All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 25, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
30:55
Radio Icon Delilah on Life After Loss

She’s a radio icon. Delilah delights over 8 million listeners every single week with her velvety voice and sound advice. In the rest of this in-depth interview, Delilah’s back revealing the truth about her life off the air, the course of her career, and what’s next for her family. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
A couple of times I actually deserved it.
One time I did traffic from a news car, you know, that had KPNW all over the sides and the top.
And I was the traffic girl.
I would be on the roads at six, driving to the accidents, reporting on, you know, everything is clear on I-5.
And I went too fast.
You got fired for getting a ticket?
I got fired for getting a number of speeding tickets.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Slow down and love someone.
Those words are recognizable as the name behind the slogan, Delilah.
She's a radio icon.
Finally, I have her trapped in the studio here.
Her signature soothing voice, which I'll seek to emulate, she inspires over 8 million listeners, sharing their stories of hope, love, and healing.
Today, Delilah is here revealing her own story of healing.
She's opening up about a family tragedy that changed her life and how she's learned to take on the world, one heart.
at a time.
God bless you for being here.
Thank you.
I've been a long-term fan.
I remember one evening late, I was probably coming home from the hospital or something, and there's pensive moments when things didn't always go well, and you've got to try to make peace with it, and you're on.
And you were talking to people like regular people.
I thought, how cool, I discovered this woman.
She's probably just a little newbie starting off.
But she's so good.
I bet she has a future.
Thank you.
And finally I realized a decade of my life passed.
Because in medicine, you know, you train and you basically disappear off the planet.
You don't have any zeitgeist that would happen.
Zero.
None.
Because you never watch anything.
You don't have time to do anything except sleep.
Except sleep, eat, and study medicine.
Go to the bathroom and operate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not necessarily in that order.
So before you actually entered the trade you're currently in, you thought about my business.
I did.
I actually went to school to study medicine and I could not pass chemistry.
And so after three tries at the same entry-level chemistry class, I mean, entry-level chemistry, I would argue with the teacher, I'm like, how do you know the periodic chart is correct?
Because it's changed.
Therefore, it's not fact.
It's all theory.
You haven't even seen what one of those little atoms looks like anyway, so how can you test me on information that isn't even fact?
Right.
And after like, you know, the third teacher and the third class that I couldn't pass, they're like, okay, you should probably not pursue this.
And I was already on the, I was paying for my education by working in broadcasting.
And I thought...
Yeah, why don't I stick with what I'm really good at?
Well, you could have been good at medicine too, I think, just listening to you.
But I'll tell you.
She's a healer anyway.
Exactly.
But chemistry is probably the least connected science to medicine.
It is so remote in almost every aspect from what we have to do in the management of people.
Now, it's important for understanding how the drugs work.
It's critical for actually filtering out who can learn, stuff that you need to learn in medicine.
They filtered me out really quickly.
It does in every school.
They actually literally put chemistry as your first criteria when I went to college in order to make sure that half of us dropped out.
If you can get through chemistry, you can do anything.
Yeah, that, and I couldn't.
And I was so good at the other stuff, you know, straight A's in biology, and I did really, really well in human anatomy, and I knew all the bones, and I knew all the muscles, and I knew the cardiovascular system, and the reproductive system, and I could, like, give lessons about, you know, and then...
The atomic, subatomic weights of atoms that they don't even know.
And now they've added, since then, they've added more stuff to the periodic chart.
There are issues in chemistry I still have scarred by.
The teacher that I had...
I've never told this story before, but a wonderful man, Leonard Nash, great professor.
This is actually the middle-level chemistry class at Harvard.
All the freshmen in there, hundreds of you, just trying, you know, you all were best in your school.
That's why you got in there.
So we all think we're hot shots.
Of course, one knows half of us aren't going to make it.
So halfway through the first week, Leonard Nash was on the Manhattan Project.
He helped figure out how this country could, at the time, win a big war and was an iconic professor.
But he's teaching this chemistry class.
