six weeks we sent them out in helicopters and balloons, we sent them out with bloodhounds, and on the final week, we had a blank lot next to our studio on Hollywood Boulevard, and when they came and went in, there was a big tent. It said, “Madame La Zonga, Fortune Teller.”

And so we said, “Did you find the house?” “No.” We said, “Well, did you notice anything when you came in?” They said, “Well, there’s a big, something out of a carnival.” And I said, “That’s Madame La Zonga, fortune teller. Why don’t you go in and see if she can tell you where the house is?” You know where the house was? In the tent!

So when they walked in they saw the house, and we paid the thing off and gave them a year’s rent and so on. But that's what we were doing every week 52 weeks a year live on coast-to-coast television for 25 years. That took a lot of doing. I mention that because we really had to have crazy people as stunt idea men.

And we had people who did some things, we took off their suit clothes in the dressing room and put a kind of a shabby suit on, sent them up to the Brown Derby at the start of the show, and they would order a special meal, and when it arrived, they were to say, “We don’t have any money. What are you gonna do?” And if the waiter was kind enough to help them out and get them out of that, they had no money, he was gonna get a trip to Hawaii and they were gonna get something.

Those were the kinds of stunts we did, and it was a great, great experience. But in the meantime, my favorite thing was the kids. I wanna tell you, the kids had me as an expert on children by the end of the 27 years. I knew how to talk to kids, and when Bill Cosby did it two years ago with me as a co-director and participant, we did a great many more shows for three years with Bill Cosby, the great black comic, and he had to take a lot of, shall we say, discipline from me.

Why? You might not realize this but a comedian is a funny man. He is not a straight man. And he was a born comic. And with kids, you have to be the straight man. They are funny. So I had to keep telling Bill, “Stop being funny and be funny with the kids!” And he learned how to do it in the three years and did a good job, but he fought that. It was very funny to see it.

In my own case, I had a lot of tricks. For instance, I learned that when kids talked about dogs, they never knew what the word “pedigree” meant, and I could fall back on that as a surefire thing. “Little kids,” I’d say, “Do you have a dog?” “Yes.” “Does it have a pedigree?” “No, we’re Catholic.”

“Do you have a dog?” “Yes.” “Does it have a pedigree?” “No, we put a kind of ointment onto their legs.” “Does your dog have a pedigree?” “We don’t think so. We tried it with the dog next door for more than a month.” And my favorite was the kid who said, “No sir, our dog doesn’t have a pedigree.” He said, “We had that cut off two weeks ago.”

So when I found something that was good, I wrote it down the road, and it was just marvelous for me to have the fun that I had with those kids. Well, time went on and I began to do other shows, some of them serious shows. I took my children, five children, we went to the Holy Land and made a special called The Linkletters.

We spent Christmas in the Holy Land at a time when they were beginning to have the real trouble between some of the more outstanding penalties where the ones who were Muslims didn’t like the Jews, and we had some very, very interesting and some dangerous times when we were in the Holy Land. But it started me on programs where I took my family to China, I took them to Africa, I took them to Egypt, and I went to Washington, D.C., where these youngsters of mine were really given a broad education in traveling and in meeting all the other kinds of people in the world.

One of them that was very interesting to me, of course, was the fact that we gave them experiences not only in traveling but in doing things for raising money for Christian schools, and we raised several million dollars to start up Christian schools and give parents who wanted their children not to go to public school during the public drug abuse program but to go to other kinds of schools.

And so this has been a great education for me, and during that time, we kept having more children and more grandchildren. We now have, in our 18 grandchildren, we have two Mormons, three Jews, two Catholics, a Buddhist, and a couple of Protestants. And all that time I figured one of us would get into heaven and get to the backdoor and let the rest of us in. So I got it covered when the time finally comes.

I want to talk a little bit about how my life changed. When people come up to me and say to me as they often do, “Didn’t you use to be Art Linkletter?” I have finally worked out a wonderful answer. I say, “Yes, I used to be Art Linkletter, but in my lifetime I have been at least three and maybe four different Art Linkletters. Which one would you like to meet?” And they say, “How is that possible?” I say, “Well, the truth of the matter is, in life, I have developed a theme for a serious talk called Life is What Happens to You While You’re Making Other Plans.”

And Phyllis Diller says it another way, funny lady. She said to me one day, “Art,” she said, “You wanna know how to make God laugh?” I said, “How do you make God laugh?” She said, “Tell him your plans.” Think a minute, in your own lives, how many of you, especially the grown and older adults, thought you’d be something else and it turned out to be entirely different?

