AOTA-240329 - Clay Jenkinson and spotlight on Memorial Opera House Echos of Pompeii

This week on Art on the Air, our whole show features the nationally-acclaimed humanities scholar, author, and award-winning first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, Leigh Jenkinson, who portrays other historic figures as well, plus has appeared as an expert commentator on numerous Ken Burns documentaries. Our spotlight is on Memorial Opera House's April 6th presentation of Echoes of Pompeii with Executive Director Megan Stoner. You're in the know with Esther and Mary, Art on the Air today. Stay in the know with Mary and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself with art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself with art, and show the world your heart. Welcome. You're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, WVLP 103.1 FM, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. I'm Larry Breckner of New Perspectives Photography, right alongside here with Esther Golden of The Nest in Michigan City. Aloha, everyone. We're your hosts for Art on the Air. Art on the Air is supported by an Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, South Shore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Art on the Air is heard every Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org, and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Also heard on Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP 103.1 FM, streaming live at wvlp.org, and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. on WDSO 88.3 FM. Our spotlight interviews are also heard Wednesdays on Lakeshore Public Media. Information about Art on the Air is available at our website, breck.com slash aota. That includes a complete show archive, spotlight interviews, plus our show is available on multiple podcast platforms, including NPR One. Please like us on Facebook, Art on the Air, WVLP, for information about upcoming shows and interviews. I'd like to welcome to Art on the Air spotlight, or I should say back here, is Megan Stoner, the Executive Director for Memorial Opera House, and she's been busy filling the role there, getting things going, and we have lots of things coming up. She's had some things already happening there. So, Megan, tell us about what's been going on at Memorial Opera House, first of all. Hi, I'm so glad to be here. So, we just wrapped up The Little Mermaid, and let me tell you, it was a beautiful show. Everything under the sea. Specialty lighting, you know, a score that if anybody has ever seen anything Disney will know. Just beautiful costumes. It's been wonderful. Before that, we had a sold-out Galentine's Day, a presentation of the Vagina Monologues, which was a huge fundraiser for the Memorial Opera House Foundation. So, we are so grateful to them. And before that, Elton Josh, who was just fantastic. So, we've been busy. And then the renovation stuff, they've done some stuff on the outside, but they're not doing the inside until like May. Is that correct? That's right. When we close Beautiful, the Carole King story, that is our last show before construction. So, once we close that, we are done. And yeah, so we'll see what happens. I'm excited. And I know some time ago, and you mentioned maybe in your previous interview, that you may be still looking for some staffing positions to round out your technical staff and other things like that. Are you still looking for that? Yeah, we are. We're still looking for some contract positions to work with our Young Frankenstein and our Scrooge musicals. Both will be really fun. We have a grant for Young Frankenstein that will bring some electricity onto the stage. So, it could be very, very cool for the right person. You don't necessarily have to want to be on stage, but it takes a lot of creative minds to make that the magic happen behind stage. Yeah, having come from a directing, well, actually, first as a lighting designer and then directing and producing, yeah, there's a lot of things that go into a theater that people can be involved with. And it's a great place to do. And the Opera House has been there for so many years. It's a great way for people to crack in. And even as a, quote, community theater level thing or moving into maybe the stepping stone of professional theater. Yeah. And, you know, Larry, people ask me all the time when they're going to start seeing me on stage. And I like to tell them that I have a much better face for radio. So, that's where my performing skills begin. But I will be assistant directing Scrooge when it comes up this winter. So, I will have a very big hand, but you won't see me on stage. Yes, I know. And people often said that to me about, you know, coming on stage. And I said, and I feel I had the skills and I think I have an okay. Besides having a face for radio, I think I could probably do that. But I've always been interested in pulling the whole stage picture together, making sure every aspect of it works. There's something very exciting about that. So, Megan, I think Scrooge would be the one that you could be in the background all dressed up. Then you can finally say to everybody, I did it. I took the broom. I was the janitor. You could be the Alfred Hitchcock of the Memorial Opera House. Maybe I'll make a special appearance. They called it Spiller carriers. So, you have a concert coming up that's kind of exciting. So, tell us about that. Echoes of Pompeii. Oh, my goodness. Pink Floyd. They have a spectacular lighting show that they bring in. It makes you feel like you are at a Pink Floyd concert. So, I've heard. I've never been to a Pink Floyd concert. So, I'll take what I can get. I'm very excited about Echoes. They were here last year. People loved them. They had a sold out show. We expect nothing less. So, you know, we're really excited to pack the house and just like have an awesome time. It's going to be great. Now, are they local? Or, you know, I don't know a whole lot of them. I know I'm aware of the names of them. But are they locally based? Are these people over? They come from where? Yeah, they're a regionally based group. They perform in Chicago an awful lot. And then they perform kind of like, I would say, in a 200 mile radius of us pretty frequently. So, it's not like you can't catch them. But I think their nearest performance for a couple months is over 50 miles away. So, if you were a fan, you'd have to travel and plan. And oh, my gosh, just wait a month. They're right here. And it's super easy to get to. So, you know, it's really nice that they have a really great following. And their, you know, their listeners are loyal. And I absolutely commend that. So, for those of you that are local that are just waiting to get in, you might want to get your tickets. You might