This past Tuesday, I had an opportunity to cover an event in which actor Alan Alda of “M*A*S*H” television series fame was appearing.
And he seemed very pleasant and easily approachable in the brief time several other media members and I were with him.
He was in Knoxville speaking at the University of Tennessee’s Alumni Memorial Building next to Neyland Stadium. As part of the Homecoming Week activities, which will no doubt involve a number of Chattanooga area residents, he was giving the Mossman Distinguished Lecture in the building’s Cox Auditorium Tuesday evening.
Ninety minutes or so before his lecture, a time of media availability was allowed, so I wandered over to small auditorium room No. 27 in the building’s lower floor while covering his visit for the Knoxville News Sentinel.
He walked in a few minutes later with a UT official or two and immediately began shaking hands with the five or six media members in the room. After the television cameramen hooked up microphones on him, he encouraged us all to stand in front of him so he would not have to look all over the place while answering questions.
Although he played an Army doctor near the battlefield during the Korean War in the famed “M*A*S*H” series, these days he is working on another kind of cure, and that was the subject of his visit. He said knows aspects of science are not always easy to understand for the non-scientist, so he is trying to help scientists learn to communicate their world better.
“The public is on a blind date with science,” he said. “They don’t know each other. They don’t communicate with each other. They don’t speak the same language, and the public is a little wary of science. We’ve got to learn to know each other better.”
Part of his reason for being on that mission is that he hosted “Scientific American Frontiers” on PBS in the 1990s and early 2000s and realized the subject matter can become more interesting if scientists know how to communicate it properly.
Toward that end, he also founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, which helps teach scientists to communicate better.
After a couple of questions about his current work helping scientists communicate their world better, I began getting an itch to ask him about “M*A*S*H,” in which he played Capt. Hawkeye Pierce. So I blurted out a question wondering if he is ever asked these days about being on that show.
The 80-year-old actor quickly quipped, “Right now!”
After a brief laugh by everyone there, he went on to say that the show produced some good memories for him.
“It was great,” he said. “We worked long hours every day, and all we thought about was the work. We didn’t really understand how big an impression we were making until it was over.”
Although I was not a die-hard fan of “M*A*S*H,” I did watch it some during its run in the 1970s and early ‘80s, in part to listen to the great theme music.
I was in my last year at the University of Georgia in early 1983 when the memorable final episode aired, and I can remember the crowd of students packed in the lobby of one of the dorms in my complex. I have never forgotten seeing one or two female students in tears when the show concluded.
Some other media members there went back to asking him about his science work, and then I decided to ask him what he thought about all the changes to television, including the fact that a lot of shows are now produced and shown through online outlets.
Needless to say, I was acting more like an entertainment reporter than a science or news writer by this time.
In response to the question, he said he had recently been on an online only interview show.
“I would never have imagined doing that 20 or 30 years ago,” said the recipient of six Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, a Tony nomination and an Academy Award nomination (for the 2004 movie ‘The Aviator’). “I remember when cable was just coming along and I didn’t think that was going to go anywhere. Who would have thought you could watch brilliant shows on your computer?”
One or two science questions followed, and then I asked him if he had ever been to Knoxville before. I was hoping he might say he had spoken there before, or visited the Great Smoky Mountains as a child before coming down to visit Rock City on Lookout Mountain afterward.
Instead, Mr. Alda – who also played on “The West Wing” -- replied, “I think so but I’ve been so many places I don’t know where I’ve been. One time I came down from my room in a hotel and I looked at the lobby and I recognized it and said, ‘I must be in Boston.’ I didn’t recognize it for the park, but for its lobby. But now all lobbies look alike.”
He soon finished up the interview and shook everyone’s hand again, with no one asking him for a selfie or autograph, as even media members sometimes do. He then went off to do a sound check in the building’s Cox Auditorium before going to what they were calling the “Green Room” to get ready for the lecture.
A few minutes later, he charmed a packed auditorium of students and others with a 45-minute lecture about many of the topics he had just discussed in abbreviated form.
And then, at the end, a question-and-answer session followed. After one or two questions about science or conveying scientific knowledge, one adult woman asked him a question related to – that’s right – “M*A*S*H.”
To hear actor Alan Alda discuss his work in getting scientists to communicate their knowledge better and his memories of appearing on “M*A*S*H,” listen here.