Tom Landry
Ronald Reagan
Bill Cosby
That language guy. Does the “Buck’s English” column. Can’t think of his name, though… I’ll do a search or something and find his name. Unless someone posts it first.
Timothy Ferris
Living in Houston as a young adult gave me a fairly good opportunity to see alot of people. But, I missed a bunch, too.
I saw Bill Cosby as part of a distinguished speaker series at a local community college about 10 years ago. It was scheduled to be only 90 minutes but lasted almost 3 hours. He touched just about every subject that was in the new at the time and some that weren’t. Some things he said were quite a surprise. Despite his fame and fortune, or because of it, he gets 3 or 4 letters a day from racists. He talked about his great success in TV and lack of success in movies. The best part is when he talked about toilet mouthed comedians such as Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. He played a couple minute sample of an Eddie Murphy act including all the language, then told the same story without any cuss words. There were people rolling on the floor laughing. It was probably better than any concert type shows he did and the 10 minutes of applause that followed was proof of that.
My employer is one of those companies that politicians like to visit and give speeches. I have seen George Bush the elder, Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Niki Lauda, Dick Cheney, and Joseph Lieberman. And I was paid to listen to them all.
Hey Skip, also caught a Chomsky lecture. A technical one. He had two overhead projectors to use with markers and he kept going on and on about how cool that was. He had never used overheads before c1976??? Didn’t come off as very intelligent at all.
James Burke (connections), Raph Nader, Clean Gene McCarthy, Nobelist Penzias (microwave background radiation), Math superstar John “Game of Life” Conway (amazing!).
Hunter S. Thompson, several years ago. He spoke at length about politics and about his then-recent bust by his friendly neighborhood cops, who broke more laws busting him than they were charging HIM with breaking.
Very surreal situation. For one thing, he was sharing the stage and the speech with Jerry Jeff Walker, of all people. And it was passing strange how he would duck under the table occasionally and puffs of smoke would come wafting out…
Hunter S. Thompson, several years ago. He spoke at length about politics and about his then-recent bust by his friendly neighborhood cops, who broke more laws busting him than they were charging HIM with breaking.
Very surreal situation. For one thing, he was sharing the stage and the speech with Jerry Jeff Walker, of all people. And it was passing strange how he would duck under the table occasionally and puffs of smoke would come wafting out…
One that sticks out simply because it was so absurd:
Jane Fonda
She spoke at my University (back in the anti-Vietnam war days) and then went to another speech in a different part of campus.
After an impassioned speech about war and peace and world politics, she asked if there were any questions. A petite young woman in the front row asked, “who does your hair?”
If looks could kill, Ms. Fonda would be doing 25 to life in Joliet right now.
Duke - I saw Bush Sr. at Penn State too! Campaign 1992, Fall. I was a sophomore, holding up my Young Democrats sign. Ah, to be young again.
Do you remember the part where he started pandering to the students about beer taxes? Yeesh.
Rohinton Mistry
Germaine Greer
Ellison Onizuka gave a speach at my school (Waikea Elem.) about science and spaceflight. I got to shake his hand. This was a year or two before he died in the Challenger accident.
Dave Foley had a question and answer session (and I got to ask one) at the screening of “The Wrong Guy” at the Hawaii International Film Festival. He pointed in my direction and said “You.” I turned around to make sure it was me and he ribbed me a bit on that. I asked him what projects he was working on and he said he was working on a few shows for FOX but nothing appears to have come from them yet. Although the film came out in 1997, the studio didn’t support it and it never got relesed in the US. It came to the festival in 2000 or 2001.
Everybody else would only be famous in Hawaii, Ben Cayetano, Marjorie Bronster, the Trask sisters, etc., etc.
John Forbes Nash, Jr. about Schizophrenia and the Movie - A Beautiful Mind.
George Carlin
Louis Black
P.J. O’Rourke, at my friend’s graduation in May.
Oliver Sacks spoke at my university my sophomore year. Some of his material was familiar from his books, but I really enjoyed it.
At the very lowest end of the sem-famous spectrum, my junior high once had a guy who played semi-pro football in Houston, a guy who was trying out for the Oilers, for crissakes, come speak to us during our annual say-no-to-drugs week. Even at 11, I could tell the vice principal was trying desperately and failing to come up with some rationalization for wasting our time like that.
P.J. O’Rourke
Laurie Anderson
Buckminster Fuller, about six months before he died.
Stephen Hawking
Chuck Yeager, at the Smithsonian, a few days before the 50th anniversary of the first supersonic flight. He talked about his research flying and played the recording of his near-accident in the X-1A.
You bought a ticket to hear Jared Diamond? Wow, I feel lucky. I waltzed in to UH for free and heard him. Also Steven Pinker who (unlike Chomsky, apparently) was not boring at all. Also Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Buckminster Fuller spoke at my college graduation, but I wasn’t there.
I saw Marcia Clark speak at the University of Florida in … November 1995, I think. Since I was a journalism student, I also covered her backstage press conference before the speech.
Also, IIRC, wasn’t Jackie Robinson the commencement speaker at your high school graduation?
I lived in Chapel Hill, NC 1981-1985 while my husband was in graduate school. A bunch of Democratic candidates came through during the election year.
We went to see a few of them…who were they? Gary Hart, someone else (?) and Jessie Jackson.
We decided to leave the Jessie speech (how many times could he say El Salvador?) and suddenly he kept saying, “Stop where you are! Don’t move!” And then they passed the hat. It was kind of like being in church when the offering plates were passed around. It felt very awkward to me. I wasn’t really interested in supporting him; I just wanted to see if he could say something about anything other than El Salvador.
Juan Enriquez, most recently, author of As the Future Catches You. Director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Busness School. Dynamic speaker and really makes a big case for GEnomics and how that will revolutionize just about everything. REally a good speaker that you should try to see.
Many many many others but that was back in the early 1980’s at university. Plus some fortune 500 and Ambassador types more recently.
I went to the 2nd inauguration parade of Nixon. Really. I lived in Maryland and we took a school bus down. We sat right across from the glassed in seats of the President’s family. I have never been so cold in my entire life.
Willard Scott spoke at a high school graduation I went to. He wasn’t famous yet. He was just the local weather guy. Why in the world did they have a local weather guy do a speech at a graduation?
Hah. Well, I actually saw him only over the summer (it was the summer, right? I wasn’t freezing to death so I’m sure it was) when I was back on campus to get a library book. I was just walking by and didn’t stay for the whole speech.
Beer taxes, eh? Sure, go for the Penn Staters’ Achilles heel. Now, if he’d offered free beer…
Like Skip and ftg, I saw Noam Chomsky, but the circumstances were rather unfortunate. He came to my school to give two lectures on two consecutive days. Some friends of mine went to the first one, which was all about his left-wind causes and whatnot, and they raved about it, said he was a brilliant man with amazing ideas, and funny! OMG funny as hell. So I thought “Hey, I think I’ll go see the dude.”
So I go into the hall and sit down, and Chomsky begins the speech… about minimalist linguistics. Evidently I had missed the good speech, and now I was stuck listening to the indescribably boring speech from hell. Needless to say, I had absolutely no idea what the fuck he was talking about.