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One family Saves Another
Come on. Take a walk with me. I want you to meet Jim and Marty Dwyer and their five boys. The Dwyers always wanted a baby girl but figured it wasn’t going to happen after those five boys. So they agreed to raise someone else’s. But she...
Wanted: Alligator Wrestler
Used to be only Seminoles wrestled alligators. The tribe lived in the Florida swamps. Gators were their major source of food and profit. But today, the 26 hundred members make big money running gambling casinos, enough for kids to afford college and dreams beyond the swamp. None of them wants to learn this dangerous, ancient skill. Chief James Billy tried to keep the tradition alive. It cost him. Big time.
Boys of Winter
One afternoon in St. Petersburg, Florida, I stopped to watch Fred Broadwell waiting for a pitch, crouching over the strike zone, leaning into the wind, seemingly suspended. The ball floated toward the plate. He chopped it toward the shortstop and shuffled off toward first base on stiff legs. It was a big day for Fred. A couple of years ago he was sidelined with pneumonia. Now he was back at 95.
DID HE SCORE?
Four Corners
There was a time in America where neighbors were considered part of your wealth. In Four Corners, Louisiana, they still are. Hardly a family here makes $10,000 a year. But together, they had rebuilt eleven homes. They linked up with trade people who taught them how.
Singalong Sound of Music
The Sound of Music movie was re-released with a twist. The audience showed up in costumes and was encouraged to sing along. I did. Want to see?
Yellowstone National Park in Winter
150th celebration Yellowstone National Park. It does not give up winter easily. The geysers cough and crackle and keep their warmth inside. Old Faithful is the first to break its glass jail. Splashing in the sun like a ghost train in the Rockies. Warm rivers are the only winter fire. Snow the only blanket. Animals who survive are as stubborn as the land itself. Bison have passed through the ice and the pain, standing dark and still, trembling in the wind. Trumpeter swans preen and float. The plain begin to look beautiful. Swirling through snow on currents of ice, they spin free. The Aspens are crystal. The pines are glass. An iridescent bone yard, waiting for the world to thaw.
Black Pioneers
Black history in Oklahoma is unique. Some were cowboys. Some were Indians. And all of them were pioneers. Charles Davis knew them well. Most of them he buried.
Until It’s Not Here No More
150 years ago, the plains Indians of Oklahoma were refugees of war. The tattered remains of once proud tribes who had become foreigners in their own land. Practically overnight, they were faced with a new language, new religion and a new way of life. In the struggle to survive some of the old ways were forgotten. But Katie Osage remembers. “I was born in a tent and raised in a tent. Yeah, I still live in a tent.” For nearly a century, she has lived in two worlds. And she has survived.
Babies Behind Bars
Pete Weststein used to live in a place of blue distances, tending his dairy herd. It is now a valley of prisons. Four of them, nudging aside the cows and the quiet. His wife Frieda is raising her family next to those prisons. She wondered, what became of the babies that were born inside.
Singing Sullivans
On Betty Sullivan’s 75th birthday, her kids got together to sing for their mom in a place polished with dreams and hard work. Carnegie Hall. She was set to perform again at Carnegie Hall on her 90th birthday. Coronavirus canceled the celebration.
Jim and Betty Sullivan just wanted their eight kids to learn music. They began to teach them in an old home, now covered in weeds. Son Tim sang country songs. His sister, Heather, wrote themes for television shows. Her sister, Stacy, had a recording career, and big sister, K.T., was a world-class cabaret singer.
She sang them a song with her favorite line.
“You have never left my mind long enough to leave me …”
No Phones
Silverton, Washington has a hang up about being in touch. Out here, rivers sparkle like winter stars. And the air smells like it was just made. Denny Boyd grew up in asphalt meadows dreaming of such a place. So 15 years ago, he left city life to open a store in the mountains of western Washington. He neglected to notice the small print in his dream. Silverton, Washington was one of the last towns in America where you cannot make a phone call.
A Normal Life
Seth Chwast cannot hold a conversation or a complex thought. At two he was diagnosed with Autism. His mother was determined to give him a normal life.
A counselor suggested that Seth consider mopping floors for a career. Instead, his mom enrolled him in one last therapy class at the Cleveland, Ohio, Museum of Art.
Painting his Soul
His eyes were turned to beauty only he could see, a gallery of gods. Native American spirits, watching over Christ.
