Later Years
After three public meetings in 1967, an eight-member Los Angeles City Council committee "cleared" Linkletter and City Council Member Tom Shepard of charges that they were linked in a scheme to influence city purchase of the "financially troubled" Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills.
Linkletter invested wisely, enabling his considerable philanthropy. In 2005, at the age of 93, he opened the Happiest Homecoming on Earth celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Disneyland. Half a century earlier, he was the commentator on the opening day celebrations in 1955. For this, he was named a Disney Legend.
Linkletter was once a spokesman for National Home Life, an insurance company. A Republican, he became a political organizer and a spokesman for the United Seniors Association, now known as USA Next, an alternative to the AARP. He was also a member of Pepperdine University's Board of Regents. He received a lifetime achievement Daytime Emmy award in 2003. He was inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame. He was a member of the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation (which ended in November 2008).
He received honorary degrees from several universities, including Pepperdine University and the University of Prince Edward Island. He served for many years as a trustee at Springfield College and donated funds to build the swim center named in his honor.
In 1978 he wrote the foreword to the bestselling self-help book Release Your Brakes! by James W. Newman, in which he wrote, "I believe none of us should ever stop growing, learning, changing, and being curious about what's going to happen next. None of us is perfect, so we should be eager to learn more and try to be more effective persons in every part of our lives."
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“But you were not living at all,
and I was half-living,
so where the years blight these others,
we, who were not of the years,
have escaped,
we got nowhere.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)