Bob Pittman

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0:34Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:43Today we're here at the Can Lion Festival and has swapped the River Cafe kitchen for a galley on the most beautiful boat in the harbor, which, I'm happy to say, is safely tied up. Bob Pittman is a captain, sort of, as he is of so many great things. He created MTV, which changed the way we listen to music, and most recently, iHeartMedia, which changed the way we listen to everything else. Bob believes in stories. He's often said that everyone has one great story to tell. The first time we met, he told me some about growing up in Mississippi, the food his family cooked, and from an early age, his almost illegal passion for being a pilot.

1:22He spoke movingly and proudly about his father's brave commitment as an anti-segregationist. In our short and recent friendship, I've learned from many about his generosity, his faith in new talent, and guess what else? His rigorous passion for producing Casa Dragones tequila, definitely my favorite. In the two years I've known him, I've heard nothing but admiration and love from everyone I've spoken to. I understand why.

1:53So you made this lemon ice cream, and I wonder whether you'd like to read the recipe. Of course I'd like to read the recipe. I like it because the headline says Bob Pittman Lemon Ice Cream. It's the only time I've ever had my name associated with food. I like that. So the ingredients are finely grated zest of one and juice of three lemons. Makes sense. a cup of sugar, a half teaspoon of sea salt, two cups of double cream. It serves six. And you put it in a bowl, mix in the lemon zest and juice, sugar and salt with a spoon. Slowly, I'm sure slowly is important, add the cream, carefully mixing with a spoon, and it will immediately thicken.

2:38This is really simple stuff. This is absolutely my kind of recipe. You then put the ice cream mixture in the freezer and freeze it for two hours. It hardens up and then you have magic. Try it. Okay. So the thing about this ice cream is that you don't have to churn it. No. By the way, as a kid growing up in Mississippi, my grandmother had to churn and would make ice cream. Did she? And I loved the ice cream. I hated churning it. This was before the days of electric stuff. This is you turn it and turn it. When it got really hard, I'd call my older brother over, you turn it some. And then we'd sort of put it away and we'd have the ice cream.

3:19Tell me about the churner. So it had the ice in the, what was it like? It was like a wooden tub and it had a ice in it. And you put this metal container down that would hook onto the crank on top, put kosher salt all over it, big salt, just cover it on the ice with that. And you churn and churn and churn until it hardened up. And that was your grandmother. That was my grandmother. Did your mother then discover that you could actually put a plug in and churn and electric? Well, this was for the days of that. And we were probably too poor to buy one, even if there was one for sale. But it was perfect with my grandmother, who, by the way, at the same time was making crab gumbo that we'd been catching the crabs all day.

3:58She was from New Orleans and had this spectacular gumbo recipe. Start cooking about nine. We'd throw the crabs in about five. The ice cream would be ready about then. She'd put the towel over it, take the thing off, pack it with ice while we ate the gumbo, and then we could have the ice cream for dessert. This is because a lot of people I talk to really talk about their grandmothers as much as their mothers. So you started out by talking about your grandmother. So why don't we go back to that, about growing up with your grandmother cooking for you? She lived in your house? No, no. We just visited my grandmother often.

4:29They had a little house on a little bay in Mississippi called Bay St. Louis. We called it the camp, and we'd go visit them at the camp. And when we went there, my grandmother was a proper Cajun cook, and we had all that fabulous Southern and Cajun stuff. My mother was from Northern Mississippi originally, a farm girl. So hers was more hearty, like, you know, Crowder peas, butter beans. What's Crowder peas? Crowder pea is sort of like a black-eyed pea, a little firmer and sort of dark all over as opposed to one speck of darkness. And my brother and I, every time my mother would go visit her family and come back home, she'd bring with her bushels of peas and butter beans.

5:08And my brother and I hated it because we had to shell them all so that she could then freeze them for the winter. As a kid, you don't want to sit around doing that stuff. So we're talking a distance of how many miles between northern and southern? Southern Mississippi, probably a five-hour drive. Yeah, and yet the cooking was so different. Very different. Very different. When you were down near Louisiana, it was very spicy. When you're in the middle of Mississippi and up north, it's very bland. By the time you get to the top of the state, and by the way, all through the state, there's barbecue, which has a red sauce but is very sweet.

5:42And you just sort of slow cook the stuff on steamers, and so it just sort of melts. And then you slather that stuff on until it really turns to candy. Put it in that smoker and just let it go. And it was, yeah, up north. But on the south, it was more fried food. We'd gig for flounders. You'd go out with a white lantern, and you'd look for them in the water, and you'd gig them. And then you'd pull them up. Let's gig it. It's a stick with a nail on the end of it that you stick them so you can get them, and you pick them up from that. They sort of burrow into the sand, but they're a flatfish like a sole.