want to get them. What other concert stuff do you have coming up? This will be probably later into the fall, because you have to wait until after the renovation. Yes, we have brand new to us, the Ultimate Doors, which is a Doors cover band. I know, I know. So, we've never had them perform before. It's the first time, as far as I know, kind of in the region that they've been up here. So, they are a nationally touring band. And yeah, I'm very excited for them. And that will be in November. And you have such a full schedule. And we're going to talk about that probably in your next interview. You have Beautiful coming up and several other things. So, but, you know, about last minute here, tell people where Opera House is located. I can't believe anyone would not know, but just in case, how they can find out tickets online, phone numbers, and things like that. Absolutely. We are located at 104 Indiana Avenue. We're a catty corner from the Courthouse in downtown Valparaiso. We have Facebook, we have Instagram, and we brand new have TikTok, because we're young and hip, right? No, my much younger, much hipper marketing director is doing that. And you can find us online at MemorialOperaHouse.com. And that's where you can get all your tickets. Megan Stone is the Executive Director for the Memorial Opera House. Thank you for coming on Art in the Air Spotlight and sharing about Echoes of Pompeii. Yeah, thank you so much, Megan. And the Spotlight Extra, the Northwest Indiana 2024 Listen to Your Mother, a series of live readings by local writers about motherhood, will be presented at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 28th at the Hobart Arts Theater. Art in the Air Spotlight and the complete one-hour program on Lakeshore Public Media is brought to you by Macaulay Real Estate in Valparaiso, Olga Patrician, Senior Broker. And as a reminder, if you'd like to have your event on Art in the Air Spotlight or have a longer feature interview, email us at aotaatbrek.com. That's aotaatbrek, B-R-E-C-H, dot com. This is Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence, and you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM and on WVLP 103.1 FM. We are pleased to welcome Clay Jenkinson to Art on the Air. Clay is a nationally acclaimed humanities scholar, an award-winning first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. He is also an author, master interviewer, moderator, documentary filmmaker, and social commentator. Clay is also the founder of both the Theodore Roosevelt Center and Listening to America, which he also brilliantly does by embarking on an Airstream journey wandering America. He is an author and has written over a dozen books, recently The Language of Cottonwoods, Essays on North Dakota. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome, Clay. I'm very delighted to be meeting you. Esther, thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. I should say I haven't yet embarked in my Airstream. I'll be leaving Bismarck, North Dakota about May 1st for the rest of the year, really, retracing John Steinbeck's 1960 Travels with Charlie journey. That'll be the first of many Airstream journeys I'm going to make in the next 10 years to try to figure out the soul or souls of America, the mood of America, as we approach our 250th birthday. That's fantastic. Well, what we first want to do, Clay, is explore your background. I always like to say your origin story, how you got from where you were to where you are now. So tell us all about Clay Jenkinson. Well, the most important fact is that I'm a North Dakotan, born in North Dakota. I returned to North Dakota many times and now permanently over the last 19 years. I can't get it out of my system. I love the Great Plains. I love the emptiness of the Great Plains, the vast and open spaces, the badlands of the Little Missouri River Valley, the subtle beauty of the Northern Plains. Winters are tough, but we're equal to it. So I grew up in a little cattle town called Dickinson, population 13,000 in the western part of the state. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father a banker. They were both readers, which has made all the difference in my life. When I was about 15, I went to work for the local newspaper, the Dickinson Press, circulation about 6,500 a daily. It was such a hapless little enterprise that I was the chief photographer and the sports writer. I worked in the press room and actually got the chance to help run the presses for a summer. I did absolutely everything you can do except sell out. Oh my, Esther, it was the best possible experience. In addition to that, I got to live through the transition from the old letter type, lead production of newspapers to offset. Our offset was miserably bad in the beginning, but that was an industrial revolution that I got to see and it really mattered. While I was there, I met the man who changed everything. His name is Mike Jacobs. He later won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. He was the chief writer at the Dickinson Press. He was not a great photographer, so he used to come to my high school and pull me out at midday. We'd go on these wild journeys through western North Dakota and I would take the photographs and he taught me how to write. If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be talking today. I'd be an insurance salesman or a banker. That type of mentorship is so crucial to somebody's development, I think. Jefferson said of his great mentor, George Wythe, and William Small, two of them, he set the destinies of my life. This man, Mike Jacobs, set the destinies of my life. Demopolis for me. So from Dickinson, where did you go to school and you were being pulled out of high school. Maybe your college experience and maybe some of that beyond before how you developed into that. So I went off to college first at Vanderbilt and then I finished at the University of Minnesota. I went to Vanderbilt because I won a sports writing scholarship of all things. The T.R.A. Grantland Rice Memorial Sports Scholarship. But after a year, I decided that I was truly a Midwesterner and I returned to my beloved alma mater, the University of Minnesota, where I thrived. I wanted to be a journalist. When I went to Vanderbilt, I told my advisor, he asked me what I was going to do. I said, I want to study journalism. With all the snootiness of the liberal arts, he said, well, we don't really teach the trades here, but you can become an English major and perhaps that will suit you better. And that too changed my life. And so I became an English major. And after that, at the University of Minnesota, where I was able to win a few awards and so on and get great help from my beloved professor, Thomas Clayton, at his suggestion, I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship and won, bizarrely enough. And then I spent four years at Oxford University. Excellent. So your experiences overseas, did you get a new perspective on the United States from being in England for that time? Yes, in all sorts of ways. I'll just give you a couple. First of all, I so missed the outback, the national parks, the national monuments, the national forests, the BLM lands, the greatness of Montana and Utah and Colorado and Wyoming and California. I ached for all of that. Number two, this sounds so pathetic, but I missed Kmart, where you can buy a Teflon pan for $8. Everything in Europe costs more because they actually don't exploit labor in quite the same way we do. And so I missed those. You could go to Walmart or Kmart and fill a cart for $800 or $27 and have stuff. And I miss bacon, because British bacon is really a form of bad ham. So those things I miss. But I'll tell you what, when you go to Europe, and I've been all over Europe at different times, they, of course, are very skeptical about us, as they should be. And you wind up being a Jeffersonian. You talk about equality, the rights of man, and our self-correcting society and American exceptionalism. And although we make mistakes, on the whole, we're a force for good in the world. And we wind up singing the song of Jefferson's vision of America, even though in your heart of hearts, you know, it's not really quite true. But you wind up sort of being defensive about your country. And so I love that. But I also was listening. And what I was hearing was, actually, you're not a republic, you're an empire. And actually, you do make a lot of mistakes. And actually, we kind of resent the way your soft power infiltrates everything here when McDonald's replaces the local cafe and so on. And so that's stayed with me. And I try to have a perspective in my life that makes me realize we're not the only show on earth. Or maybe not even the greatest country in the world. Or maybe not even the freest people in the world. Those are sort of silly categories. We're a great nation in a world of some other really great nations. And it's my provincialism as an American was undermined in a wonderful way by time abroad. I always connect Benjamin Franklin with Europe, rather than I don't, that's the connection I always make. Well, he was a British citizen, of course, as was Jefferson, as was John Adams, and Franklin spent more of his life abroad, really, than he did at home. If it hadn't, if the British hadn't behaved so badly to him, to him personally, he would have remained a loyalist, I think. So let's talk about your move to Jefferson and becoming, of course, my first contact hearing your interpretation of Jefferson was a long time ago on WGN with John Williams. And I guess having even people calling in and asking the Jefferson way back then about current events and everything. So but tell us how do you develop that whole persona of I don't know if you call it an impersonation, but as much of a Chautauqua interpretation of Jefferson. Yeah, we call it Chautauqua after Lake Chautauqua in New York. And it's a it's a grant line that we helped to establish at the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of my other mentors, Everett Elbers, at the North Dakota Humanities Council bought a big tent and talked scholars into going out dressing up in costumes and giving first person portrayals and answering questions in character, which is the test of it. So I was I was lucky to have that opportunity. Speaking of WGN and John Williams, we've been at it now for 25 years. I'm coming back in the fall, we're having our 25th anniversary program somewhere in greater Chicago. We're very close friends. So that was a big, important little inflection point in my life. But here's what here's what happened. I was teaching at Pomona College in South in Southern California. I was on my way back to Oxford for the summer to do work on my dissertation. And it was on John Dunn, the sermons of John Dunn. And then I got this white courtesy telephone call at LAX. You know, that never happens. So I thought, who died, you know, or did I win the Pulitzer Prize? And so I picked it up. And it was him. It was he, Everett Elbers. And he said, I'm going to apply for this big grant. It's a tent. If we get it, I want you to portray Thomas Jefferson. And I said, sure, sure. Why not? And flew to England, thinking what kind of federal agency would ever fund something as silly as this? He got the grant and he held me to my vow. And so I took on Jefferson. And at the minute. So here's the thing about Jefferson. If you approach Thomas Jefferson and start to look into his life, his genius, the beauty of Monticello, his pioneering work as an American architect, his work as one of the founders of the Library of Congress, his capacity for taking pains, the 26,000 brilliant letters in perfect handwriting, the whole range of Jefferson's genius, he's sort of America's Leonardo da Vinci. Once you get close to that, you either have to say no, or you're going to be swept down that river for a very long time. I got on that creek and bought the Viking portable Jefferson, a little volume badly printed. And that was the beginning of what's now 40 years. This is the longest relationship of my life with Mr. Thomas Jefferson. And it's like a marriage. We've had good years and bad years. There are times when I can barely stand to be in the same country with them. Right. And I think he's the greatest person who ever lived their ups and downs. I keep reading about him. I'm still puzzled by him. I'm still fascinated by him. I'm sorry, what's happening to him now. We can talk about that. Oh, yeah, I would love to. Yeah, let's let's talk about I mean, you know, you look at him as the well, the Jefferson that wrote the declaration. And yet, you know, ambassador to France after Franklin, that had to be a tough act to follow. And then as president, and then also his his relationship with John Adams, I always find that whole fascinating thing, you know, starting from the presidency and how, of course, the the ultimate thing is how they passed away on July 4th, 1826 together just hours apart. Jefferson died first at about noon on the 4th of July 1826. And John Adams about 400 miles north died at 5pm roughly on July 4th. And Adams last words, Adams was 91, Jefferson was 83. Adams last words were Thomas Jefferson still survives. I always say wrong as always. But but you know, that's not what's killing Jefferson. What's killing Jefferson is, I suppose what you'd call wokeness. He's being he's being canceled, because he is a racist, and an apartheidist. And of course, there's Sally Hemings and his dispossession of Native Americans. And so in some circles, now he's toxic. I don't say that lightly. In some