Actor and author Henry Winkler, who is now starring in a hit History Channel series show, “Hazardous History,” tells Newsmax that the program features eyebrow-raising details on how everyday life seems much more dangerous when you look back on the older days.
For example, Winkler told Newsmax’s “Ed Henry: The Briefing” Monday that one of the show’s segments details how the soft drink 7-Up has a notorious background history behind its lemon-lime-flavored fizz that’s being sold today.
“So 7-Up was born in 1927, bubbly, refreshing,” Winkler told Henry. “The tagline was, we’re going to take the edge off. The reason was, it was laced with lithium.”
He added that there are “so many things that I have found out about the way we have lived and live on this show,” which airs on Sunday nights.
“One, for 13 cents, if your child was under 50 pounds, you could mail them through the mail down the street to their grandparents,” said Winkler. “People actually did that. They started then sending their child across the country as long as the child was under 50 pounds…what about lost mail?”
Winkler also talked with Henry about his career in writing children’s books, which came about after he says he found it “very hard to get hired” as an actor after playing the Fonz on “Happy Days” for years.
Winkler, who has been diagnosed as being dyslexic, has written 40 books, including the latest installment in his popular “Detective Duck” series.
“I am in the bottom 3% academically of everybody in America,” said Winkler. “It is the wiring in the brain. One out of five children on the planet has some sort of learning challenge.”
But after his Happy Days starring role ended, Winkler said he asked a friend what he should do next, “and he said ‘write books for children about your learning challenges’…so what I learned is, you can do anything you set your mind to.”
Winkler co-authors his “Detective Duck” series with a partner, Lin Oliver.
“I met her and we sent the proposal to my agent at the time, who is still my agent, Esther Newberg, and she said, ‘You know, I don’t, I don’t do children’s books.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s always the first time.’
He said his first series of books was about the character “Hank Zipzer,” and now, “we have ‘Detective Duck,’ who dreams about being and is also an environmentalist.”
The third “Detective Duck” book is coming out in September, after the first two in the series were on the best seller list, Winkler added.
Winkler also told Henry about another memorable character in his life: Frank Sinatra.
“Starting when I was about 14, in the wee small hours of the morning, I would write love letters to girls who didn’t want anything to do with me, [while] listening to Frank Sinatra,” said Winkler. “When I took Ron Howard with me and we watched him in Las Vegas, we went to a show and I introduced about six people to him and as we were leaving, he said goodbye to all six people by name.”
He said the next time he saw Sinatra was in 1976 at the bicentennial celebrations in New York City at the Statue of Liberty.
“We were in tents waiting to be called to go on camera, and he couldn’t see what was going on,” Winkler remembered. “So he took a steak knife and he cut a picture window in the tent so that he could see. It went from renting the tent to buying the tent.”
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