6:17So we do that. But, again, my parents and my grandmother, you put them in cornmeal. Probably everything's put in cornmeal. and you throw in the deep fryer and you have this spectacular fried fish. Everything's fried. I had an uncle who said, I like ham anyway, you fix it as long as you fry it last. So I think that was a great indication of Southern cooking. And do you think that black culture also contributed to this? I know that there's something going on right now about the black community feeling that a lot of the Cajun cooking or the cooking of the South amidst their culture. Do you think that?

6:55Or do you feel like... Well, I think the Southern cooking and the Black culture were completely intertwined. I mean, it was sort of all of one. And I spent time in Chicago, and I loved the South Side of Chicago. Soul cooking is the cooking I grew up with and always share that affection for... My other favorite is fried okra, where you cut the okra up, have a cast iron skillet, get the really hot, roll it around in some cornmeal and throw it in there. And by the time it comes out, it's crispy like a popcorn. You said something about being too poor to afford a Turner, perhaps, for the ice cream.

7:32Tell me about life in the Pittman household. Well, I grew up, I didn't know we were poor. My dad was very well educated. He had his undergrad from University of Southern Mississippi, had a graduate school at Emory in Atlanta. My mother was a college graduate, which is also unusual for two parents at that era. And the family really valued smarts. My dad was a Methodist minister. So the church gave us a house and gave us a very nice house. So we had a nice house as if we have a lot of money. And they would let the ministers join the country club. So even though they had no money, they didn't have to pay, but we could go to the country club as if we had money.

8:09And so we had a decent lifestyle, but little money. But in those days, you didn't miss it and you didn't know, and all that wasn't flaunted on TV. And what was easy like? My household? Yeah. How many are you? I had one brother, and I had a magical upbringing that I didn't realize how magical it was until I became an adult. I never in my life saw my parents fight. My parents would have disagreements. They'd go, well, I don't know if I agree with that. Well, I don't know. Why do you think that? And they would go through it. In our household, you couldn't say hate. We never hated anybody. We didn't hate anything.

8:46So that was sort of the dirty word of the house. And when my mom passed away, one of my cousins said, you know, the worst thing I ever heard your mother say about somebody was, I wonder why they want to be that way. So that was her way of saying that's not her favorite person. But everything was met with sort of an understanding and a gentility, which I truly appreciate. My My brother and I often talk about we definitely won the parent lottery. And, you know, yes, we didn't have money. We didn't have a lot of things. But I'll trade all that for what we had. Did you and your brother argue? Of course.

9:18We were kids. And by the way, I wish I could say I didn't argue in my household because I don't have that. I don't know how my parents managed to pull that off. And I think I didn't appreciate it until I became an adult. This reminds me of when I talked to Valerie Biden, who's President Biden's sister. and she said she was brought up in a household of Irish Catholics in Delaware where there was no arguing. You just were not allowed to argue with your brothers, your sisters, that in the house it was that you defended each other. And I wonder about that because you just see that as so much of our life.

9:55I don't know about your children, but disagreement is okay. You know, it is okay to disagree. It's okay to take your position. But it's something very beautiful as well about the idea that somehow there was peace in the house. Well, I think there's also a difference between arguing and personalizing something. It's one thing to debate it. I believe that. You believe that. And we'll, I don't know why you believe that. Let's figure it out. As opposed to you're bad. You're an idiot. You don't care. You're evil. And, you know, if you can avoid personalizing it, I think you go so far because you can continue the conversation.

10:29Bettelheim said a great thing. I remember as a young parent, he said that you don't ever say to a child, you are something. You say you are behaving. So you don't say you are selfish. You say you are behaving in a selfish way. And that makes apparently an act. And then you usually say, but I know that's not you. In a hopeful tone to the child. This is all what we aspire to. There's a great cartoon in The New Yorker, which a mother says, I'm going to get very angry at you in a very quiet and controlled way. Which is also maybe not the hell thing. But back to the food. So you said your mother worked?

11:03My mother worked as a school teacher for some of my childhood and then was a stay-at-home mom after that. And so she would cook dinner? Cook most meals we cooked and ate at home, right. Usually it was a somewhat light meal. It could have been eggs, a piece of meat, a piece of fish, some peas, beans, rice, and sort of these wholesome eating. And it could be fried stuff. But we would also eat stuff like squirrel. Did you? What was squirrel like? I've never eaten squirrel. Well, squirrel, I always think it's, you know, people say something tastes like chicken. I always think something tastes like squirrel.

