A Window to the World

I grew up with Phil Donahue. Well, strictly speaking, I grew up watching him.

Donahue was born in 1935, I came along nearly 25 years later. As a child, he lived across the street from Erma Bombeck, who went on to become a beloved humorist and nationally syndicated columnist, one of my mom’s favorites. Phil Donahue became much more than that.

In 1967 he started something that was the first of its kind, a daytime television talk show that blazed a trail eventually traveled by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams and Ellen DeGeneres, among many others. Oprah once said, “If it weren’t for Phil Donahue, there would never have been an Oprah Show.”

Donahue’s show started in Dayton, Ohio before moving to Chicago and finally New York. The program was unorthodox from the outset. A single topic and often a single guest for a full hour, with the host goading an in-studio audience to take part in the conversation, never before seen. His very first guest was the outspoken a…