Rebecca Brown's Interview with
Mike Leonard
Author of
The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family

Rebecca:
For years, I've been encouraging our readers to discover their parents' stories & write them down, & we have reviewed many memoirs & biographies, especially of The Greatest Generation, what has been your greatest satisfaction as a result of getting your book published? & though you're a bit of a celebrity, was it hard finding a literary agent?

Mike:
First of all, the response from the readers has been great because most of them mention how my family reminds them of theirs in certain ways, although sometimes the parental roles are reversed. They will say how their dad is like my mom or visa versa. My parents are direct opposites. If they were a pencil my dad would be the lead & my mom the eraser. He believes everybody has a good heart & she thinks most people are carrying some kind of concealed weapon. My mom drinks, my dad doesn't. She thinks we're doomed. He sees the pot of gold. Our family has had its ups & downs but through it all we have managed to laugh, mostly at our foolish selves. As far as finding a literary agent, well, she found me. Her name is Jane Dystel. About twenty years ago she called out of the blue saying that she liked the way I wrote my Today show stories & wanted to know if I were interested in writing a book. I thanked her for her interest but declined because my kids were young & I didn't want to spend the time.

Rebecca:
The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family is a record of not only the trip you, three of your grown children & your parents, Jack & Marge, took from Arizona to New England, it's also a trip back in time to your parents' childhoods in Paterson, New Jersey & their parents' arrival in America. When the bright idea occurred to you, did you have an inkling that you'd end up writing a book?

Mike:
No. In fact, when the idea to take the road trip hit me I wasn't even planning to make a Today show series out of it. I knew we would take our video cameras & document the journey for a family documentary. That's where Jane Dystel comes in again. For two decades she had been sending me a holiday card at Christmas time & I would send one back. That Christmas my return card mentioned the upcoming RV trip. Jane called me the day she received it & said, “that's your book.” It was our first conversation since her initial call twenty years earlier. I agreed with her assessment that the trip would make a good story but didn't want to commit until we returned. Even then I put off writing the book proposal for about four months. But Jane kept bugging me & I finally submitted a sample chapter & an outline & sent it to her in August of that year. There was a lot of interest, a bidding war actually. Random House won out.

Rebecca:
You must have missed your regular life with your wife at home when you set off to pick your parents up. What was the hardest thing you had to work through?

Mike:
I did miss my wife. She stayed at home to help our daughter Megan who was expecting a baby. We left at the end of January & the baby was due in early March. Our plan was to time the journey just right so we would be passing through Chicago when the baby arrived. An early delivery was a big worry & that was difficult. Not being there would have been awful.

Rebecca:
Along the way, the places you stopped at & the people you met, stirred up many a memory. What were the saddest & the funniest?

Mike:
There were lots of funny moments. We get great enjoyment out of the silliest things, especially our own screw-ups. The book is full of those examples because we screw up at an alarming rate. There were times when the RV rocked with laughter. My parents would get into some kind of crazy argument & the words that flew out were hilarious.

Rebecca:
Your parents enjoy a colorful vocabulary. When you came to write down some of the conversations, did you ever think of censoring them? & if not, why?

Mike:
I didn't because it's the way they are. Also, I felt it was important to show our flaws, of which there are many. We are an average family, imperfect in lots of ways. My mom swears…-- not bad stuff…but enough to get your attention. She is a great person though & had to tough it out through a difficult childhood. I think her salty language is a product of those hard times & when her childhood difficulties are revealed late in the book the reader comes to an understanding that she is a heroic character, & all true heroes have their faults. Since the book has been released I have received a mountain of letters & emails, all of them praising my mom & dad for being who they are.

Rebecca:
Most of us know you from your human interest features on NBC's Today Show. When did your career in film start & what influence has it had on your life, & those of your children?

Mike:
Feel free to call me a late bloomer. My TV career didn't get rolling until I was thirty & even then it started rolling pretty darn slowly. I had always struggled in school & had a banged-up hockey face so nobody ever recommended a career in television. After graduating from Providence College in 1970, Cathy married me despite my limited options & nine months later we had a baby. A professional hockey team in Phoenix invited me to training camp & then cut me from the squad.

To make ends meet I worked as a real estate title examiner, then as a construction worker, then a salesman followed by a bunch of other occupations as I tried to figure out what line of work best suited me. It was an eight-year process & during that time my hobby was making home movies with a Super 8 film camera. They were silent movies cut to a music track that played on a separate reel-to-reel tape recorder. The movies were short & the subject matter for the most part focused on the day-to-day stuff of family life. They were crude but innovative. One of my unemployed friends suggested that I try to parlay the films into a TV job so I lugged the projector around to all the news stations in Phoenix & showed my home movies on the office walls of flabbergasted news directors.

That didn't go over well. Without a degree in journalism, without TV news experience, without a face or voice deemed camera or microphone ready I was roundly rejected. I was thirty years of age by that time & the father of three small children. My last chance was a small PBS station on the campus of Arizona State University. The man in charge felt pity & gave me the use of a cameraman & an editor for a one-day tryout. I swung for the fences doing a story that was unlike any he had ever seen. A job offer followed. The pay…forty dollars a week. I accepted. Three months later the Phoenix CBS affiliate hired me as a sports reporter & sixteen months after that a vacationing NBC executive happened to catch one of my feature stories on his hotel TV & offered me a job with the Today show. I told him thanks but no thanks. Just kidding. How can you refuse the Today show? & that's where I've been for the past twenty-five years.

Rebecca:
You & I are of an age that we remember Saturday morning matinees with all the local kids at the movie theater(-- cinemas in the London, UK, where I grew up), & I loved your descriptions of them. What do you think kids are missing now they watch movies at home?

Mike:
Not only is the Saturday matinee a thing of the past but so is the notion of kids walking or riding their bikes to the local, small town movie theater with not a parent in sight. Without parental watchdogs the inside of the movie theater often became a bubbling cauldron of mischief-making. Unless it was a good movie like Hercules Unchained. Then it became as quiet as a church as we sat in bug-eyed wonder as the strongest man who ever lived squeeze the life out of two-headed creatures & tyrannical evil-doers.

Rebecca:
Having such a hard time "hitting the books" at school, how did you enjoy writing this book & would you write another one?

Mike:
It's funny; all those problems in school actually helped me become a writer, grammar & spelling mistakes notwithstanding. I learned to use my eyes & ears to focus in on what was happening around me. I became more observant, noticing the little things that give each event a distinct flavor. My home movies were my stories, all told without words. When the chance came to add words to my TV audition tape I chose them carefully, not wanting to bog the tale down with fancy, unnecessary prose. All the souped-up words in the world can't save a lousy story.

Rebecca:
Thank you, Mike, for taking precious time out of your life to share with us, is there anything else you'd like us to know?

Mike:
Yes. Even though the RV plays a central role in my book, it is just a vehicle to tell a bigger story about life --…a life that is most often made up of little moments. Those little moments loom large when we open ourselves up to the knowledge that chance encounters & brief conversations are often the catalysts for life-changing events. When my unemployed friend casually mentioned that I could work in TV, I listened despite his lack of credentials. You never know who the messenger will be. Open your eyes & ears to all possibilities & your life will never be the same.

Rebecca:
Do catch my Review of Mike Leonard's The Ride of Our Lives - I hope it makes you go out & buy yourself a copy!

Rebecca Brown
Published 07/02/06