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Feb. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
09:51
Larry Elder Answers Personal Questions From Fans | Larry Elder
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I get letters, comments, criticism from fans and non-fans.
And let's take some time to respond to some of them, shall we?
How did I get into talk radio?
Kind of a long story.
I was living in Cleveland.
And I was writing op-ed pieces.
I would send them into newspapers.
I didn't have a column or a deal.
I would just write something and I would send it in.
And usually I'd get a little rejection notice saying, thank you for sending it in, but we don't think we can use it.
But that was undaunted.
I kept sending them.
I kept sending them.
And finally, one day, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an article that I wrote.
This is over 30 years ago where I said that racism is no longer a major problem facing black America.
Now, you say that today and people call you a denier.
Imagine 30 years ago.
So I got a phone call from a radio host, the producer of a radio host in Cleveland, And he said, I read your piece in the newspaper.
Are you black?
And I said, I think so.
And he said, you don't believe racism is a major problem in America anymore?
And I said, no, I believe that you work hard, stay focused, and don't make bad moral mistakes.
You can be fine.
And he said, would you mind coming on my guy's show tonight and talking about this?
And I've never been on radio before.
And I said, sure.
So I was on for a whole hour.
Now that I'm in radio, I realize that is an eternity for somebody who's never been on radio before.
Cleveland is almost 50% Black, so most of the people who were calling the show were Black, and they were ticked off.
I was called Uncle Tom and Sellout and Bootlicker and Coconut and Oreo and bug-eyed, foot-shuffling Uncle Tom.
And I was called everything you can imagine, including the name that you call somebody when you really want to hurt a Black person.
I was called Republican.
And I remember saying to myself, I'll never do this again.
I get back to my office, the phone rings, and it's the station manager.
He said, I heard you.
He said, you were amazing.
I said, I was?
He said, oh God, you were funny.
You were witty.
You have a good speaking voice.
You took difficult positions and you defended them without losing your sense of humor or your temper.
Have you ever thought about doing talk radio?
And I said, no.
And he said, why?
And I said, I don't like being yelled at, and I don't like yelling at other people.
And he said, are you married?
At the time, I was.
He said, do me a favor, go home to your wife and talk this over and call me tomorrow.
I said, fine, I'll do that, but I'm not going to change my mind.
So I went home to my then wife, and I told her about this.
And she said, well, what do you think of talk radio?
What do you know about it?
I said, I know nothing about talk radio other than it seems shallow, glib, and stupid.
She said, it is.
You'd be good at it.
And so I agreed to sit in for that one week.
And after 20 minutes, I heard angels singing.
I just knew this was what I wanted to do.
It took me about two years to meet the right people.
Ultimately, I met Dennis Prager, who is a radio host at KBC Radio.
And he had me on his show as a guest.
And station management heard me.
They gave me a two-day audition.
And the rest is pretty much history.
And I've been on TV and radio now for about 35 years.
In fact, TV even before radio, but that's for another story.
So that's how I got into talk radio.
Larry, what would you have done had you not gone into talk radio?
Well, I've always, always, always wanted to be a writer, and I'm a writer now.
But that's what I wanted to do.
But I also knew that you could not likely make a living out of being a writer.
Most writers that I admired, many of them died, broke.
They got famous after they died, that kind of thing.
I didn't want that.
But I always wanted to be a writer.
And I think you get addicted to it if the first thing you publish that you write gets published.
And I wrote a poem about Sandy Koufax when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, and it got published.
To see your name in print just blew me away.
Well, fast forward several decades later, guess who I'm able to meet at a black tie affair in Beverly Hills?
Sandy Koufax.
I knew somebody who knew him, so we were able to walk down to his table.
My friend introduced him to us, to me.
And I said, Sandy Koufax?
I said, I just, I can't believe it.
I told him the story about the first thing I wrote was a poem about him.
And I said, I'll just give you the first stanza, Sandy.
Koufax is on the mound.
The game has just begun.
He gets a sign from the catcher and swish, strike one.
And Sandy had a big smile, put his hand on my shoulder and said, don't quit your day job.