And so it was my life. I first became the son of a poor preacher who was a shoemaker during the week between Sundays when he was a preacher, and I learned how to be a good Christian by having all kinds of experiences in the Bible and Sunday school and church school. We were very poor. We always lived in a small house with half a number as an address.

Our address was always 22-1/2 Van Dyke Avenue because we had a little house, and back at the big house they had a whole number. And we also had the rather humiliating experience of having food given to us at Christmas and Thanksgiving anonymously to be sure that we had food. And so I know now and lived as a poor boy and as a poor family, and that has led me to a great many other things that I’ve done in my life because I know what it feels to be even homeless.

Because the second part of my life was that I skipped some grades, because whoever my father was gave me some pretty good genes up here and I always had a great memory, and I skipped grades and I was graduated from high school when I was 16, not 18. I didn’t wanna go to college. I had no money and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

So I told my dad that I had been hitchhiking around Southern California, and now I was gonna spread it and hitchhike across the United States. And he was such a believer in God and in faith that I would be taken care of, a 16-year-old boy—when I think of my own boy of 16 thinking of leaving the house and going out and hitchhiking across the country, makes me shiver—but he said, “The Lord will take care of you.”

And off I went hitchhiking up to Walla Walla, Washington. And then I had to get across the Rockies, and that’s no place for a hitchhiker. But I found a group of young fellows and a few older ones who were hobos, and they taught me how to jump on freight trains, and later as I became more fluent and more experienced, how to jump on passenger trains. And so for the next two years, I was a hobo, homeless when I’d arrive in a big town like up in Minneapolis or Kansas or St. Louis. I would have no place to stay.

I would go to an employment office, and at that employment office, I would take any job that was offered. So these were the jobs that I was offered. In Minneapolis, I was offered a job as an electric arc welder in a manufacturing company, and I held that job for almost a full day. The closest I had ever been to an electric arc welder was going on a streetcar and seeing him do something with arcs on the wheels.

Then, another experience in Cincinnati, they said, “We need a busboy for the nightclub,” and I thought, I’d never been in a nightclub in my life. I figured, well, what does a busboy do? Must the people off the bus. So, I took that job. It lasted two days before the waiters lined up and decided I should be fired because I was busting them dishes and picking up the tips.

Then I went to St. Paul and had a wonderful job hanging up raw livers that had been killed 10 minutes before in hooks in a big refrigerated room, with the blood running down my arm, making 42-1/2 cents an hour, and I did this for a few weeks. So, I’d give you those three examples of how I was learning how rough and tough it is without an education, without special abilities, and yet I made out—I never stole, I never begged, and I finally got to New York, and at long last, I had talent that got me a legitimate job.

Because in high school, San Diego, I had taken a class in typewriting. Now, why would I, an athlete, a boy with a real rough bunch of friends, go into a typing job? I’ll tell you why. That's where the girls were. And I became an 80-word-a-minute typist. So when I got to New York, I went in and I got a job as a typist in a coupon collection department of the Bond Department of the National City Bank in New York on Wall Street.

I was now 17, and I was there doing that, my typing, on October 29, 1929, when the greatest depression and crash in the history of the financial market happened, and I was in the middle of it, and I thought probably it was my typing that caused the whole damn thing. But I lasted another month or two, and then I was fired from the job as well as other people did as we dived deeper into the depression.

What do you think my next job was? I was a cadet on a tourist ship going to Buenos Aires, and I was up in the crow’s nest at three o’clock in the morning watching for a light coming up the coast that the bridge couldn’t see for 10 minutes after I did, coming up as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro—and I learned a whole lot of things about those kinds of experiences before I came back, hitchhiked and rode trains back to San Diego and took the safest job I could find, and the best.

I decided I’d get into education, that I’d be a schoolteacher, and someday I’d make 300 dollars a month, because that's what they were getting in those days. When I think of how the rate scale has come up since I was born in the last hundred years—do you know that out of every 10 people, and when I was born, six of them were making less money a week than we would give a dog today. And they were also uneducated. Four out of every 10 never graduated from high school in 1912.

And every one of us who were born that year could expect to live on the average to be 47 years of age. And in my lifetime and in yours, many of you, we have advanced the gift from God of our precious moments on this earth, this life, we have gained 30 years. That is the biggest single change even counting landing men on the moon, doing heart transplants, inventing the Internet, and doing all the other tremendous things that happened. Imagine people getting 30 years of life! That's what most of you have had, 30 years of life. And that's the way it is now. The fastest-growing group of people in this country in health and who have lived the longest are in the 85 and up.

