Once a critic for Los Angeles magazine, and KNBC-Los Angeles, John Barbour was creator, and one of the hosts of NBC’s Real People television series, which ran between 1979-1984. The show was so popular it sometimes garnered a 50% audience share, a monumental feat even in the pre-Internet era.
Not bad for a man who, in his early days in Los Angeles, won bit parts in movies with James Cagney, Doris Day, and Glen Ford, unfamiliar names for many in this generation… a generation whose “stars” are becoming ever more foreign to me.
Never one to pass on an opportunity to speak his mind, Barbour also won Emmy’s for his work as a television critic. He left KNBC just before I arrived in L.A. in 1979 from Chicago, so I was unaware that he had been a familiar presence in the city’s local media community when Real People emerged.
I have found many reasons to put off writing about this, but I’m going to be a guest on Barbour’s broadcasting return via his Real People Radio show.
The invitation came from the radio show’s producer, David Chu, who contacted me several years ago after he watched my documentary on MMS. It was David who suggested that I make the DVD available in bulk quantities for people who may want to make the information available to larger groups. We’ve stayed in contact, even when he moved for a time to Argentina. Now in Oregon, he’s still committed to positive change.
That commitment to positive change is a bond I see in many people these days. I hear it in the voices of many that are being raised in the call for freedom.
I had a great “get acquainted” conference call David and John a couple of weeks ago, and now we’ll do it on the air, before a listening audience.
Voices need to be raised for freedom in America. I point America out because we feed ourselves the notion that we’re the “Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave,” but are fearful, docile, angry, chronically sick and steadily degenerating, and the health and food production industries are leading us further down the same sorry river. We can change this; but only if we wake up to what we’re doing, and admit to ourselves, what’s not working.
Consciousness needs to be raised for health and healing. Minds need to be opened to methods and modalities that work, with the willingness to kick those that do not, to the curb.
The conversation will air this Wednesday, March 9, from 5pm – 6pm Pacific. I believe that listener call-ins are also part of the show.
