I love living in the Historic Triangle — where a fun Saturday night is a TV talking head historian busting jokes about Hubert Humphey! And the audience GETS the jokes!

From time to time I still write for the Daily Press (the newspaper that hired me in 1992 and asked me to create Chester the Crab in 1995 and then gave me a great run of creating five years of daily educational comics). Last Saturday I went to Jamestown Settlement to report on a speech by Michael Beschloss, author and frequent contributor to NBC and PBS.

He was just what history needs. He didn’t talk in droning philosophical frameworks. He kept involving the audience, asking for shows of hands about questions he asked. He spoke off-the-cuff, not from a dense speech. He told funny stories about people. Now, some were hard to believe — LBJ really owned a car that could travel in water and would scare visitors to his Texas ranch by driving at high speed towards a lake?!?! But some anecdotes I had heard before, and I trust Beschloss’ truthfulness. And I’m old enough that I remember Minnesota politician HHHumphrey. So me and the . . . ah, MATURE audience had a good time.

In promising to keep his speech short and “not go all Humphrey on you tonight,” Beschloss told this crowd-pleaser: Hubert had droned on awhile to a crowd and then caught himself going long, so he asked the crowd what time it was.

“Does anyone have a watch?” Hubert asked.

A heckler replied, “How about a CALENDAR?!”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 1:55 am and is filed under History Teacher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.