How to Push a Book
Judson Hale '55 is the editor of Yankee magazine and The Old Farmer's Almanac. He is also the author of a new autobiography titled The Education of a Yankee (Harper & Row). At the end of a 26-city TV and radio tour on behalf ofthe book and the 1988 edition of the Almanac Jud stopped by the DartmouthBookstore to sign some books. We asked him what it's like to go on a book tour.
I've done media tours for the almanac for many years but the appearances for The Education of a Yankee were a new and surprising experience. Most of the interviewers actually took me seriously! If I'd known I was going to be called upon to talk about all that intimate stuff—in depth and in detailmaybe I wouldn't have written about it.
The almanac interviews, on the other hand, were fairly typical of what I've been used to. But this year I didn't take along a woolly worm to illustrate a method of weather prognosticating. I stopped doing that after a rather embarrassing experience on a television show in Detroit awhile ago. That year I'd named my woolly worm Garth. He traveled in a jar and I was sort of attached to him. He was like a little pal in the hotel rooms at night. I did notice that he wasn't particularly active, but I always told the television hosts that he was just asleep. Sort of hibernating. Then on the show in Detroit, when I took Garth out of the jar on a live show, he broke in half. I guess he'd been dead the whole time. They say animals will always upstage you. On a show in Milwaukee this year the only other guest besides me was a parrot which could, and would, burp on command.
Perhaps a show in Cleveland gives the best idea of how I'm usually perceived—a live morning show with a mostly female audience. The first guest was a man wearing a red T-shirt. As soon as his interview began he removed the T-shirt and began playing "America the Beautiful" with his armpit. He simply pressed his left hand with his right armpit and squeaked out the melody into a microphone. It wasn't half bad. I tried doing it when I got back to the hotel that night but couldn't even make a sound.
Anyway, the second guest that morning was the tallest woman in the whole world. She was 7'9"—much taller than even Wilt Chamberlain. And the third guest ... well,I was the third guest.
"What did I do?" you may well ask. I made a big effort to act dignified.