God knows why he's doing it.
I think it's just a love of humanity.
He's willing to deal with all these freshman medical school.
They don't have applicants even.
People have aspirations for medical school.
Midway through the first week, he looks up and says, Mr. Oz, back then I was Mr. Oz.
Mr. Oz, does that question sound right to you?
And I'm looking around saying, why is he picking on me?
I mean, what is going on here?
And for the rest of my career, he would call on me every class to see if what was going down made sense.
So I thought, I must be either really good or really bad or something.
Why would he call on me?
And years later, people I run into will recognize me, not because of anything else I've ever done, but because they were in that class scarred with me.
But one day I confronted Dr. Nash.
I said, what is going on here?
Why me?
He says, well, there's two reasons.
First, alphabetically, you were right in the middle.
But he said, more importantly, I looked at the curve of the first quiz, and you were right in the middle.
You weren't the smart guy, you weren't the dumb guy.
So I figured if you got it, I was going at the right pace.
And that was the key to my success.
Wow!
Because the taxes, he had to mentor me to get through the class.
And he did that wonderfully.
The gift of gab.
You've always had it.
Always had it.
It paid off well.
But you talk a little bit about your third grade experience, which was not always positive.
And probably subsequent to that, you've had others.
Yeah, that was kind of scarring.
I tell this story today and people are like, you would be fired, the school would be sued, there would be lawsuits.
I'm like, well, back when I was in school, you know, that was the way it was.
But I went to a very small school up Coos River, Oregon, and my teacher tried and tried and tried to get me to be quiet.
And so first, you know, she would try putting my desk right in front of Right there in front of, you know, so right next to her.
Well, that's ridiculous because all that means is when I turn around, I have an entire audience.
Oh my goodness.
It's like being on stage.
And if I stood on my chair, I was on stage.
And so then she's like, well, that didn't work.
So then she moved me to the back of the room thinking, well, if she shamed me into being quiet, well, all that means is she's not really paying that close of attention and I can talk to everybody around me.
Then they moved me out into the hall.
In the hall?
In the hall, outside the door.
How were you supposed to hear what she was teaching?
I don't know if they really thought that far ahead, but then my voice carries so far, I'm out in the hall talking to every janitor that walks by, every teacher that walks by, and she could hear me at her desk inside the classroom.
So she got very upset with me, and so one day she had yelled at me two or three times, Delilah, please be quiet.
And you know, she always started out the day nice.
Delilah, please, please, I need you to concentrate.
Can you please just stop talking?
Stop.
Stop with it.
Which would only invite me to engage in the conversation, right?
So by the end of the day, she was so frustrated.
She tore a piece of duct tape and put it across my face.
Oh my goodness.
What she didn't know is that duct tape, it's a miracle.
I love duct tape.
I mean, I couldn't live without duct tape.
It's a beautiful tool for everything that goes wrong at the farm.
But when it gets wet, it's completely ineffective.
Mm-hmm.
So you could talk through the duct tape.
I took my tongue and I licked the duct tape off of my mouth.
You licked your way out.
I licked my way out and got the duct tape loose and it made her so mad.
She held the duct tape on the side of my face and she went around my head with the duct tape so that I couldn't push it off.
And yet, only a few years later, seventh grade, you're actually already noticed by radio station owners.
How does that happen?
Well, it clearly didn't work very well.
And I think that the kids are born with a predisposition, their personality.
Like, I know that our job as a parent is to mold and shape and help our children, but really our job is to figure out what their gift is and then bring that out and find avenues for them to be able to use that gift.
And so I mentioned in the book, One Heart at a Time, I was born with the show-off gene.
I am an insufferable show-off.
And then you were named Delilah, which is very theatrical.
There you go.
Everyone's going to notice you.
Scares strong men.
Yeah, I'll cut your hair.
But I lived in a town where there wasn't a whole lot of opportunities to show off unless you were good at sports.
Well, I was born with crooked legs.
