New Hat for Prague Pride

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Stephan Roth usually is behind the scenes, reaching out to journalists as a principal at OutThink Partners in Beverly Hills, a PR firm specializing in the gay and lesbian market.

But for the first time in his 15-year career, he switched roles when he became a reporter for gay lifestyle magazine Frontiers, headquartered in Mid-Wilshire.

Roth, 43, visited Prague last year and met with people from Prague’s tourism bureau. They contacted him over the summer to see if he would be interested in attending an August press trip, organized by the bureau, for the city’s gay pride week.

“My first response was, ‘Oh, I don’t actually go on the trips. I organize the trips,’ ” he said.

But after thinking it over, he pitched the trip as a travel story for Frontiers and the magazine liked the idea. His one-page article ran last month, and he found the experience enlightening, especially since he got to feel the pressure that’s on reporters.

“Everyone should be able to switch roles at some point to get an appreciation for the other side,” he said.

Kennedy Connection

The 50th anniversary this week of President Kennedy’s assassination got Carl Terzian reminiscing about several little crossing points he’s had with the Kennedys.

The main one – as previously reported in Page 3 – came in the late ’50s when John Kennedy, then a senator, offered him a staff position after seeing Terzian, who was the student body president at USC at the time, acquit himself well on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life.” Terzian, now 78, turned down that offer, but little coincidences didn’t stop.

Although he was and is a Repub-lican, Terzian was asked to help with logistics at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles – the one in which Kennedy was selected to run for president.

A sad one came 50 years ago this week. Terzian was set to travel to Dallas to give a motivational speech to a group of bankers, but it was canceled just as he was set to leave Los Angeles.

“Everything kind of shut down in Dallas that weekend,” explained Terzian, head of Carl Terzian Associates PR firm.

Much the same happened in June 1968, when his planned speech to a philanthropic group at the Ambas-sador Hotel was canceled after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there.

Robert Kennedy was attended by many doctors before he died 26 hours after the shooting. One was Robert Mendez, who has been Terzian’s urologist for years.

Finally, Robert Kennedy was taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery – the same hospital where Terzian got heart surgery recently after suffering a heart attack.

Staff reporter Subrina Hudson

contributed to this column. Page 3

is compiled by editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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