Sunday at the Shore

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Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning, a special Sunday morning that's all about having summer fun. As you can see, we've abandoned our New York studio for the Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

And this is Coe Hall, a mansion that even that fictional neighbor, the Great Gatsby, might envy. For some of you, the long weekend you're enjoying now got off to a flying start thanks to a summer Friday. The growing workplace practice Connor Knighton will explore in our cover story. This summer, more and more companies are finding that giving their employees a little bit less of this and a little bit more of this can actually be good for the bottom line.

At the end of the day, that creates a more loyal employee, a more engaged employee, and you get a really good return from it. If it was a Wednesday afternoon at this time, where would you be? At work. Summer Fridays ahead this Sunday morning. Concerts both indoors and out are a big part of summer fun for music lovers, and the Isley Brothers have been providing soundtracks for our summers for more than 60 years. With Maurice Dubois, we'll give them a listen. Who else but the Isley Brothers can make music like that?

Going strong, song after song, and sharing a lifetime of stories behind each one. I said something like, Paul, you guys are just wonderful. And he said, Ernie, if it were not for the Isley Brothers, the Beatles would still be in Liverpool.

The Isley Brothers later on Sunday morning. For most of us, bugs are the very opposite of summer fun. Still, they're a nuisance to be reckoned with, and this morning Serena Altschul will be doing The Reckoning.

Oh, oh, gosh. What are these giant bugs? Oh, these are just small tarantula hawks.

They're huge. Justin Schmidt is an expert on these flying nightmares, and he has a tip for anyone unlucky enough to run into the business end of one. If you do get stung by a tarantula hawk, what do you recommend?

Sounds very unscientific. I say lay down and scream. Get ready to scream later on Sunday morning. Summer is a time for entertaining and good conversation, and when it comes to good conversation, few people have more experience than Dick Cavett. This morning, the talk show host is hosting our Lee Cowan.

Hi gang. Dick Cavett's home on the eastern tip of Long Island is such a spectacular summer getaway, even Katharine Hepburn threatened to sail over from her own beach home. Katharine Hepburn said, I'm going to come over there where you are.

I think I'll phone. And I said, well, it's kind of a rough sail. I'm a rough girl. Did she ever come?

She never did do that, no. Watching the summer float by with Dick Cavett, ahead on Sunday morning. With Mo Rocca, we'll sample some summertime food and drink.

Lucy Kraft tries to beat the heat with some traditional Japanese fans. Martha Teichner looks at The Glass Castle, the summer film based on the best-selling memoir. Jim Gaffigan takes us boating and more. TGIF. Next. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at Play.it. A sea of green, a splash of blue, and a grand landscape for a gilded way of life. We're on New York's Long Island at a manicured estate of gardens, greenhouses, trees, and pathways, all centered around a stately mansion known as Coe Hall. Henry Joyce is the executive director of the foundation that runs it. Planning Fields State Historic Park is a 400-acre park that was created by William Robertson Coe. He gave the park, it was his country house and his private garden, to the state of New York in 1955. William Coe, who built the house 100 years ago, made his fortune in insurance. His wife, May Rogers Coe, was the daughter of Henry Rogers, who, along with John and William Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil Trust.

Clearly, money was not an issue. It is as though Queen Elizabeth lived here in the late 16th century. It's big and glamorous.

It's almost like a movie set of a house. There's the entrance hall, the Great Room, where the Coes would greet guests. There are also a few surprises. Coe Hall was completed in 1921 at the height of prohibition. Hence, the secret bar. He stocked up on massive amounts of scotch and a lot of champagne, and no one even knew that there was a bar here. And while there's plenty to see inside Coe Hall, for many, the most stunning views are outside.

Planting Fields, an unusual name, but from the ground up, there's nothing strange about this spectacular escape. Coe Hall, not a bad place to spend the weekend. And what if you could start that weekend one day early?

Our cover story is reported by Connor Knighton. The hands on the office clock always seem to move a little slower on a Friday afternoon, especially during the summer. Outside, it's gorgeous, and the last place anyone wants to be is stuck inside an office waiting for 5 p.m. to finally start the weekend. But last weekend, graphic designer Jim Desard kicked things off a little early. He just didn't show up on Friday.

Instead, he spent the day at his summer home in Maryland, tinkering in his garage, building clocks instead of watching one. I'd love to be in my studio. It's borrowed time, if you will. I don't owe the office any more time that week.

