Letterman: Yes, I've heard of the place.
Me: Anyway, this town - again, I don't know much about it - it has this bridge, and I'm told it's pretty nice.
(More audience laughter!)
Me: Seriously, though. The Brooklyn Bridge is a prime example of infrastructure that is maintained properly and can last forever. It's over a hundred years old, and is a landmark to the entire world. It's something the citizens of this city [and here I waved my arm towards the studio audience] can be justifiably proud. It would cost billions of dollars to replace, so a few million every year in maintenance is cheap insurance!
From New York I went to Cleveland, and from Cleveland I was going to Chicago, but that got changed. Instead I went to St. Louis, and Chicago would be the end of the tour. I spent the weekend in Redmond with Bill Gates, generally just goofing off. He couldn't believe the amount of time I was wasting doing this book tour. Sunday night I flew down to San Francisco. Tuesday I went to Los Angeles, where I spent two days, and on Wednesday did The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.
That was interesting! Talk about meeting a living legend! He did Carnac the Magnificent that night, and that was just amazing. I sat there in the Green Room and watched in utter disbelief - I was about to meet an American god! As I had been told, Carson didn't schmooze with the guests, either before or after they came on, and he ran the operation tightly. I asked if I could get a photo standing next to him, and was refused, but they did have a photographer who could take shots when we were on the set together, and that was plenty good enough for me. I don't really remember what we talked about, and it probably wasn't my best appearance, but I didn't get the bum's rush, which he was known to do on occasion.
It didn't matter. I met Johnny Carson!
Thursday was Houston, and then I flew to Chicago to finish the book tour. If I never did this again, it would still be too soon. Still, Chicago looked to be interesting. Simon and Schuster was happy with the reaction and sales (even if nobody showed up at the signings - what a waste of time!) and I was booked as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This was the only time I was booked for a nationally syndicated daytime talk show.
In November of 1987 she was still doing her show from the studios of WLS in Chicago. Right now it was done there, but I knew that within a few years, she would build a much bigger Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards) complex elsewhere. That day, though, I ended up down in the Loop at WLS.
Oprah wasn't yet the big deal name she was going to become. She was only a year older than I was, and had only been on the air nationwide for about a year. The nightly shows I had been on had a different format. They were basically a standup comic doing some material and running through whoever was lined up, bing, bang, boom! They taped in the late afternoon or early evening and aired later that night. Oprah was more likely to tape a week or two ahead of time, her studio audience was mostly women, and her viewers were mostly women, also. The woman herself was an American success story. Born dirt poor in rural Mississippi into an abusive family, she clawed her way into school and college and eventually made it big beyond belief.
As an interviewer, her skills were at heart an immense empathy, which was why she played well with women and often did well with the 'crisis of the week' which she would highlight. She was not considered a tough interviewer, but nobody much cared. She was also immensely well read, and was the only interviewer who had actually read our book! Every other interviewer received highlights and suggestions from Simon and Schuster, and it was doubtful that anybody had even read those. Oprah had read our book, and she blocked out an entire half hour to talk to me!
I had never much cottoned to her show back on my first go, simply because it was a daytime woman's show. Too many tears, too much tabloid nonsense, too many 'crisis of the week' style shows. On the other hand, I knew Marilyn and Alison liked her, and you can't say she didn't make it to the big time. She was already a 'big deal', and was getting bigger!
In person she was quite personable and smart. The first half of the show had been some celebrity chef and how to cook something with vegetables. After he got done, they cleared the smoke out of the studio and wheeled the kitchen set away, and it was just the two of us in chairs in front of the audience. Oprah introduced me, saying, "And now I'd like to bring out the author of a new book called Eat Your Peas! America's Crumbling Infrastructure And The Need To Rebuild It. This book is a fascinating look at what is happening with our roads and bridges and dams. Please help me welcome Doctor Carl Buckman!" The applause started and an assistant signaled me to go, so I walked around the curtain. Unfortunately for me, my knee had been acting up for a few days, and I needed the cane, even as early in the day as it was, and I was limping.
I came over and switched my cane to my left hand and held out my right to Oprah. "Thank you for having me on your show."
We settled ourselves on our chairs, and she started with, "So Doctor, explain what you mean about eating your peas!"
"Well, first, call me Carl. I almost never use the title. And second, I have to say, I'm not the author, but the co-author. The other guy who wrote this book, whose idea it really was, is Professor Harry Johnson, and he's back home teaching engineering to students, so that our roads and bridges stay safe." That got quite a bit of applause.
Oprah smiled at that. "Well, that is pretty important. Still, what does that have to do with eating peas?"
I spent a few minutes talking about how as a parent we always were trying to get the kids to eat their vegetables, which got us talking about how the tricks we used on my children and what our mothers had made us do. That played very well with the mostly female audience. Then we got into a little more substance, about how eating your vegetables made you strong, and that as a nation our infrastructure made us strong.
"You mentioned in the book that it was the Erie Canal that made New York the city it is today. How is that? The canal is 150 miles away from New York.", she said.
"That's true, but the real outlet to the canal is not Albany or Schenectady, it's at the end of the Hudson River, which is New York. This gets into a bit of the history of America. If you look at a map, there's at least a half dozen major ports up and down the East Coast." I started ticking them off on my fingers. "You have Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah, for instance. Each of them has a fine port and a good anchorage. So why did New York become the biggest seaport on the East Coast?"
I continued, "Let's go back in time a couple of hundred years ago. There's no cars, no trains, no decent roads, and a few hundred miles to the west, there's this big mountain range. It's actually very difficult to get through the Appalachian Mountains to the lands on the other side. If you were a farmer in Ohio, for instance, it was actually cheaper to send your grain down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, load it on a ship, and sail it to New York, than it was to try to drive a mule train overland."
There were some incredulous murmurs at that, but I just smiled and nodded. Horses and mules would eat their weight in grain hauling stuff that distance. Oprah said, "So the Erie Canal solved that problem?"
"It's incredibly cheap to ship stuff on a barge. Shipping costs dropped to one-twentieth of hauling things overland. The Erie Canal was the biggest infrastructure project of the era, like the interstate system of its day. All of a sudden, you could ship corn or wheat or ore from the Midwest to the East Coast quickly and cheaply. Trade grew over the course of the 1800s by an incredible margin. It went the other way, too. Now the East Coast could ship cloth and plows and glass and all sorts of other expensive and exotic items to the Midwest. One of the most important items shipped was salt! To make salt you needed sea water, and the lakes and rivers west of the Appalachians are all fresh water. And it all shipped over the Erie Canal to the Midwest."