Four decades later, Walter Grishkot still laughed about the question that television news interviewer Barbara Walters asked him.
The recent death of Walters, a pioneer in women’s news broadcasting, is a fitting time to recall Walter’s seven-and-a-half minutes of fame when Walters interviewed him on the “Today Show,” the morning after President Richard Nixon lit the National Christmas Tree that came from Crandall Park in Glens Falls in 1969.
It was a story Walter loved to tell over and over prior to his death in 2011.
What landed Grishkot on national television was Nixon’s gaffe, erroneously announcing that the tree came from Warren County, Ohio – not New York.
Walter and Joan were among about 100 Warren County residents in Washington, D.C. for the ceremony.
Immediately after the ceremony, Joan Grishkot cornered Nixon Press Secretary Richard Ziegler, and then the president himself, to correct the error.
Walter, who was handling publicity for Warren County at the time, went to work to capitalize on Nixon’s mistake.
So what was the question that Barbara Walters asked that Walter was still laughing about 40 years later?
“Are there any more trees in the Adirondacks?”
Maury Thompson
PO Box 91
Glens Falls, NY 12801
grishkotfoundation@gmail.com
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