Larry, were you popular when you were in school?
Not much.
I remember in the eighth grade, my first sort of official girlfriend, Cheryl Sheffield, I met her at a record hop dance at the school and she was holding a cup of punch, red punch.
And I asked her to dance and she said, I'm holding the punch.
And I said, set it down.
And her eyes got big, and she thought that was forceful and commanding.
Later on, she told me that.
Don't ask me why.
So we started going out.
And after a few months, she came over to my house.
My brothers and I were in the living room watching television.
Doorbell rings.
My brother opens it.
It's Cheryl at the door.
And of course, she asked for me.
So I come to the door.
Again, my brothers are there.
And she says, it's quits.
I said, what's quits?
We're quits.
It's quits.
It's quits?
We're done.
Why are we done?
She said, we're just done.
I said, why?
She said, you're too nice.
And she walked away.
That's an example of Larry Elder's social life.
And it kind of went down from there.
So no, I was not particularly popular.
Larry, what were some of the other things that happened to you in high school that formed your outlook on life?
I'm not sure whether or not you can call this something that happened that formed an outlook on life, but it certainly showed me a lot of deep-seated anger that I often talk about in my videos and on my radio show.
I applied for a job with the LA County one summer, and it was about four or five hundred people from all around the county.
Most of them were white applying for a job.
You had a three-hour exam.
It was math.
It was reading comprehension, stuff like that.
And there was a guy from my high school there who I knew sort of, but not very well.
His name was Gilbert.
And Gilbert was kind of a likable guy.
He wasn't a troublemaker, but I never thought of him as somebody who was really concerned about school.
And so he was there applying for a job too.
He took the same test I did.
So after the three-hour exam, you go out into the hall and you sort of wait for them to grade the exam.
And he said to me, Larry, watch out.
They're going to get us.
And I said, who's going to get us?
He said, you know, the white people.
I said, you mean the people giving the test?
He said, yes.
I said, Gilbert, we don't even put our name or race down on here.
How are they going to know that we're black?
They're going to figure it out and they're going to F the black people.
That's what he said.
As he was speaking, he had his hands on his hips, arms akimbo is what it's called, and he swung his arm and accidentally crashed into a white young lady who was holding a cup of cocoa.
She was wearing a white, beautiful white dress, and the cocoa spilled all over her dress when Gilbert's elbow hit the cup.
And she went And Gilbert looked at her and turned back to me and ignored the whole thing.
That's how angry Gilbert was at white people who had done nothing that I could tell to him.
He was just angry in general towards white people, much the way we saw how many blacks were angry in general towards white people during the O.J. Simpson case.
That's when I saw one of the first glimpse of this kind of deep-seated, senseless anger towards white people who've done nothing whatever to people like Gilbert.
Larry, was your social life any better in college?
Yeah, it got a little better, but I had a girlfriend I liked a lot named Phyllis.
And Phyllis was from Canada and she played guitar and she sang.
And I never met anybody like that before.
She spoke French.
She was black.
And we were sitting in my dorm one time.
This is shortly after we met, maybe a few weeks afterwards, few months afterwards.
And she said, what do you want to do when you finish school?
And I said, I want to be rich.
And she said, no, seriously, what do you want to do?
And I said, I'm serious.
I want to be rich.
I want to do something interesting and that I think will be uplifting and something I'll have passion for, but I want to be rich.
And she said, what a superficial thing to aspire to.
And I thought she was joking at first.
And I said, well, what do you want to do?
And she said, I want to help people.
I want to go to third world countries.
I want to do this.
I want to do that.
I said, I think it's wonderful.
I want to be rich.
And that pretty much was the end of our relationship.
She thought I was crass and shallow and superficial.
What can I tell you?
Now, good news, as you may or may not know, we have been demonetized by YouTube.
Epoch Times channels, all of them including mine, have been demonetized.
Good news, we must be doing something right.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took them so darn long.
You can follow me and support me and get me on demand and uncensored by going to LarryTube.com.
That's real simple, LarryTube.com.
And I am Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
I'll see you next time.
Fill us.
Cheryl.
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