Salon.com > Dick Gordon

Son of a bigot

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As the pastor of the much-reviled Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps has become synonymous with hatred. The pastor and his family make it a point to carry signs at the funerals saying, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers." They show up to media-friendly events with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”

Nate Phelps is the sixth of Fred's 13 children, and he has the scars to show for it. He describes his father as verbally and physically abusive. When he was 18, Nate ran away from home and from the fundamentalist Calvinist religion in which he was raised.

Now in his 50s, Nate finds himself publicly squaring off with his father and siblings to reverse their legacy of intolerance. He lives in Calgary, where he has become a public speaker who champions LGBT rights and raises awareness about the connection between extreme religion and child abuse. He is currently writing a book about his life and is the subject of an upcoming documentary.

What was your childhood like?

I’m a ferry boat captain

Sat, 19 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

To celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of oral historian Studs Terkel, the radio show “The Story” is running a series devoted to his work and his influence. (Read an interview with Terkel here.) As part of the series, host Dick Gordon conducts new interviews with people working today, like ferry boat captain Jenny Brown, who was laid off from her job and found an adventure she could not have imagined. A segment of her interview is below. You can listen to the entire interview here.

We were really starting to feel the crunch. I think two years prior to me being laid off we had to cut our hours back and so everybody worked and got paid for 90 percent instead of 100 percent of the time. So everybody had one day unpaid every two weeks. And so that was the first big sign that things were getting bad. And then it just continued to spiral until we couldn't keep as many people on. And I was the low man on the totem pole. I was the assistant planner, which is the lowest step, and also I was the most recent one hired so I had the least seniority. I knew about almost six months before I was actually going to be laid off, they'd already told me that it was me.

I made this knife

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

To celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of oral historian Studs Terkel, the radio show “The Story” is running a series devoted to his work and his influence. (Read an interview with Terkel here.) As part of the series, host Dick Gordon conducts new interviews with people working today, like knife maker Joel Bukiewicz, who is interviewed below. To listen to the radio program, click here.

You were a writer. Were you losing your enthusiasm for it? Or you weren't happy with what you were producing?

No, the stuff was pretty good. For some reason it wasn't feeding me like it once had, I guess. Writing into the void on a daily basis was a hard thing and I did it for a couple years, where you don't know where your story's going. It's a fight. And I think I got to where I liked the fight. There was less of that.

Did you have a plan B?

Studs Terkel: American genius

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Oral historian and writer Studs Terkel made history by doing something very simple: He talked to people about their lives. In his book “Working,” he spoke with Americans about their jobs, but what emerges is nothing short of a portrait of the human condition. To celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday, the radio show “The Story” is running a series devoted to Terkel, featuring conversations with Eudora Welty, Dorothy Parker, R. Buckminster Fuller and Mahalia Jackson. Also, host Dick Gordon conducts new interviews with people working today. As part of Salon’s partnership with “The Story,” we’ll bring you some of his fascinating interviews over the next few days. We kick off with host Gordon’s 2002 interview with the man himself, who passed in 2008. To listen to the radio program, click here.

I notice in your conversation with the veteran from Vietnam [from the Studs Terkel book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith"] he tells you right at the beginning that your interview gave him stuff he would think about for a long time. And it got me wondering about what that interview was like. How does Studs Terkel sit down with someone and get them spilling their inner selves about life and death? What's the secret?