“Some of my Zuni people won’t go along with this,” Alex Seowtewa told me, but he painted his vision on the walls of a church for more than half a century. This old mission in the heart of the pueblo was not in the heart of most Zuni’s. It reminded them of a time when Coronado came calling, looking for gold. And paid with death. The priests who ordered the Zuni’s to build the mission were found dead, buried beneath its floor.
“I was told not to look at the color of skin by my grandfather,” Seowtewa said. He dipped his brush into his own soul and painted what seemed best. For Alex, religion is a search, not certainty. He spent his life capturing clouds and sunsets to hang on a church wall.
He reached into the world and found its vagrant beauty.
If America Had a King
When George Washington took the oath of office, the presidency was a uniquely American institution. Back then, kings ruled most of the world. They believed they were divinely chosen. Of course, the first presidential inauguration changed all that. But what if the popular general had decided to become king? Who would be our king today?
Baseball Tryouts
Jeff Hall’s buddy asked him, “Are you going?’ 290 guys, most of them from the Philadelphia area, were driving 19 hours non-stop to tryout for their beloved Phillies in Florida. Hall had pitched for dozens of minor league teams for 8 years, until a sore arm...
Never Park in Space Reserved for Umpires
ohn McSherry ran a school like no others. He taught how to be UN-loved. His students were would-be big league umpires. McSherry, a National League umpire, worked his class like a drill sergeant. Get by John McSherry, the rest of the world seems like a smile.
Eyewitness to Terror
When my wife Linda and I returned from our honeymoon, I went to cover my first Olympics. It was in Munich, Germany. 1972. 50 years ago today. I soon became an eye witness to terror. A group calling themselves “Black September” abducted...
Beer Cans Heat home
Beer Cans Heat home PIX
Now you can enjoy heating your home. An inventor in Woodsdale, Ohio, gets all the warmth he needs from empty beer cans. Add a garbage pail and a copper coil buried in compost. You get heat. Wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit.
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Three
A PBS interview with the team that won a National EMMY for what was — at the time — an untold story: African American history in the old west. Their 1973 documentary, “Through the Looking Glass Darkly,” had higher ratings than any of the network shows the nights it aired. A high definition restoration of the original program was paired with this interview on the 30th anniversary. Bob Dotson, produced, wrote and narrated. Photojournalist Oliver Murray was also an associate producer, as was George Wesley.
Country Mardi Gras
Country Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras comes with fancy masked balls and big parades. Thousands spent on costumes and parties. But for a Cajun in Mamou, the celebration costs only $7.50. For that, you get a beer, hard boiled eggs, sausage and the answer to the age old question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Two
Listen to Logan Jackson’s story: “Dan Porter was an old Civil War veteran. I was a little boy. At the time we met, they were enforcing the Jim Crow law, which said black men could not vote. ‘Man told Dan Porter, says, ‘Don’t you go in there and try to vote.’ Says, ‘You can’t read.’ “Porter says, ‘That don’t make no difference. I’m one of the men who made General Lee surrender!’” Logan stared into the faces around him, ‘You don’t know who General Lee was, do you? He was a general in the Civil War. Yeah, an old soldier.’ Well, Dan, he voted.”
How a diverse group of Americans succeeded in living together is a fascinating tale that has made an extraordinary difference for the millions who came after them. Of course they had racial problems, and still do, but the way they worked them out holds lessons for our own time.
Shadows Play On This Stage
Only shadows play in the Tabor Opera house. But for Evelyn Furman, it is an attic filled with memories. They survive because of her single minded devotion to the old theater in Leadville, Colorado. She saved it from the wrecking ball until younger...
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part One
One of the most diverse places in America is not where you might expect. Oklahoma once had 28 towns settled by former slaves, scattered throughout 37 Indian Nations. For nearly a century it was primarily a land of the Red and the Black, a checkerboard of Indians and ex-slaves who very nearly got their own state until thousands of immigrants from around the world joined them seeking free land — land they got in a single day.
Odyssey of Words
Odyssey of Words
Professor Doug Brinkley was worried that his students had never seen skyscrapers made of ice. Never known a silent world. Never traveled much at all. Not even in books. He loaded 27 students into a bus and drove from Hofstra University in New York to Denali National Park, Alaska. Along the way, the library came alive.
Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?
Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?
People buy more than 1-BILLION Valentines each year. Ever wonder who writes all those cards? What kind of mind comes up with “Be My Tootsie Wootsie or I’ll Break Your Armsy Warmsy?” Well, I did. Went to the center of all this creativity, to the cupids of Kansas City.
