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interview style that resulted in absolutely awesome responses from the stars of the day.
And thankfully, Ms. Drake is alivinglegend.
Oh, and the pay is good, too!
I get 3.2 dollars.
How do I find it?
Ill send it to you.
Let me know when you get it.Okay.
[A minute later] Oh, we were all so young and pretty!
Oh, so theyre just little segments?
Yup.Oh, theres Tom Hanks!
Im still wearing those clothes.
Those clothes are still in my closet.
I can still fit into them!
I just wore that one the other day.
Well, isnt that interesting.
Cause I thought,What am I going to do with these things?
Some of them are really interesting and so, well, I might as well give them to them.
I have copies, but they are more organized than I am.
How many are there?
How many do you think he did over the years?Oh, God, I dont know.
I did it for so many years.
I dont know, 100?
You know, these were the old days.
I worked for the CBS television station here in Lincoln, Nebraska.
So I had to read books and make a run at find newspaper clippings and all that stuff.
So I came prepared.
I did hundreds of hundreds of them over the course of time.
The stars didnt come to Nebraska, though, right?Oh, no.
Nobody came to Lincoln.
We were just as a small community.
We went to New York.
All over, we went.
And thats how I got the interviews they would give us a copy of it.
Most junket questions are along the lines of Tell me about your favorite scene or something silly like that.Exactly.
The person who was the star heard that over and over and over again.
And I knew that.
So I did my homework before I went.
Im wondering if anybody ever had a negative reaction?Almost everybody was very receptive.
So theyd put all the emphasis on the person to tell the story.
Whereas I did my homework before and then tried to make it interesting …
I really had fun with these people.
Some got very tired, you know, toward the end of the day.
But I think they perked up when I came up, because I didnt ask the usual questions.
The young people who had no experience, they would say, Tell us about your life.
That was not a good question.
So we talked about that, and I mean, he was so charming.
And he said, Thats why I lived so long, because I smoke these cigars!
That was so charming.
And then he died shortly thereafter, so I mightve done the last interview he ever did.
But I was busy.
Name names!Oh, no, I wont do that.
And I would laugh anything off.
If they made a suggestion or something, I just laughed it off.
I was serious about it, but I pretended not to be.
So did you have any formal journalism training?
So I had fairly high grades in high school.
And so they put me in a class that was way out of my reach.
I didnt know what I was doing.
I was going to be an attorney …
So I auditioned [for the school play] and I got the lead role.
And so I left my other plans behind, and I just stayed in the theater.
I did all the shows in the community playhouse and the university theater.
And, you know, it just kind of evolved.
Theater was my bit, and it still is.
Im still doing theater.
And we were going into our eighth production, but of course the coronavirus shut everything down.
We were just getting ready to doThe Pirates of Penzanceand then the virus hit.
So thats been very sad.
But Ive also been involved with OLLI the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Does that mean anything to you?
Osher was a gazillionaire and lived in California.
And he wanted seniors to continue to learn.
I got involved right from the beginning.
So I take care of all arts classes here at the Johnny Carson school at University of Nebraska.
You know about Johnny Carson, right?
Hes from Nebraska.All right.
Heres the thing about Johnny.
Johnny graduated from the University of Nebraska in what was called the Temple Building.
It is an old building, built in like 1894.
He graduated from there.
I was probably ten years younger than he was, so I came after him.
Hed already gone and he became a star over the course of time.
And Johnny was on the schedule.
He didnt know me.
Everybody who attends these things this is fashion.
I came in wearing one of my outfits.
Its a striped pantsuit.
It was just bright red, bright white.
And they just told him, Oh, thats Leta of Lincoln?
And he just shouted, Wheres that Leta, that Leta of Lincoln?
Ive been called Leta of Lincoln ever since.
I said, Johnny, when you were in Lincoln, you used to dress like that.
And he said, Yeah, thats why I left.
Oh, and one more thing.
I mean, Johnny is so in my heart.
He did that forus.
And so now thats why we call it the Johnny Carson School of Theater and Film.
So you worked for the CBS affiliate in Lincoln, right?
I produced it and I hosted it and had to figure out interesting people to come on.
I did that for, I dont know, about 20 years at the CBS affiliate.
Some of the kids were terrified with all the lights, the big camera, and the big cameraman.
And some peed their pants.
And Id think,God, I hope I dont have to clean that up.
I was on your show!
It happens almost every day, which is really fun.
You had to have loved your job.Loved it!
But it was a hell of a lot of work.
You know much I got paid?
For the morning show, I got $15 a day.
Now, I hosted it and produced it.
And the kids show, I got $10 a day.
So I made $25 a day.
And of course, guys all ran the station.
The management was all guys, the control room was all guys.
And us little women were out there doing our thing.
For $25 a day.
How much did the guys make?Oh, God.
I really did enjoy my boss.
He was very open and receptive.
But he was a gazillionaire.
Thats how they lived.
But all those guys are dead now.
I am not going gently into that good night.
Does that make you mad now?No.
Thats just the way it was then.
What am I going to do about that?
Now I have retirement.
I did the all womens transcontinental air race.
That was the advantage of being on television.
The station, they said, Do you want to learn to fly?
And then the photographers would come out and film it as I learned how to fly.
I got to fly for free all those years.
They had a woman pilot to teach me.
When did you really start doing the celebrity interview junket?Oh, God, let me think.
It would have been the late 70s or early 80s.
I did them at least until the end of the 80s.
When you did all this, what was your home life like?
Were you married with kids?I married, and I married the wrong guy.
But I had a child that I adore.
How long were you married?Maybe three or four years.
And then my husband got even more absurd, and he was an alcoholic.
So about two years later, I said, Thats it.
I got rid of him, and I never ever married again.
A lot of guys in between, but I never married again.
We did it in-person for 15 years, and that was really fun.
And now, of course, everything is done on Zoom, and I just hate it.
Do you still do interviews for TV?Well, I have another television show.
This is for old people.
It is calledLive and Learn, and its on the three channels in Lincoln.
Its just things that are going on for older people, and I do interviews about that.
Would you ever have any interest in interviewing celebrities again?
Do you keep up with a lot of TV and film now?Im a reader.
I love the libraries …
I can download the books onto my Kindle and read them.
But I dont watch a lot of television.
I might tune into CNN, but I cant stand the commercials.
There are about eight or nine commercials in between segments, and I cant take it.
I hate to see whats happened to television.
Anybody whos reasonable is a Democrat.