I don't owe my family, my friends. I can just go in my studio and create and just be me. Desard wasn't playing hooky. He was encouraged to take the day off by Washington, D.C. architecture firm HOK. After working slightly longer hours Monday through Thursday, Desard was able to take advantage of an increasingly popular perk, a summer Friday. Summer Friday is when companies let their employees leave early on Fridays during the summer. We've just seen a huge increase in the number of companies that are offering it.

Brian Krop is HR practice leader at research firm Gartner. Their recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies found that 42 percent offer some type of summer Friday, up from 21 percent just two years ago. The companies that have made the decision to give this benefit are giving it every summer because they see it's valuable. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, L'Oreal's headquarters shuts down at 1 30 p.m. sharp. The beauty company has been allowing its New York City employees to beat the weekend rush out of the city for the past two decades.

It's a tradition that's thought to have started with Manhattan advertising and publishing firms back in the 1960s. But now, employers all across the country, everyone from Nike in Oregon to Mercury Marine in Wisconsin, have started offering a version of the perk. And it is not just out of the goodness of their hearts. What they found is by giving their employees a little bit of time back and giving them that gift of time, they like their employer much more.

They actually become much more loyal, they work harder, they're more committed to their organization and it really shows that their employer cares about them and wants them to have a great work-life balance. The worker bees in Erica Thumb's colony need tenting too and it's a chore this landscape architect is only able to accomplish on her occasional Fridays off. I'm going to take that day to weed the garden and check on the hives, see how the queens are doing and pull some of the honey frames and do some extracting. Her hobby is honey. When she's back at the office in DC, she sets a few desks away from colleague Oliver Vranish who uses his bonus hours to hang out with his little sister. What's this one?

Bananas. One Friday at a time, he's been writing a children's book for her and right about now, I'm sure many of you have started writing a why don't we get summer Fridays off email to your bosses and that's kind of the point. I assume you have friends at other companies, other industries who don't have this perk. Oh yeah, I like to just brag it in their face all the time if I can. Take a peek on Instagram and Twitter on Friday afternoons and you'll see happy employees gloating about their bonus hours. It's a perk that can be used as a recruiting tool. The big idea here is that work-life balance has become so much more important for employees nowadays. It's one of the biggest reasons why people join one company.

It's one of the biggest reasons why they quit their current company. Perhaps no company loves Fridays more than TGI Fridays. This is what the Dallas headquarters of the restaurant chain looks like starting at 2 p.m. on any Friday no matter what season it is. It's invaluable time. It's all year long every Friday. I think we've started calling it endless Fridays now. Caroline Masulo, in addition to being the company DJ, is VP of marketing. After an hour of cocktails, everyone including the CEO heads out the door.

Out on the lake, Masulo is able to get a head start on the weekend with her family. If it was a Wednesday afternoon at this time, where would you be? At work. Probably driving home from work, sitting in traffic, so this is a nice change for sure. Since Friday afternoons are typically the most unproductive part of the week, giving this time off doesn't necessarily cost companies that much.

But the return can be priceless. I think it's less about the three hours of time and more so, at least for me, it says something about this brand and the way that they value individuals personal time. It's worth noting this is a perk mostly reserved for white-collar workers. The staff at TGI Friday's restaurants certainly don't get the afternoon off. No matter how popular this perk becomes, there are some jobs where you simply can't take off on a Friday afternoon.

Recording track, take three. Especially not if you work on a show that airs on Sunday mornings. Ahead, amusement parks, just the ticket. Imagine spending many happy hours having fun here at the children's playhouse. Many of today's young people, older folks too, are attracted to a more extreme form of amusement.

Faith Sehle among them. For decades, amusement parks have been a staple of American summers. From the scent of fried sugar to stomach-churning rides.

There's just something about them that brings out the kid in us. Is there anything more fun than a roller coaster ride? If it is, I haven't met it yet.

Arthur Levine is a travel writer and theme park enthusiast. How many do you think you've ridden? You know, some people obsessively keep track. I don't really know. I'd venture a guess and say maybe three, four, five hundred. I'm not really sure, but a lot. Let's just say a lot. Each year, more than 335 million people pack America's amusement parks.

But as much as we might consider a visit to one of these parks an American pastime, the world's oldest amusement park is in, get this, Denmark. In the 16th century, what would this have looked like? Forest. Nothing has trees. Forest.

