It was some huge number, right?

A huge number.

I mean, it, it was gigantic.

Um, but his beginnings were so inspiring and so humble.

He was born in Strasburg, North Dakota.

He was the sixth of eight children of German immigrants from the Ukraine, and his-- They were so poor that the first winter, they all slept i, in an upturned wagon covered in sod, basically a dirt house, and, and he didn't even speak English until he was 21.

So I just wanted to lay that all out for you, how humble his origins were and so, you know, how i- inspiring his success was and how much he deserves a lavish funeral brunch.

Okay.

Mo Rocca's interest in the later years of people's lives, famous people, not so famous people, and unknowns, well, it really started morphing into an obsession after he himself was schooled by a much younger man on the set of a popular radio program.

For over twenty years, I've been a panelist on NPR's news comedy quiz show, Wait Wait...

Don't Tell Me!, and in 2015, we did an episode where the guest was Chance the Rapper, who at that moment had just become very, very hot and broken out into the mainstream.

I think those in the know, which don't include me, already knew who he was.

And we did this out, instead of in our usual smallish studio, we taped this episode in Chicago's Millennium Park outdoors.

And so thousands of people showed up, and people were screaming.

I mean, they were screaming, the fans.

There is an architect in Pakistan, a, a woman by the name of Yasmeen Lari, and this, the big event in her life that s- that shifted for her was, was an earthquake, a, a seismic change literally in life, where in her art as an architect, she moved away from using big panes of glass and polished granite, and started working with adobe and mud and, and bamboo as her medium.

You can go first if you want.

Okay, great, okay.

Question one, when asked if he was worried about Americans' economic pain as a result of the war in Iran, President Trump said what, Kathleen? A, yes, those mush-mouthed mullahs are causing it, not me; B, I'm more concerned with opening the Strait of Hormel.

Americans are not eating enough chili.

Sure.

Okay.

Question two, Kathleen, speaking to Fox News on Monday, President Trump said he was seriously considering making blank the 51st state.

Was it A, Mar-a-Lago, B, Venezuela, or C, Vermont?

It was, uh, not always frontline reporting, but you know, it was far away places with the s- with strange sounding names.

You mentioned those giants, Severide, um, Collingwood, Murrow.

What set them apart? Was it the writing? Was it their voices?

Mm-hmm

... television viewers learned about the assassination of President Kennedy from Walter Cronkite, but a whole lot of people were listening to the radio that day.

D- is it right that you reported the assassination on the radio?

The most contentious issue, I think, in, in any ravioli discussion has got to be round versus square.... ravioli, which do you think is better to eat, and why?

Well, like a lot of things, I'm torn between what I actually want and what I think I should want, and there's a whole lot of guilt mixed in.

Uh, the, the, the whole series was driven by guilt for not having helped my, uh, grandmother in the kitchen.

Uh, and, um, so I feel especially protective of her ravioli, which was indeed delicious.

They were big squares, big kind of delicate squares.

However, even during this intro, I'm thinking and kind of craving the metallic taste of the Chef Boyardee, which aren't exactly round, but are so kind of slimy and, and, uh, and doughy, um, and overdone, and gelatinous almost, that they kind of are almost...

They're, they're, they're, they're glob-like if, you know, not exactly round.

And so by, by, by, by having it in half, you're gonna make those fillings come out right away, right onto your tongue.