circles, Jefferson is now regarded as someone who can no longer be regarded as a hero. And that pains me. Of course, it's true, everything, all this is true about Jefferson. He was a contemptible hypocrite on this question. But the question is, how much weight should we give that? Should we should that be enough to erase Jefferson? Is that enough to topple him? So I have two thoughts about that quickly. One is that there needs to be an asterisk. So everything he accomplished, we have to remember every time was in part because of enslaved labor. My example is the 1000 foot garden terrace at Monticello, which is one of the glories of Monticello, 1000 feet long. But it was built as a terrace by enslaved labor gangs of laborers were for several years hauling dirt and wheelbarrows to make him this spectacular garden, which we all are wowed by with awe when we go there. And so that has to be remembered in every one of his achievements. And the second thing is that even when they don't seem related, they may be. So I was just reading last night, for example, that Jefferson had that famous dinner party in New York with Hamilton and Madison, in which Hamilton's funding bill got accepted by Madison in return for placing the national capital on the Potomac. And so Jefferson wanted the national capital on the Potomac. And he said he wanted it there because it would be a new start, you know, kind of a symbol of a new nation. He also wanted it there because it was in the upper south. So it creates more geographic balance. He also was being friendly towards his mentor, George Washington, who lived nearby. But that's not a thing. But was he also trying to protect the institution of slavery? The answer to that is probably partly so. So, you know, it's changed everything. So once you have that new lens on Jefferson, that it's way more complicated and not as admirable as you once thought, you can never take that lens off again. And so I'm okay with that. That's the way it should be. But I don't think we should necessarily tear down the Jefferson Memorial. I see. I agree. And I always found it interesting that his relationship with Sally Hemings was actually a half-sister to his wife, who was deceased, Martha. We think so, at any rate. We don't really know much about it. He never wrote about this. Pretty protective of his private life. But probably it's true. It seems almost certainly to have been true. Four of her six children, at least, were probably fathered by Mr. Jefferson. He never acknowledged them in any way. But he did free them. He had agreed in France, when she and her brother James confronted him about slavery, they were free in France. So they said, why should we go back to Virginia with you? Jefferson said, well, that's your home. If you come back, I promise this, I'll free James. If he teaches somebody else the art of French cuisine. And I'll free all of Sally Hemings' children, whoever their father may be. And he did. So he kept that bargain. But the Sally Hemings story doesn't bother me as much as the fact of slavery. Because we don't know what the Sally Hemings story was. And of course, we don't like the mismatch of power and ownership and so on. However, most of the African-American scholars who look at this say, well, let's grant her some agency. Maybe this was something that she wanted to happen. This was to her advantage. Or maybe she loved him. Or you know, who knows, right? We should be careful not to simply regard this as a kind of statutory rape. Right. Excellent. Well, I noticed one of the things is and I actually one of the station managers that runs our show, it was a big follower of the Thomas Jefferson Hour, which now you've called Listening to America. Was that part of the change of the name of the thing? Or is it because now that you're doing the tour and your Airstream is kind of a different format? It's a number of things, but one of them was not the main one. But one of them was, I'm just a little weary of talking about Jefferson and slavery. Because there's no answer to it. You know, the fact is, it doesn't look good. And he was a hypocrite. And if you write all men are created equal and own others and buy and sell people, that's something we just cannot grimace over. We have to just condemn now. So that was part of it. But the main reason was that I wanted a bigger lens. I've been Jefferson for 40 years. I know him really well, I can tell you that. But I wanted to talk about America, especially you know, the 250th birthday of the country is coming July 4 2026. I've been writing about this a lot. In fact, last night, I was writing about the Centennial, the news of Custer's collapse in Montana came just four days after July 4 1876. The Bicentennial, when we had just come out of the of the debacle, the shameful humiliation of America in Vietnam, you know that that picture of the helicopters rising with our friends clinging to the struts is one of the most indelible pictures of of America's failure as an empire. And so it's not as if all of our commemoratives have been happy. Remember the 500th anniversary of Columbus were for the first time for most of us who are alive, then we thought, Oh, I had no idea that he was a schnook, that he ruined the world that he should never have come that he enslaved people that, you know, etc, etc. And so these commemoratives often lead to some sobering reflections, which is good. But I want to be out in the country for the next five or six or seven or eight years. Listening, listening, listening, seeing, observing going to places that I've never been going to places I've been many times. And I want to hang each of these great Airstream journeys on another journey. So this year, I'm following Steinbeck around the perimeter of the country, he drove 11,000 miles in 1960. And that produced the brief classic travels of Charlie and next year, I'm going to follow the Lewis Clark trail from Monticello to Astoria, Oregon and back again, I'm a Lewis and Clark scholar and the editor of the quarterly Lewis and Clark journal called we proceeded on. So I'm going to each year, I'm going to have a framework theme. But really, it's just an excuse. I've been wanting to do since I was 17. Get out of open road. See this what Steinbeck called it this monster country, I want to see this monster country for myself. Are you producing your show like an on the road from your Airstream? Yeah, so my friend Ross is a Steinbeck scholar. He's in North Carolina. So he'll host about 10 programs during this and he'll say, Oh, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of listening to America with Clay Jenkins and Clay, where are you now? And I'll say, Well, I'm in Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, what does that possibly have to do with, with our man Steinbeck? I'll