And I don't know if they do this anymore, Dr. Oz, but when I was a baby, they cast my legs.
They still do it.
And they put a stick, a wooden dowel between my knees.
You do that for hips more than...
Yeah, it was hips, it was legs, it was the whole, you know...
The whole body.
The whole body.
Yeah.
And so my mom had to carry me by holding onto this wooden dowel and carrying me around until I was over a year old, maybe a year and a half.
Then when the cast came off, the braces went on.
And the first time I saw Forrest Gump, I started bawling.
And my family's with me.
They're like, okay, that's kind of weird.
I'm bawling as he's running in the opening act and the braces fall off his legs.
Because those were the exact model and make of the braces that I wore until I was 10 years old.
Part of it metaphorically was the braces were holding him back.
Yeah, yeah.
And when you've got the show-off gene, but you have no athletic ability whatsoever, I couldn't dribble a ball.
I had no coordination.
I didn't learn to crawl first.
And when you don't learn to pattern and crawl, it's very hard to develop coordination later in life.
I can't snowboard.
I can't wakeboard.
I can't skateboard.
I can't do any of those things that require that kind of coordination.
And I'm in a small town where, you know, basketball, football, we had a girls, you know, volleyball team.
The only sport I was good at is tetherball.
Tetherball?
Tetherball.
That was it, but that's not a sport, you know?
And so the local school, it was called Jewett Junior High.
It's not even there anymore.
There was a very wealthy logging family who had left a large sum of money to the school in a grant.
But in order to access the grant money, the school had to jump through hoops that the family had written into this grant.
So in order for the school to profit and get those funds from this family that left millions of dollars, they had to do a number of things.
And the family very much valued education and reading far more so than sports.
So it wasn't like, well, if you make it to the playoffs, you get the grant.
We had to have a speech contest, an oratorical competition every year.
And it had to have five separate categories that the family spelled out.
So the speech contest was coming up and I'm like, oh my God, this is my moment to shine!
And so there were five categories and I entered four of them and I won all four of them.
Oh my.
And so at the end of the competition, these two men, Steve and Jerome Kanegi, they were young men probably in their late 20s, early 30s, approached my mom and said, wow, you Your daughter really likes to talk.
And my mom goes into default mode, you know, she buries her.
And my mom was a big woman.
She was over six foot tall.
She buries her face in her very huge hands and says, oh my God, I know we can't shut her up.
We've tried everything.
They even duct taped her mouth one time.
And Steve Koneghi, the younger of the two brothers, stepped in and said, no, no, no, Mrs. Luke, this is a really good thing.
That's the first time in her life she's heard this, you know?
First time I had heard it.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
But what was it like, so these two gentlemen and others like them began to support you, but as a teenager and a female, that must have been a bit of a strange, even as you matured, that must have been a bit of a strange, even as you matured, there weren't a lot of women doing what There were no women doing what I was doing.
But because I was so isolated in a small town, I didn't know that.
You know, our town only had one radio station and they owned it.
And I wasn't exposed to the world at large.
It wasn't until after I graduated high school and moved out of my hometown that I realized I was, quote, the girl at every radio station.
I was the girl.
The girl doing news and traffic or the girl doing this or that or whatever.
I was the girl.
I worked with men, but I was the girl.
What inspired you?
Keep going.
I love being on the air.
I stinkin' love.
It's my drug.
It's my happy place.
When I'm in my studio, like when I come into the studio, I just like, it's my zen place.
You like the acoustics?
I love the acoustics.
I love the feel.
I love the atmosphere.
When we came in, I was looking at the board.
I love the equipment.
I love the old turnpots.
I just, I loved the station.
I loved the people at the station.
I mean, there's only five of us on the whole staff.
That was news, traffic, weather, sales, general manager.
That was it.
There was five of us.
But they were so good to me.
And they taught me everything they could possibly cram into my mind.
They mentored me.
They encouraged me.
They truly kept me on the straight and narrow.
You know, I grew up in the 70s.