Niels Erik Vinter is the director of Bakken. The park is now filled with traditional rides and games, but back when it was founded, 434 years ago, the original attraction was water. This well is where the amusement park sprang from, as it were.

The legend, the history, yeah. This natural spring attracted scores of nearby city dwellers eager for fresh water. Merchants and performers soon began entertaining the crowds, laying the foundation for amusement parks. It also inspired other cities to create their own escapist destinations, according to historian Jim Futrell. When the industry first started, it was in Europe in the Middle Ages when cities were just getting established.

They were dirty, they were crowded, so entrepreneurs started setting up what were called pleasure gardens on the outskirts of the cities, then as now to provide an escape. But America took this entertainment to new heights. In 1893, the Ferris wheel debuted at the first Chicago World's Fair, proving there was a market for more extreme entertainment. Originally, the amusement parks tended to be started by transportation companies on the outskirts of the city to generate ridership on the evenings and weekends, but as those companies matured, they started selling off the parks to people who were operating it as their primary business rather than a sideline, and you saw the emergence of an industry, a global industry.

As the years advanced, so did technology. Rides became faster, bigger, with one rising above all the rest. From the very earliest amusement parks, roller coasters quickly emerged as being the signature attraction. You fast forward 100 plus years later and it still is by far the most popular ride at the amusement park.

Why? Well, because they're just so thrilling. They provide a socially acceptable way to scream and to just have a lot of fun. So whether or not you think coasters are a scream, you have to admit amusement parks themselves have had quite the ride. A summer without a visit to an amusement park is what?

It's not a summer at all. Coming up, there's no secret. Give people the freshest food and pile it high. Lobster on a roll.

You can enjoy it. Come on into the dining room. Mo Rocca this morning has food on his mind. To begin, let's share a lobster roll. Every summer, route one in Wiscasset, Maine, becomes what locals call gridlock with view. Three lobster rolls, please. As pilgrims descend to feast on Red's classic lobster roll. I'm from Mount Vernon, Illinois, and I come to Wiscasset every year just to eat at Red's.

George and Allison Stallard came all the way from Austin, Texas. We're at lobster camp right now, which means going and getting lobster all around Maine for a week. And of course, for your onion rings, ketchup. I also have an in-house blue cheese sauce. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Debbie Gagnon's father, Al Red Gagnon, bought the shack 40 years ago. Red's secret recipe? There's no secret. Give people the freshest food and pile it high. I'm just going to grab a little more for this one.

No, they don't hold back at Red's. Enjoy, honey. Here it is right here. Each roll is stuffed with the meat of a whole lobster. So buttery and delicious.

Oh my gosh. Lobster, a once reviled seafood fed to prisoners, long ago clawed its way up from bottom theater status on the menu. The first person to serve lobster in a sandwich may have been Harry Perry of Milford, Connecticut, who grilled one up in 1929. It became the hallmark of our restaurant.

Wendy Weir is Harry Perry's granddaughter. We were known as the home of the famous lobster roll. Lobster rolls across Connecticut have been served hot ever since.

The best. Today the crustacean sensation is sweeping the nation. Then we create a Thai curry paste. Way over on the west coast, Chef Brandon Quita's lobster roll takes on flavors from the far east.

So it has ginger, lemongrass, kaffir lime, garlic. At LA's Hanoke and the Bird. We don't have a real history of lobster rolls, so it's nice to be able to have freedom with creativity. And smack dab in the middle of the country, at Josh Thoma's Smack Shack in Minneapolis, lobster rolls served cold are hot, don't you know? We go through about 2,000 pounds of lobster a week in the summertime when we're busy. Ton of lobster a week. Literally a ton of lobster a week. The bread's local.

This is probably about a four pound. The lobster's flown in from Maine. People say how far is the ocean from here? Well the ocean is, you know, an hour and a half away. By like the Concord. Well by, you know. By the space shuttle.

Like two hours, okay, all right. But a really ambitious lobster could make it here. If it went through the Atlantic, to the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over millions of years get here. When Thoma first sold his roll out of a food truck seven years ago, Minnesotans were confused. I think oftentimes people would come up to the truck and think they're getting sushi.

But soon enough they took to it. So no pressure, but let's watch you take your first bite ever. Like a lobster to melted butter. Oh that's a small bite.

