Oral History Interview with Sharon Huntley Kahn, July 10, 2018

Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053 This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word. Oral History Number: 463-001 Interviewee: Sharon Huntley Kahn Interviewer: Donna McCrea Date of Interview: July 10, 2018 Donna McCrea: This is Donna McCrea, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Montana. Today is July 10th of 2018. Today I'm interviewing Sharon Huntley Kahn about her father Chet Huntley. I'll note that the focus of the interview will really be on things that you know about Chet Huntley that other people would maybe not have known: things that have not been made public already or don't appear in many of the biographical materials and articles about him. Also, I'm hoping that you'll share some stories that you have about him and his life. So I'm going to begin by saying I know that you grew up in Los Angeles. Can you maybe start there and talk about your memories about your father and your time in L.A.? Sharon Kahn: Yes, Donna. Before we begin, I just want to say how nice it is to work with you. From the beginning our first phone conversations, I think at least a year and a half ago, you've always been so welcoming and interested, and it's wonderful to be here and I'm really happy to share inside stories with you. There's a lot of them. So yeah, my sister and I grew up in Los Angeles. We were born there. My father came down from the University of Washington, worked for a little while in Portland and ended up in L.A. because that's where all the action was. So my sister and I were born in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, you know, in the '40s was just a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. I mean the weather's fantastic. It was much more of a small town, and in a lot of ways it was sort of an industry town because all the big studios were there. So you're surrounded by people that are in the movie-making industry. As a child growing up, I just remember these parties, most of all, that my parents used to have [laughs], and I just thought, well, everybody grew up this way. But I mean, they were such interesting people, such creative people, such glamorous people. There was always somebody playing the piano. There were martinis being served. There were swimming pools in backyards. We just grew up having a great time. And as a child for me, I was just like totally free. I could roller skate down the middle of the street. We played softball in the middle of the street. We climbed trees. Even the L.A. River ran about a block away and I'd go down and built like a Tom Sawyer-type of raft and go down this tiny little river with friends and spy on people in their backyards. I don't remember my parents, either one of them, being very strict disciplinarians, but they really taught us manners. Through I think a lot of different maybe situations taught us a sense of ethics—what's right, what's wrong. Course being born in 1940, this is World War Two. I strongly remember when the war was over and the celebration. My father put us in the car we went down to Hollywood—Hollywood and Vine—and he put me on his shoulders and we walked through this massive crush of people down Hollywood Boulevard, [laughs] We went to this place and had...right next to the Chinese 1 Sharon Huntley Kahn Interview, OH 463-001, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. Grauman Theatre and it was an ice cream place, and I had hot fudge ice cream. This is late at night after all this excitement. I went home, and I was very sick to my stomach—too much excitement. To this day I cannot eat ice cream late at night. But I just figure I had a great childhood. Everything was happy and free and just fun. Then something happened, and everything changed. What happened was Eugene McCarthy. He came riding to town, and Hollywood changed. All of a sudden these people that were fun-loving and having parties, when they got together there was always silence between them or when they were talking they were talking in whispers. The kids would come up, you know, and all of a sudden they'd go quiet. So as a kid, you knew something was wrong. Something had happened, and you couldn't figure out what it was. Also, my father and mother took me aside and my sister and said, "Don't get anybody's car." Don't do this, don't do that. "If somebody comes up and starts talking..." very odd sort of fearful stuff. I remember one night they went out, and these boys in the neighborhood they had the straws and they were shooting peas through the straws at our windows. Well, my sister and I thought it was an attack of some kind. So I remember crawling under the piano—the baby grand piano—and calling my parents where they were and they came rushing back. Well, it was just boys in the neighborhood having fun. But even for kids growing up during the McCarthy years, it was scary. DM: Can you elaborate a little bit on why, why Chet Huntley's family would have been impacted by McCarthyism? SK: Well, he was in the news. He was a news commentator. It wasn't just movie stars. It was definitely radio-television people. And they had a lot of friends. It just seemed like everybody, as I would say, was in that sort of industry, and there was a lot of censorship. My father at the time worked for ABC. He had gone down from Portland, Oregon, and took a job at CBS, originally, in L.A., then went to ABC. At ABC during the McCarthy years, my father was called a Communist, and there were these people calling in—these women calling in—and saying that they wanted him off the air that he was a Communist. A lot of women were calling in all the time, and ABC was really sort of wavering. My father found out that it was a group of women— a very small group of women—but they made them sound like there were hundreds of them. And he sued them, and he won and he donated the money to some charity or something. But I always thought later when he left ABC and went to New York with NBC that he was kind of like, if you guys had done a better job of sticking with me and being more supportive I might not have taken this job. Well, good thing he did take that job. But there was another situation that was really horrifying when my pa rents...I knew there was a friend—one of their very good friends—that went missing. So there was a lot of talk every day, "Have they found him yet? Has he shown up? Has he called in?" His wife was just beside herself and the young children. Two weeks went by, and I remember, as a kid, I used to build these little cities out of mud right underneath this window. There was a faucet there, and I used to build canals and open the faucet and the water would go down the canals. I'm building this 2 Sharon Huntley Kahn Interview, OH 463-001, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. whole city and I hear my father's voice from the window up above in their bedroom. My father never came home in the middle of the day. We never saw him in the middle of the day because he had a very late broadcast. For him to come home in the middle of the day meant that something was wrong. I remember him telling my mother they found him, and this guy—this friend of theirs—had crawled under his house and had shot himself. The only way that they knew something was wrong is that is there was an odor and his wife called in the exterminator, whatever, and found him. So I don't know if my parents ever knew that I heard this. I certainly didn't go running in there crying. I just remember hearing it, and I'll never forget that whole thing: where the window was, building my little mud fort city. I was even actually by one of those things in the basement where there's sort of a screen where if you're going to do that that's where the person would have crawled. So that's a very...that stands out hugely in my mind. So, you know, my whole childhood there was really pretty positive. But that stands out as a big influence in my life. How those people all handled themselves and which ones stood out as being highly admirable and which ones didn't. I've seen plays and stories and everything about that since, but I don't remember any of them. I just remember a whole group of friends that shut down sort of.

Load more