And so most of you here—I think I’ve got a chart here. I’d like to see the hands of all the people who are 35 years of age or younger. Thirty-five or younger? You have 50 years to live. That's 50 years to try different kinds of things. You will have two prime times. You will have the prime time that we take as 30 to 50, and you’ll have from 50 to 80 to try something brand new. If by then you haven’t found anything and you’re married, you can study archeology because your wife will become more interesting every year as you learn about that.

How many are 45? Let's see the 45. You have 40.6—40 years to live. Think of that as a wonderful prize from me today. Fifty-five? Anybody 55 here? Thirty-one years of life. Sixty-five? Twenty-five years. Seventy-five? Seventy-five? Fifteen. Eighty-five? Eight. And 100, three more years. Of course, the good thing about me being 95 is that I know that I will not die a young death, before I know what I’m gonna be doing.

But that gives you an idea of what you have, and now is the time to learn what you are learning and coming to these kinds of meetings to make yourself more skillful, more happy with what you choose, and also to have second choices.

And I wanna tell you something that hasn’t been mentioned that was very important in my life, and that is, work hard. If you’re very smart and you think you can get away with not working so hard, you’re losing a big edge. I came up through radio and television passing people who were smarter than me and had more talent than I had, but I would work harder and I would arrive ready and prepared to the best of my knowledge.

The second thing I learned is, on the way up through the ranks, if you can ever pick a mentor who is doing better and may be doing extremely well, try to make friends. He will like to help you out. People like myself now who are successful are looking for young people in their 20s and 30s to help through college, to help with advising, so what they can do. Several of them are giving up already, you see, they’re going over there to get jobs.

I have had five important mentors who had a lot to do with my being successful early, and one of the first of them was Walt Disney. I was doing a local show in San Francisco. I heard that he was coming up there to present the first long full-length cartoon, colored, and I got my equipment and I went to the publicity meeting on top of the Fairmont Hotel to meet Walt Disney.

When I got there, there was a man changing the tables and fixing the chairs, and I said, “When does Walt Disney arrive?” He said, “I’m Walt Disney.” I said, “What are you doing, fixing chairs?” He said, “Well, hell, somebody has to. Why shouldn’t I? It’s the way I want, and I always come early, and I always will do anything that I can do.” We became friends.

He became a supporter of mine, moved me into such things as broadcasting the Olympic Games in Lake Tahoe. We broadcasted finally the opening of Disneyland, and he said, “Art, I want you to be the host of the opening day show of Disneyland.” And I said, “Okay, that's wonderful.” He said, “I have a problem. I have mortgaged my house, mortgaged the studio, and I don’t think I can afford you,” because I was now doing shows on all three networks every week, CBS, NBC and ABC.

But I alone among almost all of the stars in Hollywood never had an agent, because I couldn’t have an agent when I started because I couldn’t find one who would take 10% of 15 dollars. And by the time I got up to the big money, I knew I could sell myself, and I said, “Why can’t you talk to me?” He said, “Well, I always negotiate, and you’re a friend of mine. We’ve traveled to Europe and we’ve been every place.”

He said, “Gosh, couldn’t you get an agent?” I said, “Well, let's try what your problem is with me.” He said, “Well, in the first place, I can’t afford you. I’ve overspent and I’ve mortgaged everything, and I just can’t afford you.” I said, “That's your mistake. I’ll do it for scale, 150 dollars.” He said, “You will?” I said, “Of course, it’s a wonderful thing, why not?” And he said, “Well, that's great.” I said, “Of course, you could do something for me.”

I said, “I’ve been in several big world’s fairs, and I know that one of the best concessions at a big fair is the photographic concession, and I’ll pay you whatever it costs in the concession but I would like to have the photographing of all films and the sale of all cameras in Disneyland for 10 years.” He said, “I now see why you do not have an agent.” That was worth two million dollars.

A little later, one of my mentors was the inventor of the supertanker, a billionaire I met in Hollywood. We became good friends and I traveled all over the world with him, became a partner in some of his smaller ventures, and he told me how to invest money. He had invented a new way to travel—made supertankers. He just made them bigger and put a few extra engines in, and he made contracts with Shell and others.

Then, my next one was Henry Kaiser. I was doing radio shows in San Francisco and Henry Kaiser was building Liberty ships to take the supplies to our men overseas in the big wars in the Far East. He called me one day, and he said, “Art, I’d like to hire you to get women to come down and do welding on Liberty ships because I haven’t enough welders. They were all drafted and they’re overseas in the engineering forces for the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, and women can do welding.”