She took a small bite. Okay wait, wait. Deliver your verdict when you're ready. Enjoy it. Savor, savor.

What do you think? Very good. Another lobster roll lover is born. Thank you for not saying it tastes like chicken. Oh that one. Okay take another bite. Will you welcome please Mr. Marlon Brando.

Still to come. Greetings Mr. Hitchcock. Talking the talk with Dick Cavett. So you're Jack Lamin.

Yes. Plus a summer song from the Eisley Brothers. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. How's this for a conversation piece? It's a writing nook. And on the subject of conversation, Dick Cavett.

He can talk with the best of them and that includes Ourley Cowan. So where was famed Cavett's Cove? Where is that? That's it. I read at some point that clothing was optional in Cavett's Cove on the beach.

Well you could wear it if you wanted to. There are a lot of endearing stories like that that happened at this endearing place. Dick Cavett's oceanfront getaway in Montauk, Long Island. People fall in love with it.

People are always asking me, watch you'll ask if you can come back. The house is historic. It was one of seven beach cottages designed back in the 1880s by flamboyant architect Stanford White. Cavett and his late wife actress Carrie Nye bought the house in 1966 just before his TV star went supernova.

His talk show was often the talk of TV and many of the celebrities Cavett hosted on stage he also hosted out at that beach house including Woody Allen, Lauren Bacall, even playwright Tennessee Williams. Tennessee said, it's the most beautiful house I've ever seen in the north. But on one tragic night in 1997 a fire destroyed it all leaving only the brick chimney as a grim sentinel. And you can't imagine your house being gone.

Every cell I think in your body probably if it could be seen in magnified moves at that moment. Because you've lost everything, right? Yeah, yeah. Cavett and Nye set about to rebuild it but only had their memory and pictures to go by.

Forensic architecture they called it. And out of all those ashes came a near exact replica of Stanford White's historic home. You would have liked it? You would have said you did good, Dick. I think Stan would have said hey Dick you done good. He did good in his career too. He started as a comedy writer for the Tonight Show's Jack Paar in 1961 then continued writing for Johnny Carson even doing a little stand-up himself. You ever sit home quietly by the fire rereading Dickens? When he finally got his own show in 1968. Can I tell one story parenthetically before getting to that?

Sure. He just shut up and let his guests talk. Something his mentor Jack Paar had suggested. I made the 10 best dressed list in Poland. He said uh hey kid when you're gonna do this show don't you don't don't don't do interviews. Don't do interviews. Don't do interviews.

Make it a conversation. I think you do a yeoman's job there's nobody else on television that does what you do. It landed in guests who rarely did other shows like Marlon Brando, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. So you're Jack Lemmon.

Yes. You're Fred Astaire or is it Orson Welles? Fred Astaire. And the great Groucho Marx. Anybody can say something dirty and get a laugh but say something clean and get a laugh that requires a comedian.

I wasn't looking at you at the minute. Stuff did happen. Intelligent stuff did get talked about. Politics got talked about. Social issues got talked about which on most talk shows that didn't happen. I just didn't make a point of that. I just thought the world is full of more things than show business. You choose to do the kind of show you choose to do. The conversation didn't even have to include Cap.

He got Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to square off not only verbally but almost physically. Are they kidding boys and girls or not? I didn't think they'd hit me but I didn't know. Greetings Mr. Hitchcock.

How do you do? Very nice to see you. I have to say though sitting across from someone who made conversation on TV the best it could be is a little intimidating for me to sit across from you.

Intimidating for you? Because you're so good at this. Is that why you've stuttered and stammered the whole way through?

That's exactly why I stuttered and stammered. See I'm doing it now. You have a gift sir.

Okay I dare them to cut this out. You are really good. Yeah well coming from you that means a lot.

I say that to everybody of course. But perhaps his greatest back and forth chat was with Katharine Hepburn who famously thought of talk shows as being mostly tactless. Do you want to hear the story of my life?

I presume that's why I'm here. She was wary because nothing in her experience had any real connection with sitting and talking about herself. She made him move the furniture on the set. She told him his carpet was ugly but Cavett kept her talking.