11:37Squirrel's my reference meat. Is it? I'm kidding. But it is. But, you know, it's a much leaner meat than anything you probably get that's domesticated. But I always liked squirrel. It was like. Would you hunt them? Or would you go to the grocery store and buy them? No, no. I couldn't buy them at the grocery store. But either I'd hunt them or somebody would bring some squirrel by because they've been squirrel hunting. And occasionally people bring by dove or quail and eat that as well. Yeah, quail is delicious. And deer, venison, was always somebody would get a deer every winter and then they'd butcher it and everybody would have some venison for the winter.

12:17Venison sausage. I grew up in upstate New York and I still have memories of the deer on the front of the car. You remember the deer being brought back from the hunting, you know. And then you'd watch Bambi and never take it again. You get the wild boars. They didn't look so nice. Did your parents ever take you to a restaurant? We did, but there were not a lot of great restaurants in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Holiday Inn on Sunday was probably the best restaurant in town. There were catfish cabins, which were great. So you'd go out there on the river and you'd eat the filet of catfish and hush puppies and french fries.

12:54Hush puppies are? A cornmeal that's fried. Are they on a stick? No, that's a corn dog with a hot dog in it. But think of that without the hot dog in it and without the stick, and you're getting pretty close to a hush puppy. So there were things like that. They're sort of specialty places. But in my day, there was no fine dining, and if there was, my family wouldn't know about it. Talking about your father and segregation, can you tell me about that? Presumably when you went to restaurants, they were segregated. Was your school segregated? When I started school in Mississippi in 1959, it was completely segregated.

13:29There were white schools and black schools. There were colored-only signs for water fountains and bathrooms, white-onlys, completely separate. In the 12 years I went to school, everything happened. And by my senior year in high school, my graduating class was about 50-50 white-black. So it all happened in my school years. and there were people like my dad who were very supportive of change and working hard for it. There were people who were absolute racist and didn't want it. And then there was a group of people in between that knew it was the right thing, but they just, they wanted it to come slowly.

14:08I was talking to Jesse Jackson once and Jesse was saying that the biggest problem they had in the civil rights movement were not the racists because they could sort of deal with them. It was to people who wanted to go slow. And that's sort of human nature, I'm sure. So there was not bad people. They weren't terrible people. They just, they were like, didn't want things to change. And so I think you had to sort of overcome that inertia. You didn't necessarily have to convince them not to be racist. You just had to convince them to go ahead and make the changes and make them more dramatically than you expected to make.

14:41Initially in Mississippi, to break through segregation, they did freedom of choice. So you could choose which school you wanted to go to. So we had maybe 10 black kids at our school and maybe 10 white kids at the black school, hardly integrated. And it wasn't until the federal government basically said, look, you're going to have to bus kids or do whatever, but you're going to have to mix the schools based on sort of the racial population of the area. And that's when the big change came. I mean, we're getting into another discussion, but that is the role of the federal government, wasn't it? It was saying, you know, do you change hearts and minds first and then bring in integration?

15:17Or do you say, we're doing this and you're going to have to change? I think, you know, and by the way, I don't think there was any looking back any other way. Probably would have been better to do it sooner. You know, I look at all these years. I was on Instagram with one of my friends, one of the people I went to school with who was black. And my senior year, they closed down the black high school, merged it with the white high school, turned the black school into the middle school and sort of moved everything into that building. And I was asking, I said, what did it feel like? And he said, I felt unwelcome.

15:50And I thought that was the interesting feeling about, you know, here are these kids that are forced to go somewhere new into a new situation and not feeling like everybody's going, hey, welcome. Let me show you around. So I think it's, you know, been a struggle from that. But I think there are, you know, many people making great progress. And there are some people still resisting progress. And while you were growing up in this house and the food, you also started working, as I said, when you told me the other night, at a kind of almost illegal age, I would have thought. It was you were 14 or 15.

16:28I had actually worked. Even when I was in the fifth grade, I got a job sweeping up a department store in town after the store closed. I'm sure that was illegal. But when I was 15, I needed a job to pay for flying lessons. And the only job I could find in this— Can I just stop you there? Sure. Flying lessons at age 15? You can solo at 16. So I wanted to get the money when I was 15 so that at 16 I could start my flying career. and I tried to get a job bagging groceries actually at the Piggly Wiggly, which was a very good paying job because they tipped you to bring the bags out to the car and the jobs, as you imagine, were all full.

