HEROES TO MILLIONS: two synopses

CHEF TELL The Biography of America's Pioneer TV Showman Chef

“Tell started all this television madness about chefs.” – Regis Philbin

Facing an outdoor audition for a cooking slot on a syndicated-television show in 1974 would not deny Friedemann Paul Erhardt his place in culinary history. Scriptless, using his wit, personality, and imagination alone, he wins the contest, birthing a new breed of celebrity: the TV-showman chef.

Weeks later, 40,000,000 avid fans in 114 cities tune in to Evening Magazine or PM Magazine to watch “Chef Tell” perform 90-second cooking segments three times a week. The Mike Douglas Show, Dinah Shore Show, Merv Griffin Show, Jon Davidson Show book him, further fueling the German-American prairie fire sweeping across the nation’s small screens. No one has ever seen anyone like him: Chef Tell cooks fast, entertains, teaches, and makes America confident enough to try cooking his way. His fan mail blossoms to 14,000 pieces of mail weekly. Excited crowds cheer him at airports. Capitol Center in Baltimore, Maryland, draws 20,000 people to his five cooking shows one weekend.

PM Magazine’s new “rock-star chef” draws up to 50-percent market share in 95 percent of its syndicated outlets. Tell’s ruggedly masculine, yet comfortable in the kitchen, appeal crosses gender and generational lines. 20- and 30-year-old, female and male home cooks swoon over his engaging style and simple recipes.

“If a housewife, or man, sees me do something in 90 seconds they figure they can make it in five minutes,” Tell says, adding, “Most recipes are overcomplicated anyway.?You see recipes in Gourmet Magazine… five of the ingredients are out of the country and three more you can’t find!”

Yet, Erhardt suffers the scars of his childhood and his mother’s ignominious suicide through three restaurants—one on Grand Cayman Island. He endures another suicide, two marriage losses, sporadic drug use, and clandestine sexual encounters before he finds personal happiness with a woman he can trust implicitly and love boundlessly. Grounded, he makes numerous appearances on LIVE! with Regis & Kathy Lee, begins production of his own cooking show, and opens two more flourishing restaurants in Pennsylvania. When two untimely falls lead to ill health, lawsuits, marital strife and the discovery of a diabetic condition, he kicks his medications, manhandles his diabetes with dietary changes and exercise, loses 100 pounds, rehabilitates his marriage, and begins a sixth cookbook—an earlier one sold 230,000-copies—loaded with diabetic recipes.

In the Kitchen with Chef Tell airs on PBS locally, pulls high ratings, and gets picked up on syndication, but days later, on Friday morning, October 26, 2007, Tell never reaches his cooking class at Chestnut Hill College. Instead, he collapses and dies alone at home. Bunny Erhardt, Tell’s wife, informed of his passing while on a business trip, returns through a driving-rain storm late that night.

The next day messages of surprise, shock, and reminiscence flood the internet, including this: “Chef Tell has died? Stick a fork in him, he’s done.” Friedemann Paul Erhardt would have loved that.?

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LIVING BEYOND IMPOSSIBLE ~ The Terry Hitchcock Story

NOTHING: not his loving mother who is out of his life more than in, his father who kidnaps him when he is six, the street gang he joins, or the empty, abandoned vehicles in dark alleys and underpasses where he sleeps as a pre-teen … or the small-town Vermont values his grandparents instill in him... the U.S.A.F training, jazz-music performances, raucous summer nights in Port Clinton, Ohio, multiple university degrees … or his run-ins with life-threatening union bosses in Hamtramck, Michigan, and Glasgow, Kentucky, executive-suite politics among C-level executives with Gulf & Western, Inc. and The Coca-Cola Company … NOTHING! prepares Terry Hitchcock for the phone call to his office in May of 1984, from his wife Sue Ann. telling him to come home immediately. Less than a year later, she dies of cancer, leaving him three young children to raise, and within a week his employer, breaking his word, turns his back on him.

Friends, save a handful, turn away because his family is incomplete. Well-wishers suggest that he split up his children and let others who know how to, raise his family. They suspect he cannot boil water or fry eggs, let alone prepare daily meals, dress and assemble his two boys and daughter for school, and cart them from music lessons to playing fields day in and day out as well as bring home sufficient income, do homework with them, tuck them in every night, and make sure they feel loved.

Even he is not sure, but he guts it out with immense courage and persistence:

“Persistence is the only ability needed to achieve success,” he teaches his kids.

Despite personal doubts poured out many lonely nights onto his pillow and fears about his ability to raise his family and the abandonment his God apparently has forced upon him, Terry keeps his family under one roof. To him, nothing is impossible. He proves it with grit and courage alone, eventually learning how to lead his family to survive and grow with love and respect.

When his teenage children suggest he run to help single-parent children everywhere – the real victims who suffer the loss of a parent, he takes up the cause and runs from St. Paul, Minnesota to Atlanta, Georgia, the distance of 75 marathons in 75 consecutive days, with the help of family, friends and his community. People start to call him “The REAL 'Forrest Gump'.” The Run gains international media attention and supporters from all walks of life and ages. Schoolchildren from several countries follow his daily exploits.

Terry arrives in Atlanta the week of the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, greeted by Atlanta’s Mayor Campbell and international press units from as far away as Japan. Cheers ring aloud in schools all across America: their champion/hero completed the impossible task he set out to do in their names.

Invited by officials to join the Olympic Game’s Opening Ceremony, he declines. Having made his point, he is extremely tired. Over the next six months, Terry lies in a hospital, recovering as much from his fractured ankles and knees as his broken mental condition. (After significant feats, top athletes often experience doldrums; and, Terry, bewildered by the way he feels, never considered himself an athlete, only an ambassador for children, a Pied Piper for single-parented kids.

Producer and director Tim VandeSteeg meets Terry and wishes to make a movie about him, but is rebuffed several times. Terry will do keynote-speaker engagements only when he can make a difference for the parents and children in his audience, and a movie that brings attention to him just doesn’t seem right. Still, his relentless Hollywood suitor explains that he, too, was a single-parented child … that he knows Academy-Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton, who told him “Terry’s story must be put on film and, by the way, I want to play the voice of the documentary.” The film MY RUN wins top awards and audience accolades at 11 of 15 film festivals. Terry publishes A Father’s Odyssey, his daily journal notes from the run, and a moving legacy of life lessons for his proud children. Parents and children in 26 countries find inspiration from the book; some attempt their own “impossible” challenges. The film and the book win the prestigious, five-star Dove Award.

During The Run, a news reporter had asked, “What would you say to the President of the United States, if he was here right now?” Terry’s impromptu reply resonates: “Mr. President, do you believe that children are our future?...”

Someone from the onlooking crowd yells, “Well, of course, they are!”

“… Then, Mr. President, why do we not have a Cabinet-level Secretary of Children to protect and defend our children, their rights, and their futures?”

The man who nearly killed himself running for single-parent children’s welfare envisions that "Ultimate Dream" every day, inspiring others to help him. Anyone wish to bet against his Ultimate Dream becoming a reality?

Today, Hollywood projects are underway for both of these heroes to have their day on either the silver screen or TV monitors and devices streaming across America.

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Biographer/Novelist/Ghostwriter Ronald Joseph Kule writes EXTRAordinary biographies and historical fiction novels opening new opportunities for his clients. He may be available to write your book, too.

? 2018, 2021 by Ronald Joseph Kule. All Rights Reserved.