Charlie Meyerson interviews

Prepping to watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix, I revisited my Sept. 16, 1994, interview with The 7’s defense lawyer, William Kunstler, who told me then that the trial “changed me totally. …

“I never knew what it was to really fight until I watched Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Hayden and so on fight in a courtroom—do things that would make the jury understand that they were being persecuted: Bringing in a birthday cake for Bobby Seale, a Viet Cong flag on their table, standing out and protesting the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale in the courtroom.

“There were so many things they did that showed they were fighting—they weren’t gonna sit there like bumps on a log and be railroaded.

“And the net result was they won.”

I realized I never shared this file to this blog and the accompanying podcast series. So here you go.

Check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

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P.S. I was apparently the first to inform Kunstler in 1983 of Judge Julius Hoffman’s death.

This hasn’t happened much in my career, most of which I’ve devoted to profiling people far more interesting than I am.

But, twice in less than two weeks, I was honored to be interviewed about journalism, politics, radio, the origins of Chicago Public Square and my personal journey:

On Friday, I was a guest on Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky’s podcast—and that was just seven days after Matt Baron had grilled me for the Common Ground Oak Park podcast.

So here, in the Charlie Meyerson interviews series, is—for lack of a better phrase—Charlie Meyerson interviewed …

… and Charlie Meyerson interviewed again.

Check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

Michael Crichton—the science fiction writer who created Jurassic Park, “Westworld” (reborn this fall as a critically acclaimed HBO series) and other tales of tech gone awry—bristled at suggestions his work was “anti-science.” Michael Crichton in 2002 Photo: Jon Chase / Harvard News Office (Click for audio)On a 1993 return to Chicago, where he was born, he addressed that criticism. Before an audience at the Field Museum, he talked about the challenges of representing technology in fiction: “My work has been critical of science in a variety of ways ever since I began. … You can either see the technology of the future as beneficial and wonderful, which often doesn’t make a very interesting story; or you can see it as hazardous and dangerous, which is what I tended to focus on.” But he also made clear his interest in the dystopian ran deeper than just the urge to tell a good tale. He said he had “no hope” government could serve as a watchdog over advances in biotechnology, which he said was “changing every two minutes.” He added: “My wish would be for the scientists themselves to exercise caution.” Crichton, who died in 2008, refused to grant interviews with reporters during that 1993 visit. But the museum made audio of his lecture available for broadcast. And guess who saved it? So here’s Michael Crichton at Chicago’s Field Museum on Aug. 21, 1993. Enjoy this? Check out 1997 audio of American Museum of Natural History associate curator Rob DeSalle and then-Science News associate editor David Lindley discussing their book, The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World; Or, How to Build a Dinosaur.

“I went in with this naive notion that what I was going to find … was sort of this fun-filled Santa’s workshop.” Toy Wars cover (Click or tap for audio)Author’s book inscriptionReporter G. Wayne Miller’s inside story about the 1980s and ’90s battles between the toy companies Mattel and Hasbro, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them, is in the works as a drama series from Amazon, starring and co-written by Josh Gad (Frozen, Angry Birds, Broadway’s Book of Mormon). … Which makes timely my 1998 interview with Miller—a session he called “absolutely great” and one that he’d remember “for years.” As he then described his five-year mission, “I went in with this naive notion that what I was going to find inside Hasbro or any giant toy company was sort of this fun-filled Santa’s workshop. And, in fact, what I found was a very brutally competitive business.” Let’s set the WABAC Machine for a time before iPads, iPhones and iPads took center stage in kids’ imaginations to hear a firsthand account of the real-life drama that shaped generations of childhoods. Footnote: Almost seven years before this interview, I had a personal interaction with Kenner Products, eventually subsumed into the Hasbro empire. It was the subject of my first column for Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal newspaper, newly resurrected on this blog.

You’d think if you’d met the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, in the flesh you’d remember it.

Especially if he told you the real reason he made Mr. Spock look a little … devilish (about 32:17 in).

Well, I did meet him, and he told me that—and I confess that I forgot all about it.

Only when a longtime friend and neighbor lent me a vintage reel-to-reel tape player and I opened a long-filed-away box labeled “Gene Roddenberry” did I recall that I was actually in a studio with Roddenberry at college radio station WPGU in 1974—a half-decade after the original TV show had been canceled and a half-decade before the first Star Trek movie was to debut in theaters. (Photo: Roddenberry in 1974 by Nolan Hester for The Daily Illini.)

Not only that, but I got him to autograph a book, which sat on my shelf forgotten and unloved for years.

Here’s how it sounded, Nov. 7, 1974: A long-unheard interview with the visionary Gene Roddenberry, hosted by Phil Robinson with help from Jim Gassel, Bill Taylor, a so-young-and-nerdy-you-could-plotz 19-year-old Charlie Meyerson and a bunch of call-in fans.

Bonus 1: Keep listening past the end of that show and you’ll hear my second Roddenberry encounter—raw audio of a 1976 phone interview followed by the finished feature that resulted: An episode of WPGU’s mini-documentary series, Probe.

Bonus 2: For completists, here’s the aircheck of the full 1974 hour—including ads and a newscast by WPGU anchor Maggi Pratt.

Related listening: My interviews with “Trekspert” Mark Altman in 1995, science fiction writers Ray Bradbury in 1999, Cory Doctorow in 2019, Greg Bear in 1994 and 1996, William Gibson in 1993 and Douglas Adams in 1997 and 1992.

Check out even more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via Amazon Music or through your favorite podcast player, and at Chicago Public Square.

And thanks to Dave Mausner for lending me that tape player.

This week’s transformative Chicago City Council development—the historic livestream video presentation of a committee meeting—brings to mind a time when the council was maddeningly tough to follow.

In 1988, I was a newbie City Hall reporter for WXRT-FM. It was an assignment I relished not—partly because the council’s procedures were bewilderingly opaque and byzantine.

But I channeled my journalistic frustration into creation of a series that won a nationwide United Press International award for documentary radio reporting.

So, let’s return to the year 1988. Eugene Sawyer was briefly Chicago’s mayor, and a young journalist was pissed off at the difficulty navigating … Chaos in the Council.

■ Me, far more enthusiastic about covering City Hall in 2012.

■ Another award-winning WXRT News investigation from 1984.

■ And check out some of my interviews with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via Alexa-powered speakers, through your favorite podcast player, and at Chicago Public Square.

The death Tuesday of Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago journalist Lois Wille—a veteran of the Tribune, the Sun-Times and the Daily News—brings to mind a memorable 1997 interview with her and journalist Linda Lutton.

You can hear them debate urban housing trends that were remaking Chicago then and, more than two decades later, are shaping it still.

Here’s how it sounded—as aired June 22, 1997, on WNUA-FM, Chicago.

More conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player, and at Chicago Public Square.