Smoking Pens
A third of all the paperback books sold in America are romance novels. One company has published a billion books in ten years. Enough to give a copy to every man, woman and child in China. The author of those books, Laura London, was voted “the most sensuous writer.” She is a man. His real name is Tom Curtis, a cross country trucker.
Book of Love
Book of Love
Now here’s something that Valentine cards just can’t convey — the depth of your love. In this age of social media, where anyone can be a star, here’s a consolation prize, Romance novels that let you and the one you love — or would like to love — be the main characters.
Maiden in Shining Armor
Maiden in Shining Armor
There hasn’t been much swordplay in the south since the Yankees left. Few southern women ever fought their way onto an Olympic fencing team, until now. Atlanta’s own Nee Lee struggled for 12 years, training with no sponsors and little money. One thought, “I want to be a maiden in shining armor.”
Olympic Memory
At the beginning of this century, Rulon Gardner won a gold medal virtually no one else in the world thought he could, beating Aleksandr Karelin, a Russian wrestler so good, opponents had not scored a single point against him in 10 years. Karelin started his amazing run when Gardner was a junior in high school. Back then, Rulon didn’t make the Varsity team. He and a brother wrestled for the final spot. Rulon let him win. His brother was a senior. That would have been his last chance to compete.
Coach Abe Lemons for the Laugh
My first job for NBC News was at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That’s where I met legendary basketball coach Abe Lemons. He was president of the College Coaches Association that year, but told me he couldn’t get tickets to any Olympic basketball games. Instead, he scored a seat to the finals of the hammer throw.
I asked Abe: How was it?
“Well, our seats were kinda high up,” he said with a slow grin.
“How high?”
“When one of those hammer guys wound up and tossed, the fellows around me all yelled down, ‘How’d he do?’ And the fans down below would turn, cup their ears, and say: ‘Huh?’”
Small Town Football
A friend of mine played football for a school so small, the players changed uniforms at half time and came back as the band. There were so few girls, they borrowed cheerleaders from another town. It made for some close relationships. My pal married a cheerleader. She also played flute in the band. She also moved the yard markers. That’s the way it is with small town football — a family affair.
The OTHER Moscow Olympics
Efforts to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow did not go well. No alternative site was picked. In the midst of all this, here came Moscow, Kansas, with what it hoped was the answer. The 250 people in town started passing out bumper stickers. They wanted to keep the games in Moscow, if not Russia, then Kansas. At Moscow International airport, they expected big crowds, if they could find a plane that seats more than one. “We have a man who works at the post office,” said Doug Bell. “He knows all about air mail. And then there’s the guy who cleans the sewer tanks here. He knows all about rapid transit.”
Olympic Athlete’s wife
My first job for NBC News was the Munich Olympics in 1972. Before the games began, I was sent out with a silent film camera to shoot minute-30 feature stories. Each one had to be shot — in a few minutes — on a single roll of film. Just 3 minutes of video. No natural sound. No interview.
Changing Racial History
Changing Racial History
Macon county, Tennessee, is so lovely folks like to say, “If you stay long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you’ll never leave.” Not everyone was given that chance. Black people used to be run out of the county. Some were hung from a tree on the courthouse square. Fred Thomas’ friends thought he was crazy when he opened a medical clinic in Macon county. “If I had listened to what people said,” Dr. Thomas pointed out, “I would have been a plumber.” Fred Thomas ignored the county’s racial history. He began to forge his own.
The Trouble We All Live With
A 6-year-old girl became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. Ruby Bridges always said her mother was the hero of the moment. She put her family and her husband’s job in jeopardy to open schools for...
Doctor Finds Poor Friends
Jack McConnell stopped to pick up a man who was walking down a dirt road without an umbrella on a drizzly day.
“Where you headed?” McConnell called out the window.
“To look for a job,” the man answered. “Any one I can get.”
“What’s your name?”
“James.”
“You married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids and my wife is pregnant with our third.”
“What do you do for medical care?” McConnell wondered. He was a retired doctor.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” James said. “No one else is going to help us.”
His answer would change thousands of lives across the country.