17:03I tried to get a job at a men's clothing store, which everyone hung out at after school and I had no jobs. And I walked in this radio station and asked a man named Bill Jones, who owned the radio station, if I could have a job. And he said, do you get in trouble? Not really. You get good grades? Yeah, I get good grades. He goes, come in this room. He took me in a little studio. He had a real, real tape recorder. He turned it on record. He tore some wire copy off these teletype machines that used to print the news constantly. And he said, read this. I read it. He listened to the tape and goes, that's good enough.

17:35Go to New Orleans and get your third class radio telephone operator's license, which means I could then control the transmitter. And so I went away to New Orleans, got it, and that began my radio career. At age 15? Age 15, making a dollar. I think it was probably$1.65 an hour minimum wage. Wow. Do you remember anything to do with food and your working? Oh, I ate garbage. I mean, I was a very skinny kid. So I heard in my ear always, eat. You need to eat more. We've got to fatten you up. So I would eat bags of potato chips and candy and everything. So anything I wanted to eat and just had a ravenous appetite for junk.

18:11Yeah. And did that last? Well, it lasted until I started gaining weight and go, whoa, wait a minute. Maybe that's not a good idea. Yeah. And when you left home, did you go to university? I went to college in Jackson, Mississippi. I was on the radio. I kept getting better and better jobs, and I had a job. I worked in the afternoons in Brookhaven. On Sunday, I drove to Jackson. It was on Sunday morning on the 102.9 Stereo Rock in Jackson where we went, and that was a tasty track from Dr. John the Night Tripper. And before that, you heard the doors. You have a great radio voice. You would imagine people sitting in some, you know, smoke-filled room.

18:48And then I got a job on the Top 40 station in town, which was the pop station. And I did nighttimes there. So I went to college during the day, went there, and I got completely bitten by the radio bug and decided this is going to be my career. Maybe as simple as because there were request lines ringing all the time, and there were girls on the other end of the request line. I mean, I'm a teenage boy. And they go, hello, I'd like to meet you. And you go, what? You're asking me to meet me? So I got very - What year was this? This was 1971, 72. In 1972, I sent away all these air checks, which are tapes of your radio show, to all these radio stations all over the country trying to get a job.

19:27And I got hired in Milwaukee. This 18-year-old kid, I've never been north of Tennessee. And I remember driving up. I loaded up my car. I drove up, spent the night in St. Louis, and then I drove the rest of the way the next day. And when I saw that Chicago skyline, I went, oh, my God, what is that? I've never seen anything like it. And I said, one day, one day I'm going to work in Chicago. I went to Milwaukee, and the competitor in Milwaukee had a sister station in Detroit, and they hired me to go to Detroit to do 10 at night till 2 in the morning. At that time, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the country.

20:03And I go, oh, my God, I'm in absolutely the big time now. They didn't pay me any money, but I'm in the big time. So at age 20, I went to Chicago, NBC in Chicago, and I'm the program director, and I'm doing the afternoon show on the radio station. And I did the FM station there, and then they sent me to New York to WNBC when I was 23.

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21:15Making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for. But don't wait. These year-end savings won't last. Shop the entire Toyota lineup and find a great deal today on buyatoyota.com. Toyota. Let's go places. The McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the internet for a snack. Snack wrap is back. Those were very heady political times. Late 60s, early 70s. Detroit was burning. Detroit burned in the 60s. In the 60s. I came there not much after that. And the country was in turmoil, Nixon resigning, you know, everything going on.

22:05You escaped the draft, did you? I escaped the draft because I have one I. So I was 4F. So I was never going in. Did you have one I? Yeah, but I lost an I as a child, my right eye. Lost an I as a child in a horseback riding accident. So I was not going to be drafted. But I also had a, they had a lottery for my age group. And I happened to get a good number for the lottery. So the lottery number was completely wasted on me. So the draft, but the draft was there. And by the way, I still had a draft card because until they get called up and get classified as 4F, you have to have the draft card. But that was going on.

22:39And remember, we had the oil embargo. So we had to wait days to get our gasoline. And it was just, and inflation went wild and the economy went terrible through the 70s. So I lived through all that. I didn't know what I was looking at. By the way, I'd never driven in snow until I got to Detroit, and someone took me to a parking lot one day and taught me how to drive in snow. But I learned a lot, some good and some bad. Going back to the food, when you left this, you know, being cooked for by your mother, being shopped for by your mother, having wild squirrels, and then you were on your own, did you just forget about the food that you'd grown up with and grab what you could?