I went to work there. I got women to go welding. I became a partner of Henry Kasier, and I was able to go with him for the next eight or 10 years all over the world. Then, the next one of my mentors was a familiar name, Bob Hope. We became friends because we both had a lot of interests in the same kinds of things. We built moving-picture studios, we built theaters all over the country, and we were in real estate, and we did very well together.

So whenever you can make friends with somebody and get experience, can get advice, can get money at times or can get you even a job, look for it. Look for a way to impress guys in your same big business when you get into corporations, and above everything else, positive thinking, which you heard about today, is a wonderful thing.

I traveled with Norman Vincent Peale for four years and spoke to 15,000 and 18,000 people in the crowds, and I found out positive thinking is wonderful but it is not worth much unless it is followed by something else that is quite often not mentioned: Positive action. Positive thinking is great but you gotta move and you gotta take problems and you gotta pick up your phone.

I was fired as the radio director of the San Francisco World’s Fair when the chairman of the board called me and said, “Linkletter, what is going to be the opening of the World’s Fair?” And I said, “I got it all lined up.” I said, “I got the President of the United States, I got Marine Corps, I got stars.” He said, “You have no imagination. Everybody does that.” I said, “Well, what would you do?”

He said, “Go to the window and look out. What do you see?” I said, “The Golden Gate Bridge. I emceed the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge.” He said, “Well, you should have thought of it.” “Well,” I said, “How is that gonna be the opening of the fair on Treasure Island?”

He said, “If you know anything about physics, you’d know that that bridge is the longest bridge in the world. That's what we’re known for. And through those riggings coming out and holding the bridge is a westerly wind, and that wind has a humming sound as it goes past each cable. I would put microphones across the whole bridge according to the sound of each one of those cables, and we would open the fair using the Golden Gate Bridge as a harp playing California, Here We Come.”

I said, “Mr. Connick, you’re a nut.” He said, “Mr. Linkletter, you are fired.” I went home at 11 o’clock in the morning. I was out of work, the fair was opening in a month, but I knew all about fairs. I’d been through three of them. I opened my own business. Inside of three months, I had sold all the people who went to fairs who were exhibitors on running their shows, and I was making more money than Mr. Connick who fired me.

So that's what can happen making lemonade out of lemons in my own life, and you too can take those kinds of things and find ways to make them work. There are many, many other stories of my life I could tell you about, but basically is having faith and having faith in our Lord, and having the feeling that if you can help other people on your way up, you’re doing something important. Because what you do for a living is you get a living for a job, but what you do for human beings is a gift of life.

And so I got the Humanities Award two years ago from President Bush, and that was a humanities work for me for raising money for World Vision all over the world, for making films in Africa and saving the kids on AIDS in many parts of Africa. And so I became something after the death of my daughter, 20 years of age.

My darling youngest daughter jumped off a studio apartment building and killed herself under the influence of LSD. I went to Washington, and President Nixon made me a member of the Drug Abuse Commission. I then became later an ambassador to Australia under President Reagan, and that started me off a terrible tragedy, helping to save young people and make something of it as Larry King did when he had a heart problem and became a foundation for heart people.

And so, when you ask me the question as many people do, the one question I hear, “When are you gonna retire?” I say, “I have a book out called Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life. It’s a big book, full of everything from finance to sex appeal. It has your attitude. It has how to plan the years of your life from 40 on so that you have a great life, and this was dedicated to the baby boomers, 76 million, who will be getting into the retirement thing this next year.”

And that book is the book telling you about that you talked about that is a great thing for you, for your mother and dad, and for your children even, because it was made up of the top scientists in aging, and we have become the encyclopedia for how to age well, and it guarantees you 11 years, if you follow it, of life, happy successful life that you might not have had. So, that's my recommendation.

I’m gonna conclude by my answer, really, as to why I will never retire. I never wanna be what I wanna be because there's always something out there yet for me. I get a kick out of living in the here and now, but I never wanna feel I know the best way how, because there's always one hill higher with a better view, something waiting to be learned I never knew. So till my days are over, never fully fill my cup. Let me go on growing up.

So I’m telling you as you get older, don’t get old, grow old. Go back to college and take courses. Try new things. Look and see what your passion can do which is meaningful for you for the rest of your life. And I do thank you for this opportunity to spread my philosophy and my prayers for a great bunch who are doing just the right thing in the right place, and that's right now. Thank you very much.