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 atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who pulled no punches in ridiculing Christianity. Phones rang off the hook, sponsors started cancelling. Donahue was undaunted.
He brought Nazis into a nation’s living rooms one morning, lesbians another. When so many were closeted, Donahue opened the airwaves to discussion of homosexuality, drag, gay parenthood, AIDS, you name it. Feminists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were brought in to make the case for women’s liberation, naysayers like Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant came on the show to warn of what they saw as the dangers.
Donahue waded headlong into matters of race, moderating an ongoing debate on everything from the expansion of civil rights to hip hop culture. Consumer protection was another recurring topic, with Ralph Nader being Donahue’s most frequent guest. But variety was the rule, with guests giving cooking lessons and teaching break dancing and showing graphic videos of childbirth, abortion and vasectomies.
For 29 years, Donahue’s show explored the contours of American life. He boxed with Muhammad Ali, sparred with spiritual leaders and politicians of every stripe, talked shop with doctors, lawyers, diplomats, homemakers, business executives and entertainers. Nothing seemed off limits, not alcoholism, not drug abuse, not polygamy, not infidelity, not rape or incest or other sexual abuse.
A farm kid from Wisconsin was watching. My family climbed out of bed at 5 each morning to begin the day’s work, waiting to eat until after the milking and other chores were finished several hours later. In our household, the timing of a hearty farm breakfast more often than not coincided with the airing of Donahue’s show on a local channel. Living out in the country can feel lonely and isolating, almost disconnected from the rest of the world. Phil Donahue brought the world to me. He opened my eyes, stimulated my mind, stoked my imagination.
I met Donahue in 2005 at a media reform conference in St. Louis. We had a chance to briefly chat. I thanked him for his work and clumsily tried to convey how much that work had meant to me, how he had helped make a farm kid from Wisconsin a citizen of the world, how he planted seeds that inspired me to learn the craft of journalism in college and later venture overseas for two years of service in the Peace Corps.
Phil Donahue died this week. I watched him live and work, and am better for it.