Angela Hill revisits her 1990 interview with Oprah Winfrey, as she prepares to exit daytime TV. In it, Oprah reflects on her southern roots and how they contributed to her enormous success.
Angela Hill / Eyewitness News
NEW ORLEANS – Oprah Winfrey has interviewed presidents and queens and most every star in Hollywood, and they have come in droves to applaud the professional life she has led and the impact she has had on the lives of so many.
For 25 years, she has listened and laughed, forged difficult conversations and cried both tears of sadness and joy. Oprah always said she loved to learn, but it was her own insight that was perhaps her greatest gift. That, and her generosity.
Even to me, the local talk show host who sought her guidance when she started her show a few years after “Oprah” and who interviewed her in 1990.
Her empire was just beginning, but at her core she was the little girl growing up with her grandmother on a tiny farm in a tiny town in Mississippi.
“Just living in a community where everyone knew everyone else and people speak to each other,” she told us in the one-on-one interview taped in New Orleans.
It was being raised in "the southern way," she said, which she believed had a profound effect on her.
“I think that has really helped me to be all that I am, being raised that way. We come to this life doing whatever we end up doing because of everything that has happened in our past and if I hadn't had that upbringing, I would have been a different kind of person,” she said.
It was in her community church where she began her broadcasting life, singing and speaking at holiday services, like on Easter.
“I was 3 and half years old,” she remembered. “I was raised in a community where people supported that and they'd say, ‘That’s a smart child,’ and people started talking about me being this little orator.”
She had found her talent and what would later become her passion.
“By the time I was 8 years old I was doing ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley, reciting ‘Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole. / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.’ I didn’t know what I was saying but it sounded really good.”
Winfrey’s road from Mississippi to the top of the television world was not easy. She said she got off course while living with her mother for a few years, but got back on the right track when her father took over, giving her structure and discipline.
“And that’s what my father provided for me that my mother could not,” she said. “A major turning point. It was the difference between succeeding and failing.”
Failure would never rear its head in Oprah's professional life, perhaps because her standards never wavered. Standards that may have been set when she was raised 'in that southern way,’ as she described it.
“Regardless of who you are coming to that (talk) show, what the subject is, even if I don’t agree with you, you know you’re going to be left with your dignity. I am not interested in stripping people of their dignity and they know that,” she said.
For 25 years they knew that, as did the audience whose applause and support never wavered. But for all she did for the talk show genre, Oprah will perhaps be remembered more for all the lives she touched and lifted, including the local talk show host who is forever grateful.
---
Watch the final episode of "Oprah" Wednesday at 4 p.m. on WWL-TV Channel 4.