say, Well, nothing. But Jefferson loved Big Bone Lick, because there were mastodon and mammoth bones being plucked out of the mud there. And he sent Lewis there, and he sent Clark there, and he sent George Rogers Clark there, and he had mastodon bones at Monticello. How could I come through the Cincinnati area without stopping at Big Bone Lick? And then Russell say, Well, okay, what do you see? And I'll say, Well, I'm in this campground. And there are a bunch of different types of campers and tents and people and dogs. And they're brought worse than there's bacon. And there's people are drinking gin or wine and playing the guitar ukulele. And it's like, sounds great. What have you seen in the last, you know, few days? And I'll tell them. And so then on other times, he'll say, Where are you? And I'll say, I'm in. I'm in Calais, Maine, where Steinbeck had his famous encounter with potato, French Canadian potato farmers, and he called Canucks. And Russell said, I know a lot about that. Let's talk about that incident. Did it really happen? Was Steinbeck exaggerating? How much can we depend upon what Steinbeck says and travels with Charlie and so on. So there's quite a bit of that. I think people are going to be charmed. I mean, you're both smiling. I think people are going to be charmed by when I say I'm looking out the window. I'm looking at the world's largest ball of twine. Right? I'm looking at Niagara Falls. I'm looking out the window and I see a herd of pronghorn antelope galloping across this valley in Wyoming. Oh, Clay, it's exactly what I dreamed that this adventure was going to be for you. When I first read about the Airstream journey, I thought, oh, he's going to go see the greatest rubber band ball in the world. And you know, wherever it takes you. Esther, Esther, Esther, how naive you are. There is more than one world's largest ball of twine. There are competing world's largest balls. So there are some distinctions you have to make. The world's largest ball of twine by one person. The world's largest ball of twine as a community effort. All right, America, get rolling. We're not just going to allow, if someone says this is the world's largest pelican, we don't just accept that. We're going to test these things because, you know, there's a lot of boasting. There's a lot of wild boasting in America. So I'm here to, I'll be upsetting a lot of people by saying, no, no, that that world's largest loon is only the third largest loon. There's a bigger one in Wisconsin. Remove that, tear down that plaque, Mr. Gorbachev. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today, humanity scholar, author and social commentator Clay Jenkinson on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM and on WVLP 103.1 FM. You know, you're the second guest we've had on our show that does a radio show from an Airstream trailer. We have Terry O'Reilly, who bought one specifically to do his Under the Influence in Canada. And he was recording his show, driving into Toronto all the time, and he bought an Airstream to make into a studio on his property. So, so you're... That's what, wasn't he talking to us from the Airstream? Yeah, well, he did his show. He does his entire show from the Airstream. This is a man named O'Reilly? Terry O'Reilly. He does a show called Under the Influence. The only reason I found out about it is a little Chicago station, an NPR station, not the one we're on, airs it at 6.30 in the morning on Saturday. And I heard it, and it's a half-hour show. It's about advertising. It's a great show. I think you would enjoy it. Yeah, it's a great show. I'll send you the link. Does he haul this thing around, or did he just park it? He just parks it at his home, yeah. How about... That's a, what a weenie. I mean, I mean, come on. If you're going to do this, you've got to, you've got to go... Go on the road. Steinbeck tried to get into Canada, and he was turned back at Niagara because of his dog, Charlie. And the Canadians said, we're nice, but you Americans aren't. So if you bring Charlie into Canada, they won't let you come back if he doesn't have his vaccine. This was before vaccines were quite as volatile an issue as they are now. So Steinbeck decided he couldn't do it. So he came down instead along the bottom of the American Great Lakes. But he wanted to go through that part of Canada. I haven't decided. I'm not taking a dog. I can't keep a chia pet alive. And a dog... But if you take... Here's the problem. If you take Charlie, the poodle, this wonderful, blue-gray, big French poodle, out of the book Travel with Charlie, there ain't much left. Charlie is a very important figure in the show. Character. So I think what I'm going to do... You remember Castaway with Tom Hanks? I've got an old water container, you know, one of those backpack water containers. And I used it on my... When I hiked the entire Little Missouri River a number of years ago, and I called it Wilson after Wilson in Castaway. So I'm going to take that. It's a relic. It doesn't work anymore. But I'm going to take it and put it in the passenger seat. And Wilson and I will have important conversations. I hope he doesn't get lost at the world's largest ball of wine. Or light it on fire, for that matter. It's just the kind of thing you would expect Wilson to do. Exactly. The other character you're known for is Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, you do several of them. I know you do Meriwether, Lewis, Jonathan Swift, and you talk about John Steinbeck. But the other one that you have voiced considerably is Teddy Roosevelt. But tell us about your relationship with him, like you did with Jefferson. Well, first of all, you must never say Teddy again. We hated the name Teddy. It's a boy's name. It's a diminutive. But everyone, of course, called him and did call him Teddy Roosevelt. So I was moving back to North Dakota 19 years ago from Reno, Nevada, which I love. I should never have left. I was moving back because I had this dream, you know, my home in the Badlands and so on. And so I didn't realize that the state had become a red, red, red, red, red state in the interim. But that is another question. Anyway, I thought, what am I going to do when I get back to North Coast? I can immerse myself out in the Badlands. I thought, ah, I'll take on the character of Theodore Roosevelt, because he spent four years out here between 1883 and 1887, had two ranches, the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn. He later exaggerated the amount of time he spent here. Once he said he spent 15 years out here. And he spent a total of about 350 days over a four-year period. But it changed him and it changed America, because that's when he developed a good part of his conservation ethos. And when he became president, as you know, he became president on steroids with respect to conservation. He set aside 230 million acres of our public domain as National Park, National Monument, National Forest, National Wildlife Refuge, National Game Preserve, and so on. No president has ever done more than Roosevelt did to save portions of America from adverse economic development. And so I find it really interesting that he and Jefferson could not really stand to be together on Mount Rushmore. Jefferson was a mild man, stayed within his lane. In fact, he underdefined the presidency. He was a gentleman and he was a man of harmony. And Roosevelt's always punching somebody out in the tavern sometimes. He's very robust. His personality is... One of the people who met him in the White House during the time he was president, he was president for almost two terms, said, after you spend some time with Roosevelt, you go back to your hotel and ring his personality out of your clothes. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. So I got into it and I still do some Roosevelt and I do some Jefferson. I do some Meriwether Lewis. I do some Oppenheimer. He's my favorite character, frankly, and I've been doing quite a bit of it now. I bet. So Brent Olin's film has brought Oppenheimer to everyone's attention. And I do John Steinbeck, too, although not as much. So I do all those characters. And I'm sorry to say I have a walk-in closet in my house that has costumes. And you think, what will archaeologists say if they ever excavate Bismarck North Coast? Was this some sort of a spy? Was he a dreamer of... They'll never understand Chautauqua. Who would? Right. Let's get back to Jefferson and Adams, because, like I said, they have such an interesting symbiotic relationship all the way from the Declaration. And, of course, Adams, in my reading, was smart in picking George Washington or in getting George Washington to lead the Continental Army, but also seeing that he had to have Virginia to make the Declaration work and the Virginians to do that. Richard Henry lead it and introduced it. But their relationship is so interesting and then how it devolved and then they reemerged. They were argonauts, as Jefferson put it at the beginning. They were on the Committee of Five to write the Declaration of Independence. Adams championed Jefferson's draft as it was debated on the floor of the Continental Congress. Jefferson was quiet, as always, shy. And then they were in Europe together. And in France, Jefferson visited both Abigail and John Adams in London for a protracted period in 1786. Mrs. Adams said Jefferson is one of the choice ones of the world. But then the French Revolution came and they began to see their differences. And Adams was essentially a small-r Republican conservative. And Jefferson was a small-r Republican radical, essentially. Jefferson defended the French Revolution, including the Reign of Terror. And Adams thought that was not only wrong, simply wrong, but also irresponsible. I mean, Jefferson should not be defending this spasmodic period of violence in France. And so they began to sort of distance themselves from each other. And then when Jefferson won the presidency in 1800, thus displacing Adams, who was a one-term president, Adams took that very personally. He mostly blamed the American people for not seeing his greatness. But he also blamed Jefferson. And he was right. Jefferson behaved in some unscrupulous ways in that election period. So then they lost touch with each other. And they were not even frenemies. They were enemies for a while, or just said no more, enough. But then when Jefferson retired, went to Monticello, suddenly on January 1st, 1812, Adams wrote him a stiff little letter saying, I'm just sending you some hello, old, friend. And not to disturb you, but I'm sending you some pieces of homespun, by which he meant his own son, John Quincy Adams' latest published books. And said, you know, sometimes I think about those days. And Jefferson then responded with an equally stiff reply of thanks. And Adams thought a step farther. And suddenly, as Jefferson puts it, the sluice gates of their ancient friendship opened. And then they exchanged 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives, which are widely regarded as amongst the greatest correspondence in American history. And I can just sum it up by saying this, that, well, first of all, Adams said to Jefferson, almost in one of the first letters, we must not die until we have explained ourselves to each other. It's a wonderful thing for him to say. But also, Adams really loved Jefferson, and loved Jefferson, in spite of everything. Jefferson esteemed Adams. So Adams did the heavy lifting in the friendship. He took more chances. Jefferson was really a harmony obsessive. And his only goal in the correspondence was not to piss Adams off. Not to make Adams go crazy. Because they had so many issues between them. So Jefferson was the diplomat, and Adams was not. But the letters are fabulous. I hope everyone listening will just go find Lester Kappen's, or even online, an edition of Jefferson Adams' letters. They're just beautiful. And they show what America could be, maybe even now, is civility and grammar. We're still part of our national enterprise. Yeah, that's kind of lost with email and electronic thing. Plus, you have such an insight into Adams with his relationship with Abigail. I'm always taken, and of course, you'll probably think this is funny, is every Fourth of July, he published the letter that he wrote actually on July 2nd to Abigail, his vision of America. And it's like, you know, he sees bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other, and so on. And I always found that that was so, you know, what a vision he had for this was not just America, the 13 colonies, this was the entire continent. Now, he said to his beloved wife, Abigail, who was an amazing human being, more amazing, perhaps, even than he, one of the world's great letter writers. He said, this day, July 2nd, will be remembered through history, and there'll be pompous parades, and there'll be fireworks, and there'll be picnics. And this is the day, July 2nd. And so I'm sorry that you, you humiliate him once every Fourth of July. But Jefferson got the Fourth of July, and Adams thought that was the second when we actually declared independence from Great Britain. And Adams later said to Jefferson, with some bitterness, you ran away with the revolution. Like Jefferson was getting all the credit, but Adams really is the Mary and Martha story from early test. But it is true. And so, you know, July 2nd, well, not so much, or as Maxwell Smart would say, missed it by that much. But it is, it's very prophetic, isn't it? He nails the Fourth of July. Oh, he does. I always put a footnote that he believed at the time that that was going to be that. Of course, he wrote him with a daily letter to Abigail. So it's like, literally finished like that. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today, humanities scholar, author, and social commentator Clay Jenkinson on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM, and on WVLP 103.1 FM. I want to talk about Ken Burns. And you know, you've done, oh gosh, was it four, five, I think five, six documentaries with him. And of course, the most recent one is the American Buffalo, which is currently running on PBS. You I think you also voice characters, but primarily they brought you on as a commentator and what's going on. So tell us about the experience of working with Ken Burns as a filmmaker. Well, first of all, let me say that America is so much better off because of Ken Burns. And I hearken back to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Civil War, but he's done 25 films and baseball and jazz and country music and Vietnam and Jefferson. And I was in the Franklin film. I was in the Jefferson film. I was in the National Parks film where I actually got to say something. I got to talk back to Ken Burns and it didn't wind up on the cutting room floor. I've loved it. So here's the thing. He's a genius. And he's absolutely amazing. And I feel honored and humbled and joyful, thrilled to be asked by him to be in his films as a talking head. You don't get a list of proposed questions. You just turn up at his studio at Walpole, New Hampshire, and then they put a little makeup on you and sit you down and make you up. And then he sweeps in at the last second and sits about four inches from your face and says, so who was Ben Franklin? And you go, you sound like Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners. And then finally it kind of gels and you say a bunch of things and then you go home. He doesn't say you'll be in the film. He just says, thank you. And you wait two years to determine whether you're even in the thing. And of course, the minute I get on the plane, I write him a note saying, I want a second interview. I'll pay for it myself. I'll buy you a Cadillac. I just want a second interview. I mean, please let me fix this. That never happens. And so he once told me this, the best advice I ever got about being in documentary films, and now I'm in quite a few of them. He said, if you stick the landing, you can be in my film. So say what you're going to say and then stop. You know, as an editor, it's hard to edit. Somebody says another thing and another thing and another thing, because you can't find a place to cut it. He said, if you just say what you're going to say and then stop and it's concise and it's insightful, you'll get in my films. But if you just blather on, even if it's the greatest thing I ever heard, I won't be able to edit it. And so that was tremendous advice. I've edited a few documentaries myself and I know how true that is. But I should tell you, and you probably both know, that we talking heads, you used the word commentators, I was very polite, we're often called the talent. Right. And at first I thought that was really an exalted and beautiful thing. Until I realized that the talent, the word means something like, those idiots, we can't make this film without, or will you stop working on your comb over and get in here, it's time for lunch, or the talent is not having his best day today, or it costs a lot to fly the talent. Talent is easy to be replaced. I mean, I thought talent was like a term of deep respect, even reverence. And then I realized it actually is a term of contempt. It's so much easier to make documentary films without talent. He's been nothing but gracious. I just came back from New York where I was interviewed for four hours for a Doris Kearns Goodwin docudrama, I suppose you'd call it, about the West. And so, again, I got on the plane and begged for a re-interview. We'll see. Now, when you go to do that, obviously, he needs to give you a broad perspective about, okay, we're talking about Ben Franklin, but you know, so what kind of prep work do you do for that? I mean, he's going to give you a general topic of what it's going to be. So for some, I don't prepare at all, like Jefferson, I thought, well, if I don't, I don't know Jefferson by now. But like for Franklin, because I'm not really a Franklin scholar, but he said, you want to be in this film? I said, of course. So I worked hard for months and I memorized stuff and I had outlines and I read books and I re-read books and I then typed out my outlines and I typed out the quotations and would go over them, including on the plane. And there was one particularly that I so wanted in the film where Adams, who hated Franklin really, said a beautiful thing about him. He said that, you know, he's beloved by scullery wenches and by aristocrats and by ballet de chambres and mere people. And then they said that the most common people in France regard him as having restored the golden age and so on. And so I memorized that. And so I was so ready and I was no better or worse than I was when I just wing it. But this time for the Doris Kearns Goodwin one, I studied a lot too. So what you do is you re-read books and you read some new books and then you, you know, I hate to say it, but you do a lot of sort of Wikipedia stuff. Like when did they, when were they born? When did they die? What year was the revolution? That kind of thing. And then I produce a big set of typewritten files that I print out. I'm a paper waster. And then I bind them with a Bella binder. Okay. That becomes my quote unquote Bible for that film. And I do that for each of the characters that I do. I do that for each of the humanities retreats I do every winter out west of Missoula and so on. Um, I always create this sort of Bible. And so in other words, if you take Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama canal, I want to put on one typewritten page, everything you have to know about that, you know, his quotations about it, the key dates, um, the, the length of the canal, how long it took to build when it finally opened. And so if I have that Bible, I call that a one pager, not to get too deep in the weeds, but if I'm on the plane, I can go through all that. And I know immediately, oh, those are the 27 things I really need to know about the Panama canal and Theodore Roosevelt. And so that's pretty nerdy and obsessive, but there's no point in vaguely, right? There's no point in saying, yeah, I think Jefferson was, was he a revolutionary? I don't know. You do your research and then you just trust that, you know, during the interview, it just spews out. You hope, hope, hope. So what are some of the topics you cover in your listening to America? What, I've listened to a