Yeah she wouldn't shut up. At one point Hepburn even referenced that house of Cavett's back in Montauk which she implied held the same romance as her own beach getaway across Long Island Sound in Connecticut. And each one of us has a secret you know and you go to Montauk and you try to rebuild your secret and I go to the mouth of the Connecticut River and my childhood and and I try to rebuild mine. But after more than 50 years the time has come Cavett laments to put his seaside treasure and the 20 acres of moorlands around it up for sale asking price 62 million and change. So why after all these years do you want to do you want to sell this perfect place? I don't want to sell it. You don't want to? You'd have to be a fool to want to sell it.

The home's charm never wavered but at age 80 Cavett's enthusiasm for its upkeep did. Even fairy tales he reasons have to come to an end just like summer. It's just a new chapter. That's good let's let's call it that. Ahead this is a little boy. Bugs just scratching the surface.

I mean isn't that a face that everybody would love? We've moved on to the garden. The perfect place to stop and smell the flowers when you're not fending off the bugs that is.

Serena Altschul gives us the buzz. How often do you come out just to check on these guys and have a look? Oh about once a month. Have you been stung by these guys?

Oh yeah. You could say biologist Justin Schmidt has been bitten by the bug. Actually a lot of bugs. They are quite toxic.

They're about as toxic as a rattlesnake. I kind of make the analogy that if you took a rattlesnake broke it into 500 pieces and added wings you got honey bees. He's devoted his life. This is a little boy. And well his body to studying insect stings and venoms.

I mean isn't that a face that everybody would love? At his lab in Tucson, Arizona. How many times have you been stung? Probably somewhere between one and two thousand times. He's been stung so many times that he figured all that pain could be helpful. So he came up with what he calls in his recent book the Schmidt scale of pain. Stings from 84 different insects are rated on a scale from one to four and accompanied by some imaginative descriptions. So people would be surprised to see all the different descriptions because sometimes it's a hot pain, sometimes it's an itchy pain, a burning. Yeah exactly they're quite different like the tarantula hawk is an electrifying one. Feels like you you know how the electric power line break off and land on you. Ah so you described the sweat bee as light, ephemeral, almost fruity. What are you talking about? I'm talking about it's just just a little tiny thing very light it's almost like a teasing pain.

It's just hey open your arm up let me out I don't mean any harm. And the harvester ants found just outside his front door. They're an excruciating three out of four on his scale. Well this sting to me is one of the more painful of all of them. It feels like somebody's reaching under your skin and ripping out tendons and muscles. But Schmidt isn't just studying what the stings feel like. He's also trying to understand why insects sting in the first place.

Insects are tiny tiny little things and things that want to eat them are big. So you got this basic problem how do you defend a little guy a really little guy against a really big guy and the sting turns out to be the solution. So while it may not feel like it to us most insect stings are purely defensive. And if they stung us yeah we say oh this is the trouble then they leave this this stinger is left in your skin. And what it does is it has a little flag on it right and this flag is like a sponge it's got chemicals in it it's just kind of communicating back to them.

Oh yeah that's what it tells them it's it's an alarm for everyone says hey gals get alert there's bad news I found the trouble it's right here. Insects can be a nuisance to be sure but there is a silver lining to all that pain. It turns out stings can be useful in finding better ways of dealing with pain itself. And one of the projects I'm working on right now is trying to alleviate chronic pain in human beings. We have cancer or many other diseases that have chronic pain and the solutions we have are very blunt. So Schmidt is using the powerful but harmless venom of the fearsome looking tarantula hawk to better understand how pain works in the body and ideally help us find ways to treat it more effectively. We can now take tissue culture which has the nerves that cause pain then we say okay we can put something that makes the the tissue culture indicate pain. Now we can do the chemistry and pharmacology of what can I put on that tissue that stops it. As far as treating the pain of getting stung by an insect at a summer picnic he's got a tip. Salt and a little bit of water just to make it into kind of a cool paste. What does salt do to a stain?

We don't know. That's one of the fascinating things. It's kind of one of these home remedies. The venom actually gets injected fairly slowly into you. But buzz off all you daredevils.

Justin Schmidt has a warning. I don't want you to be like me. I don't want you to go out and get stung. I'm getting stung for you know scientific reasons not just entertainment. But I do get the sneaking suspicion that you love these stinging bugs. Oh absolutely. How can you not adore these?

I mean you look at their life histories so you can see the beauty of what they do, why they do it, how they do it. It's just so fascinating. I just realized I've drunk half this bottle. Yes.

And you're at work. The it wine. Rosé. Next. The fertile north fork.