And there's a woman here on this trip with me named Katie that we were very close in grade school with.
Very close in junior high.
We were in Girl Scouts together.
And we did all sorts of things together.
But in high school, she went the path of getting high and getting wasted.
She's got 32 years of sobriety now.
But she was a party girl.
And, you know, she was very proud with the cigarettes and the purse and the backpack and the weed and the pocketbook.
And, you know, and I knew if I messed up even one time, I would not get to go to the radio station.
And the fear of losing my happy place, I never got high, I never got drunk, I never skipped school.
And with all that beautiful behavior, and the fact is you love every aspect of it.
How'd you get fired 12 times?
I mean, what went wrong?
Well, it wasn't for stuff like that.
Well, one time, a couple of times I actually deserved it.
One time, I did traffic from a news car, you know, that had KPNW all over the sides and the top and the roof.
And I was the traffic girl.
I would get up and be on the roads at 6, driving to the accidents, reporting on, you know, everything is clear on I-5.
I went too fast.
You got fired for getting a ticket?
I got fired for getting a number of speeding tickets.
I got fired because I neglected to tell the station I had speeding tickets.
I just paid them.
I didn't realize that that information went to an insurance company and the insurance company sent it to the company that owned the car that the car was licensed to.
Were you ever fired?
First of all, were you ever fired for a legitimate reason?
That's not legitimate to me.
That legitimate reason would be you did something on air that you wish you hadn't done or you had an interpersonal issue with someone where they were giving you a hard time and you're going back at them and it became too difficult.
And then the reason I'm asking is I want to know if there are not legitimate reasons you were fired, too.
Most of them were when radio stations, you know this, you've been around long enough, when radio stations change formats, then they clean house and they bring in a whole new crew.
So some of it was that.
Can you imagine firing Babe Ruth?
I mean, do these people even know what's going on?
I was, you know, 21, 25, 27. Someone's looking back and saying, ah!
She was there!
I have done the I told you so dance.
I admit it.
Not so much in public, but behind the scenes when I have been at conventions and stuff and seen the faces of some of the men that fired me.
I have, you know, gone back to my hotel room and gone, I told you so.
I told you so.
You didn't think I'd make it, but I told you so.
You know, I admit to that childish immature.
Yeah.
But there were a lot of times I was let go, Dr. Oz, for really stupid, stupid, asinine, insane reasons.
One time, the radio station, I was number one.
I had been number one for a couple of years at night.
I had not only higher ratings at night, which is just a mathematical formula where how many people are listening, times the amount of time they listen to.
So they said, well, you're just so good at night because people don't have anything better to do at night than listen to you.
And this is the same person that two years before said, it'll never work at night because nobody listens to radio at night.
They watch television, and you're not going to change their consumer habits.
Now, well, the only reason you got great ratings is because they've got nothing better to do at night than listen to you, and that's why.
So I'm like, really?
Okay.
So I went after Cume, and I decided to answer every phone call and every letter I got from every listener.
Hand, answered them, and then mailed them with my own postage stamps that I bought.
And my cue went up, you know, when you pay that kind of close attention.
Sure.
So then, not only have I got higher ratings at night, I've got higher cumulative number of people listening than our morning show had.
So you would think they would say, man, that's amazing!
Oh, did they fire you for reaching out personally?
They hired a consultant who charged tens of thousands of dollars to come into the market and do market research.
And they gave me, I have it in my file someplace, the report, which is in a bound notebook.
And on the front page of the report, it says, Delilah is the tail wagging the dog.
And the whole report was about how if they wanted to elevate the image of the station, they had to get rid of me because I was stealing the limelight from the real stars of the station.
Classic.
How long did it take you to go to the next station?
Not long.
I was never unemployed.
I mean, I've never had to look for a job.
I went from Reedsport, my hometown, to North Bend Coos Bay, so I left 3,000 people for the booming metropolis of 12,000 people.
And then I moved to Eugene and I flunked out of school.
Then I moved to Seattle and got fired there several times.