Grand Central Station’s Hidden Secrets
A secret room. A walled up tomb. A priceless jewel. No, not on the set of the next Indiana Jones movie. They lay hidden in America’s busiest railroad station. Train travel still thrives in New York City. Grand Central Terminal sees as many trains today as it did in the golden age of steam and steel. Picture the population of Atlanta and Buffalo pouring out of trains and subways. Seven hundred thousand travelers every day. Ten thousand pause to grab a meal, a thousand stop to ask directions. Some lose more than their way. In one month, train crews sent Grand Central’s Lost and Found three hundred cell phones, one hundred and fifty eyeglasses and an engagement ring.
Music from the Edge of Nowhere
Gordon Wright was the conductor of the Arctic Chamber orchestra, a group he formed to take classical music to the remote villages of Alaska. His musicians have performed in places so cold, the violinists play wearing gloves.
Hands Free Hero
Marty Revellette lived his life with a single mindedness that blocked out everything but challenge. He was a man with no arms, but he pulled a women from her burning car. She survived. This story tells not only “how,” but “why.”
The country owes its success to those who are willing to try regardless of disability, people who risk their lives for country, family, even strangers.
Professor Longhair
Henry Byrd lived on a side of New Orleans most folks never see, the forgotten side of morning. Byrd never left the city. Never followed his fame. But most modern Rock stars can trace their heritage to his pounding piano style. They call him Professor Longhair.
All of America is their backyard
Dan and Susie Kellogg sold their home in Colorado. Bought an RV. And set out traveling into the unknown. They decided to live full time in a mobile home with enough kids to field a football team. 12.
One Hole, Par 70
Laughter echoes down Pillar Mountain. Two duffers in Kodiak, Alaska, are ice picking their way up the snow-covered cliffs. Carrying golf clubs. The course is practically straight up, fourteen hundred feet, from the valley floor to the green. Pebble Beach, it ain’t. But it is a golf tournament. One hole, par 70. That’s right. One hole, par 70.
Life in a Jar
Life in a Jar
The keys to history’s treasures are often discovered in unexpected places. One of them turned up in a tiny Kansas town, unlocking a story half a world away. This week let’s celebrate the 100th anniversary of a woman who saved 2,500 children. In 1940 the Nazis walled off a neighborhood near Irena Sendler’s home in Warsaw, Poland. Pressed almost half a million people into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park – with not enough food to keep them alive. Five thousand were dying each month. Sendler, a public health service nurse, devised a daring plan to save the children.
Blind Kayaker
Lonnie Bedwell never let a handicap, handicap him. The man is lights out blind. Lives far from fast water, but Bedwell was the first blind person to kayak the Grand Canyon. He navigated the rapids listening closely, as friends called out the way.
WHAT INSPIRED HIS QUEST? THE FRIEND WHO SHOT HIM.
Arctic Explorer
Will Steiger searches for land that hasn’t felt footsteps, the coldest parts of our earth, where the north wind bullies and temperatures cower—to seventy below. In this vast wilderness near the North and South Poles he seems oddly out of place—plodding carefully through the massive ice, alone. Will Steger explored the unknown—one step at a time—for more than forty years. Some ice fields are now so thin, his sled dogs fall through. But science alone won’t fix this. Will thinks people coming together and working for the common good might. We may get blisters on our hands, and calluses on our dreams, but the ally he seeks is the part in all of us that knows what is right. Many preach about saving the planet. Will just puts his boots on and goes.
Orphan Train
Five little boys rattled across America in the fall of 1922. They were part of a remarkable odyssey. One hundred thousand such children were plucked from the streets of New York City and sent west, to a new life. Most were the sons and daughters of immigrants, found starving and alone. The Children’s Aid Society swept them up and shipped them to villages all across the country. At each stop their arrival was advertised. Kids trouped off the train, lined up, and couples simply picked the one they wanted. The brothers had very different experiences, but survived — with the help of each other.
Rejecting Stardom
Many people in Goose Creek, South Carolina, were speechless when Braeden Kershner turned his back on celebrity. It seemed somehow un-American. Don’t we all want to be somebody special? Don’t we try to become our dreams? It’s not that Braeden...
Pops Dream
Braeden Kirchner likes to conduct music with his eyes closed, so he can see his dream. The boy from Goose Creek, South Carolina, wanted to conduct the Boston Pops. Never mind that Braeden was just 18. To prepare for a career in conducting, he learned to play every instrument in the orchestra. He finally got his chance.
Photo Wagon
John Coffer turned his back on modern times to wander America in a wagon pulled by oxen, stopping only to take portraits with his antique camera. Coffer traveled at two and a half miles an hour for five years. 25 states. 10-thousand miles. He crisscrossed America so slowly, everywhere he went, folks joked he was a temporary resident. Coffer captured old fashioned images of modern America.
