Radio Voice Lopate Speaks at The Club in Briarcliff Manor
Leonard Lopate, the famed public radio show host of “The Leonard Lopate Show” on WNYC, has spent the past 26 years using his show to learn about interesting subjects and talk with people who otherwise would not answer his call.
A humble man, who would much rather ask questions than talk about himself, Lopate preferred to have an open conversation with the audience that attended his July 10 appearance at The Club in Briarcliff Manor.
“My philosophy about broadcasting is that it is really about the topic and the guest,” Lopate said. “It is not about me. If things come out about me it is only because they come out in conversation, there is no way to refer to certain things without bringing in aspects of yourself. I was told years ago by a producer who used to work for a famous talk show host that his ex-boss said that an audience can tolerate an awful lot of ego. I thought that is great but I don’t want to do that. I would much rather serve the guest and the audience. If you are hearing a lot of me then you are not hearing a lot of the guest.”
Lopate is reminiscent about the colorful lot of characters that have appeared on his show. He has interviewed 34 Nobel Prize winners, a former president, a future president and a gaggle of artists, authors and scientists.
One of his most frightening guests was also one of his most articulate.
“In radio we fear silence. When I had author Mary Catherine Bateson on I would ask her a question and there would be a long pause,” Lopate recalled. “So I would start talking again and she would start to talk over me in beautifully phrased paragraphs. She had to take that moment to think it through, but she thought it through in such a way that was incredible. It was just like she wrote.”
Often a guest is very generous. Lopate recalled how director Francis Ford Coppola suddenly laid out how he created a claustrophobic effect in a movie by lowering the ceiling of the courtroom as the trial progressed.
While technology has not changed Lopate’s approach to conducting interviews, it has changed his awareness of his audience.
“My audience was once just very local and now it is international,” he said. “I got an e-mail from a woman from Tokyo a few years back who said ‘I began listening to you to improve my English; then I realized it was interesting.’”
“The Leonard Lopate Show” airs Monday through Friday from noon to 2 p.m. on WNYC.
Lopate is the second guest to make an appearance at The Club at Briarcliff. Comedian Robert Klein was recently featured there and other notable personalities are being scheduled to appear.
Located on the former site of the historic Briarcliff Lodge, The Club at Briarcliff Manor is New York’s premier fee-for-service continuing care retirement community under development in Briarcliff Manor.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.