Then I moved to Boston and got fired there and moved to Philly and got fired there.
Where in Philly were you?
That's where we're from.
Philly was WMGK magic.
So resilience is really sort of your mantra, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
And I talk about this in the book, One Heart at a Time.
One of the best gifts my dad gave me was he told me when I was very young, don't ever go in debt.
He said, do not go in debt, sis.
And he said, when you go in debt, you have to stay employed because you have to pay your bills.
When you live debt-free, you can say...
Kiss my expletive.
And he had no idea at the time he was telling me that, what a gift he was giving me.
Because...
I didn't incur any student debt.
I paid as I went.
I worked as I went to school.
I never graduated, but I did go to school a lot.
But I paid it all as I was going.
I paid my rent.
I never bought a new car.
I bought used cars for cash.
And so I didn't owe anybody anything.
So when a program director would say something, I had a program director once, and I don't talk about this in the book, but I had a program director in Eugene once, not fire me, but move me from seven to midnight till midnight till six, which is a horrible hour to work when you're going to school, and cut my pay.
And when I said, that's not fair and I'm not doing that, he said, well, why don't you come to my apartment when you get off the air tomorrow morning and we'll talk about it.
And then I said something like my father would have said.
And I quit.
And had I not been given that gift from my dad to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining and not owing somebody else, I don't know that I would have had the courage at 18 years old to stand up to a man who was in his 50s and wildly successful and say, kiss mine.
I'm not playing that game.
That's not the way it's going down.
Well, I'm glad you told that creep to get lost.
Oh, he was such a creep.
Such a creep.
I'm sure that happens a lot, especially to young women, which I think is obviously we're hearing more and more about it these days.
But I think it happens because people, men, become oblivious to the reality of what they're doing.
They just start saying, I mean, that's so, I mean, can you imagine that man admitting that to anybody in his entire life?
How reprehensible that is.
But it was common then.
It was so common then.
And I think it's common now, but thank God we're talking about it now.
Thank God we're talking about it now.
But because my dad gave me that bit of wisdom and it stuck with me, and he lived that way.
He and my mom lived that way.
They never owned a new car in their life.
They paid as they went.
There's so much freedom when you are not beholden to somebody else.
It's true financially, it's true morally, it's true in everyone.
It is.
There's a lot more to come, but first, let's take a quick break.
Delilah, interesting name.
Your parents named you because they were a fan of the biblical character?
Did they have a family name?
They wanted to be a hairdresser.
They were wicked funny.
My parents were not religious at all, but they were wicked funny.
And they were given a golden opportunity because their name was Luke.
My maiden name was Luke.
Now, my sister, who is out there, she does my social media, she is the keeper of the family truth.
She has done the research.
She's done the DNA. She's done the family tree.
She knows the facts.
She knows the dates my grandparents were married and when they died.
I never let a fact get in the way of a good story.
Don't confuse me with the facts.
I'm telling a story here.
She's like, that's not the way it went down.
So the truth is, my family, they really aren't Luke's.
What?
Yes.
My maiden name is Luke.
My father's maiden name, you know, his name was Luke, his grandfather.
But my sister did this research and found out that back in our history, I don't know how many generations back, but she'll tell you exactly.
You were Paul.
John.
Luke died.
Mr. Luke died.
And two years later, his wife, his widow, gave birth.
And then she gave birth again.
And those two children took her last name, which was her married name, Luke.
But we're not even really Luke's.
So you have no idea who your dad is?
Oh yeah, my sister does.
My sister knows it all.
She did all the research.
Fascinating.
But because our last name was Luke, my parents thought it would be very funny.
To name my brother, their firstborn son, Matthew Mark Luke.
Oh, please.
That's mean.
But people want you to change your name sometimes.
Oh, yeah.
So when I was born, they said, well, we got to counteract the good with the bad.
And so my grandma Luke, my dad's mom says, yeah, they were going to name you Bathsheba.
And so she called me Sheba, she-devil, until she disowned me, but she called me Sheba my whole life growing up.
