RIP Art Linkletter

[tugmoose]

Ya woulda had me on this one.

[cryptique]

His is one of those obits about which I thought "He was still alive?"

[LouieB]

His is one of those obits about which I thought "He was still alive?"

That is what I thought. He has been out of the public arena for a long time. I am going to guess most people here have no idea who he is/was. He left the air in 1970.

 

The "kids say the darnest things" segments on his show used to be one of my favorite things ever growing up.

 

LouieB

[cryptique]

I first knew about him from the neighbors' copy of The Game of Life, which was emblazoned with his face.

[tugmoose]

When I was growing up he and Authur Godfrey were guys you knew used to be famous for something, but were pretty much down to their last shot on TV and basically reduced to pitch men. Kinda like Pat Boone.

[Oil Can Boyd]

But what a crazy life he lived before all that TV stuff. As one of my friends said, he lived the sort of life that Tom Waits writes about. From a different obit:

 

Gordon Arthur Kelly was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Before he was a month old he was abandoned by his parents and adopted by Fulton John and Mary Metzler Linkletter, a middle-age couple whose two children had died. It was not until he was 12, while rummaging through his father’s desk, that he discovered he was adopted.

 

In his autobiography Mr. Linkletter recalled his adoptive father, a one-legged cobbler and itinerant evangelist, as “a strange, uncompromising man whose main interest in life was the Bible.’’ The family prayed and performed on street corners, with Art playing the triangle.

 

By the time Art was 5 the family had moved to an unpaved adobe section of San Diego. As a child he took on any job he could find. At one point he sorted through lemons left abandoned in piles outside a packing plant, cleaned them, and sold them for 6 cents a dozen.

 

Mr. Linkletter decided to see the world after he graduated from high school at 16. With $10 in his pocket, he rode freight trains and hitchhiked around the country, working as a meatpacker, a harvester, and a busboy in a roadhouse. A fast typist, he found work in a Wall Street bank just in time to watch the stock market crash in 1929. He also shipped out to Hawaii and Rio de Janeiro as a merchant seaman.

[LouieB]

When I was growing up he and Authur Godfrey were guys you knew used to be famous for something, but were pretty much down to their last shot on TV and basically reduced to pitch men. Kinda like Pat Boone.

Yea, except Pat Boone had been a singer, whereas the other guys were radio and then TV stars who had had variety type shows. I did not know those details about Linklater, that is interesting...

 

LouieB