PRIMETIME of your life FREE | VOLUME 5 • ISSUE NO. 1 | JANUARY 2016 Interesting features for our 50+ audience
Gary Walker
Lifetime Master Storyteller By Lucinda Sue Crosby For PrimeTime of Your Life
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cheduling an in-depth interview with Gary Walker took some persistence. First of all, though a skillful and gifted award-winning writer/author/actor/journalist, his innate humility caused him some hesitation. “Are you SURE you want to do this?” he asked during one phone call. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, he was actually born in Kansas to a solidly middle-of-America family. “My reaction … I think of it as part of my mid-western sensibility, where modesty counts,” he said.
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Secondly, he’s involved in an array of endeavors that require time, thought and energy even though he insists that, in recent weeks, he’s been “simplifying” his life. I can only imagine how busy he must have been before! His neatly printed resume was a revelation: the dazzling length and mind-boggling breadth of this enviable curriculum vitae limns a bold life brimming with curiosity turned fascinated application resulting in real accomplishment. As he put it, “I’d bore into the core of something, zoom all the way to the center, roll around in it until I had a handle on it, then zoom back out and on to the next whatever.” As a boy, he fell madly in love with radio – “the theater of the mind”
SCAM ALERT PAGE 10 Gary Walker as he likes to say. “Each word or inflection is so important,” he said. “You set your imagination to work creating people and places … going where you wish with whom you wish. Since then, I have always loved hearing and telling stories.” As a sideline, he also danced and sang professionally for a span of 20 years, including 500 paid performances before graduating from high school.
During the next chapter of his life, his mother’s genius first cousin, Dr. Joe Guffy, became his mentor. “Uncle Joe” was a leading research chemist with Standard Oil who felt impelled to continually wrestle with a low threshold of boredom – a character trait Gary understood only too well. “This guy was amazing,” Gary said. “For example, when he took scuba diving lessons, he wound up inventing and sewing his own diving suit on his dining room table.” Continued on page 8
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