Refugee Wins Nobel Prize
I’d like you to meet Mario Capecchi. He’s the son of a single mom, a poet, who thought she could defeat the Nazis with her pen. She didn’t, but he became one of the scientists who saved us.
Singer Saves a Town
Singer Saves a Town
I was sitting in a small cafe. At the other end of the counter was a man who looked like Lincoln. He was big and rawboned and about 80. His voice pierced and rattled like an old bugle. I couldn’t help overhearing. He was holding forth about a fellow named Paul Sykes, who arrived in Oklahoma with 600 former slaves from Alabama the year before one of those big land runs that offered up free homesteads out west.
Photographer for Life
Photographer for Life
Milton Rogovin grew old watching his neighborhood grow up, sharing the yearbook of their lives. He was still photographing them at age 100, surrounded by friends who were now taking his picture — the “forgotten ones,” who did not forget him.
Birth of the Ice cream Cone
A lot of what we love today —ice cream cones, hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter, iced tea, the club sandwich, cotton candy — were all introduced in a single summer in 1904. Americans also got their first glimpse of the Olympic games and the Democrats managed to shoehorn in a National Convention. All three events in one city at the same time. Never happened again.
The Rescued Save the Rescuers
Roby Albouy spent most of his adult life in the Colorado mountains. But he carries faces from France framed in his mind, the fellows he passed on to freedom during World War Two. They were the downed crew of an America bomber. He was a fighter with the French Resistance. They never knew each other’s names. After we did a story on Albouy, the crew and their French saviors found each other again. They had all lived long enough to joke about things that once were breaking their hearts. Without each other, they may not have grown old at all.
A Chance to Grow Old
Every veteran carries faces framed in their minds, comrades who did not return from war. Roby Albouy and I were walking through the Aspen meadows out in Colorado one summer when he pulled a yellowing snapshot from his pocket and showed me the ones he can’t forget.
Nickname Telephone book
If you go looking for folks in Cajun country, it helps to have a nickname handy. In Beaux Bridge, Louisiana, the phone book lists people by the names they are actually known. Nicknames. Too many residents have the same last names. There are 78 Broussard’s. 45 Tibedeaux’s. And 46 different Champagne’s. 2 of them have the same first name. Nicknames here are a necessity.
Mama Hale
Childhood should be a season of dreams, but some children awoke each morning from an American nightmare: They are born addicted to drugs. Clara Hale saved hundreds of them. One morning she found a baby by her door. Mrs. Hale took him in. Word got around. Soon her tiny apartment was jammed with cribs.
Old Believers
Behind America's success story are untold tales of endurance. The people who succeed in this country come from sturdy stock, the ones who have always carried on when the going got tough. Their ancestors thought America’s streets would be paved with...
The Ring that Saved a Life
Motts Tonelli enlisted in the New Mexico National Guard to play with an Army basketball team. The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he traded his ball for a gun. Tonelli was captured in the Philippines in the opening days of World War Two. Forced to walk 70 miles to a prisoner of war camp. Along the way, a Japanese soldier gave Motts an extraordinary gift.
Farm to Fame
Chuck Taylor waved at a hawk strafing the wheat field in front of him. “There is beauty everywhere. I just want to express what I am feeling.”
He pushed up his feed company cap and began to sing louder than his farm tractor engine. Chuck’s voice boomed over that Colorado field, keeping time to the rhythm of his motor. The tractor turned into the setting sun, revealing a big man, close to three hundred pounds, haloed in the cab. Chuck Taylor was wondering why that sun wasn’t a spotlight.
TURNS OUT, IT WAS.
Family Music
The Knight family, Laura and John and six kids, manage to survive, no thrive, on $4-thousand dollars a year. That’s something to sing about. On their farm, music is all around them. https://youtu.be/e8MQLVt7r7k
Puppy Rescuer
Ready for a happy puppy story? Sure you are. George Mahle takes pups on a 4,200-mile odyssey to loving arms. https://www.today.com/news/puppy-rescuer-takes-dogs-4-200-mile-odyssey-loving-arms-2D79517768
Dog Tags
Stacey Hansen, a fire fighter in San Jose, California, found an old dog tag while vacationing in Vietnam. It belonged to Marine Corporal Steven Zucroff who died during the War – the day after Mother’s day — his 21st year. She brought Steven’s dog tag home. His brother Brad lived just an hour away, They met in a park overlooking the Pacific near Stacey’s fire station. Brad carried an old box with his brother’s things.