few, but you know, for our audience, but, uh, what are the things that they can expect to listen and hear? Well, they should follow us at ltamerica.org, ltamerica.org, my website. We post them all there and I write weekly essays and what I call dispatches about things and musings and I photo essays and video clips and so on. So ltamerica.org, but I wanted to change the name from the Thomas Jefferson hour for reasons that we've sort of talked about, but also because I wanted to really think about America. So I've done programs on, on the declining water in the Colorado basin. I've got a new sports angle that I'm doing. I remember Red Barber from NPR used to talk every week. Um, I'm doing that now with a guy named Kirk Kemper, who's like a genius in South Dakota about sports as metaphor. And so that will be a periodic element. Lots of, of course, Steinbeck and Travels with Charlie, but still a lot of Jefferson. And then with Lindsay Trevinsky, this rising star in history circles, she lives in Virginia and is frequently now on major media like CBS and CNN and so on. We do something called 10 things. So 10 things about Abigail Adams, 10 things about, um, the battle of Bunker Hill, 10 things about Jefferson in Paris. And then we just sort of arbitrarily choose 10 topics and we go back and forth and frequently in a playful way, we disagree. She's in her thirties. I'm double her age. She's what I would call an academic leftist, right? And she would call me an academic fossil, you know, but I, I, I'm making the turn to the super woke world of our time because I believe that it's correct, but I believe it is often excessive and self-righteous and dismissive and arrogant, frankly, and misguided in some important ways. And so I'm, I'm trying to say, and my daughter is on me all the time to dad, you know, please be careful never to say that again. And I say, we've got to be forgiving. We have got to be forgiving of ourselves that the enlightenment is about discourse and exchange and correction. And, or, or as Voltaire is said to have said, madam, I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death. You're right to say it. This new world of hyper intolerance is I think toxic in every possible way. And it has to be, it has to be confronted. And I know that can get you canceled, but I'm not really afraid of that. And I also think I can't be, I mean, Jefferson taught me almost everything I know, which is that discourse needs to be robust. We need to be able to disagree civilly. We, we need to, we need to get all arguments on the table so we can finally negotiate our way towards truth with a capital T. And so I'm not going to give that up in this era of neopuritanism, but I find it very, and I don't want to dump on it because so much of what it's doing is really good. I'm for social justice. I'm for revisionism. I'm for plucking down some of these statues, et cetera, but I don't think we should just be wandering around with bulldozers either. Right, right. One thing that I think you and I both share is a love of maps. Tell us about that in our last few moments there. Oh, I'm so sorry. You know, I was just in, in, in Phoenix with my scout, this guy named Frank, and we were in this hotel, Hampton Inn or something, and they have the huge sort of breakfast nook area. And we were spreading out three atlases and a bunch of other books and travels of Charlie and books about travels of Charlie and so on. And we were with magic markers and we were showing my route. We're saying, should we stop there? And if I did, how far is that from there, you know? And so we were doing this and this woman came in from the swimming pool with her two daughters, like nine and seven, and they passed us. And the nine-year-old turned back and she was kind of puzzled. Then she said, wow, old school. I can't live without maps. I know, I love maps. But my daughter thinks, hey, you got this device. Who needs a map? But a map is a whole world of imagination, of memory, of remembrance, of dreams, of plans. Visually enticing too, I mean. Absolutely. Absolutely. So yes, I'm taking several atlases and including a 1960 atlas, because I want to figure out the roads that existed then that no longer exist. The interstate highway system is sort of damaged road life. Right. Well, like 40 years ago, I don't know what the population of Grace, Wyoming is now, but Grace, Wyoming was 80 people back in the seventies. You know this? I do know this. I drove through Grace, Wyoming. Oh, I was hoping you were going to say you were from Grace. One of the 80 people, no. I will go to Grace. Wyoming is an incredibly beautiful state. Well, Clay, we are out of time, believe it or not. We appreciate you coming on and sharing your journey. Again, share your website with our listeners. Please everyone, ltamerica.org. We're going to have an interactive map. There'll be postings every day. Also, there's a Facebook site under my name, Clay Jenkinson, also listening to America Facebook site, but ltamerica.org. If you want to join this journey or help support it, I'd be thrilled, but just follow us because it's going to be the trip of a lifetime. We appreciate it. Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar, portrays Jefferson and many, many others. Thank you so much for coming on Art of the Air and sharing your journey. Hey, Larry and Esther, both of you, thank you. What a wonderful. Thank you. It was completely delightful. We'd like to thank our guests this week on Art on the Air, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. Art on the Air is heard Sunday at 7pm on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Art on the Air is also heard Friday at 11am and Monday at 5pm on WVLP, 103.1 FM, streaming live at wvlp.org. If you have a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Apple Siri, just tell to play Art on the Air to hear the latest episode. Our spotlight interviews are heard every Wednesday on Lakeshore Public Media. Thanks to Tom Maloney, vice president of radio operation for Lakeshore Public Media and Greg Kovach, WVLP's station manager. 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If you're interested in being a guest or send us information about your arts, arts related event or exhibit, please email us at A-O-T-A at breck.com. That's A-O-T-A at breck, B-R-E-C-H dot com, or contact us through our Facebook page. Your hosts were Larry Breckner and Esther Golden, and we invite you back next week for another episode of Art on the Air. Aloha, everyone. Have a splendid week. I'm Larry, Art on the Air today. Say in the know with Larry and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself in art, and show the world your art. Express yourself in art, and show the world your art. Express yourself in art, and show the world your art.