But so they named me Delilah to counteract the goodness of Matthew Mark Luke with something a little crazy.
Why did she disown you?
My grandma?
Yes.
Because I married a black man.
So, but my name, when I got into radio, worked.
Jose, you can't just say that.
We were talking about the name.
I promise you remember the name.
Did you know she would disown you?
Obviously, there was some sensitivity to your marrying an African-American.
I did.
I thought that she would ultimately forgive me and get over it.
One of the things that my family carries very well is a grudge.
So, yeah.
I mean, I knew...
I knew on some level that it was, I obviously knew it was going to change the dynamic of our family.
I did not believe that they would stick to their guns.
I thought that once they met him and once, you know, there would be kumbaya and, you know, but no, that wasn't the way it played out.
How did your parents deal with it?
They disowned me.
Your parents did too?
Yeah.
What year was this?
So it wasn't like even that long ago.
I mean, wow.
And when you separated, did they take you back?
No.
My mom never...
My mom stood by my father's side because she loved my father and was married to my father.
But behind his back, we had a relationship.
She came to see me.
She snuck out.
She would tell my father she was going to my sister's house or my brother's house.
And she would come to our house.
She came and spent a week with me.
She and her mother, my grandmother on her side, who had also turned their back on me.
But then when my son was born, my mom and my grandma came and spent 10 days with me and the baby helping me.
As it turns out, my grandmother was in excruciating pain because she had a cancerous tumor on her back.
And yet she made that sacrifice and made a seven-hour road trip to come and And love on my newborn son and love on me.
But my dad only spoke to me two more times before he passed.
So if you had a caller, because you give people advice, who lived through that trauma of that kind of divisive family situation, how would you help them heal?
What have you done to heal that deep familial rift in your own?
Well, I tell people all the time, because people call that are interfaith relationships, same-sex relationships.
You know, there are all sorts of relationships that parents disapprove of.
I work a lot in West Africa.
In West Africa today, you still cannot marry outside of your tribe in a lot of areas.
And so what I believed then, what I believe now, is that your life is the future.
And as much as you love and honor and respect your parents, your life is the future.
So you cannot determine your future based on their decisions for your life.
And if that costs you that relationship, then it wasn't really a relationship to begin with.
Because love that's conditional isn't really love at all.
Was there objection over his race or him?
His race.
Oh yeah, his race.
They never even knew him.
When my mother got to know him, she loved him.
He was just very lovable and very charming and very, very funny and very wonderful in most ways.
So I pulled you off, Delilah.
Thank you for sharing that with us.
It's remarkable the life experiences you've had.
We were talking about one heart at a time for a while.
I know you named it One Heart for Me, which I appreciate.
Ah, I did.
But I want to get into some of the stories that you speak to, because I think they're vitally important for us all to understand.
But I just wanted to get to know you better.
Your name is just unforgettable.
So I have to...
So, in radio, I was in Seattle.
I was working at KING, which at the time was a Top 40 station.
And the program director pulled me in and he said, this isn't going to work.
I said, what's not going to work?
He said, your name.
We've got to change it.
What do you mean you've got to change it?
I'd already been on the air like eight years at this time.
He goes, Delilah sounds like a stripper's name.
I said, it's the name my parents gave me at birth.
He goes, I know, but I like the name Kelly Starr.
So from here on out, you're going to be Kelly Starr on the radio.
That sounds like a stripper's name.
I'm like, oh, that?
I know exactly where you got that name.
Exactly.
I was in lights, you know, down on Highway 99. Come on, give me a break.
And so I said, well, how about D. Renee?
Because I used my middle name as my last name.
I said, how about D. Renee?
He goes, I guess that sounds good.
That's got a good ring to it.
So the first night I said D-Renee and then I said Delilah Renee and then I said Delilah.
So...
He forgave you.
He did.
And then he fired me.
It has been an absolutely wonderful time speaking with you.
God bless you.
God bless you.
▲
Export Selection