“You’ve seen his name,” he said, as the two walked across the bluff and sat on a bench, “Now you should see the person.”
He lifted the lid and pulled out a picture. It was not the image of a weary warrior Stacey expected.
Worst Weather in America
Who gets the roughest weather in America. The place looks looks gentle, like a smiling stranger with an offer of candy, but more than a hundred people have died there because winter can come in any month. One day in three, hurricane force winds slap the landscape. Since 1932, a small band of scientists has struggled into this arctic laundromat to be tumbled around in search of the worst weather in the world.
Truck Driver Surgeon
Wisdom is found in unexpected places. Tools for some of the first microsurgeries were invented in a garage. An out of work truck driver tinkered and perfected them until they changed our world. https://youtu.be/e6tI0AmehG4
America’s Main Street
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Animal Hospital
Peter Holworth is a foster parent to hundreds of sick little seals that wash up on his shore. Some are near death from starvation when he finds them. Peter nurses these babies back to health.
Teens Overcome Racism
Teenagers in this summer camp have lost something, the wishful, youthful belief that prejudice would never find them. It is easier to see racism in others. Here teenagers find it in themselves. They had learned to rely on one another in these woods. Now they were being torn apart. Camp “Any Town” teaches how to battle discrimination. Councilors point out that prejudice behaviors are learned. If they catch it in a 15 year old, they have a better chance of doing something. Those teens have have a lot time to live and will effect more lives.
Teen Cinema
There are places where the past is not past. It keeps circling back around. Many towns in America are like that. Petaluma, California, continually celebrates a magical time when kids showed up to shoot a low budget movie called “American Graffiti.” It launched some big name careers and boosted an unknown director, George Lucas, into an orbit that would lead to his epic — Star Wars. History in Petaluma is never far, far way. Sadly, this town — so tied to movie history — lost its last picture show. Kids could have just hopped into a car. Their moms would have driven them to the movies in another town.
“Oh, no!” Madison Webb looked stricken. “You’re not supposed to go with your parents!”
So, the teens created a business plan that would reopen their theater.
A New Life
Working folks have always been the great voyagers of America. There were always new businesses, new jobs, new frontiers just over the next hill. But something fundamentally is changing in the American economy. Old skills don’t always fit new jobs. The American instinct to move on when times get tough can no longer solve the problem.
We caught up with Jim and Deborah Carey and their daughter Chastity once again. The bankrupt farmers still had not harvested a dream. Jim had won and lost six jobs in a year. Six jobs. In three different states. And he had a new baby. All was not bleak. Two things were about to happen that would change their lives for the better.
Born to Farm
Boom times in the past have doubled the cost of farmland in this country, a price that few can afford to pay. Southeastern Massachusetts has lost more farmland in the last 30 years than it did in the previous 300. Folks in Wesport bucked that trend. Taxed...
Living Ghost Town
During this dark time, it is well to remember the families in this country who help others end nightmares and find dreams. It is the very core of our American story because most of us also have ancestors who risked everything for a better life. The communities they built prospered because people took care of one another. Some still do.
Ballet Dancer
Elliot Feld would hide his dance slippers in a brief case, so his neighbors would think he had an ordinary job. He would become one of America’s finest ballet choreographers, but ballet is still out of the question for most of the kids in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Too expensive. He did not recruit from the specialized schools for the performing arts. He traveled to the public classrooms to look for ordinary 8 year olds with potential.
Post Pawley’s Island school closes
Beloved teacher Ruby Forsyth had died. The classroom where she taught for half a century was now quiet. The school she started for Black children was about to close. Her former students share their memories of what she taught them.
Veteran’s Legacy
Jeff Steiner is building a sanctuary. He is planting trees on a hundred acres he bought after returning from the Vietnam war. Half a year after high school graduation he was evacuating wounded G.I.’s. A shell exploded in his face. After his discharge, he became an alcoholic. Got divorced. Attempted suicide. Then, he decided to do something positive. Plant one tree for each of the 60-thousand fellow soldiers killed or missing in Vietnam. He had planted 30-thousand, when I met him.
Beats a 260 mile School Bus Ride
Crane High is the only locally tax supported public boarding school in America. It was built in a part of Oregon you seldom see in the travel brochures. Out here, people remember bone grey better than rainbows. Southeastern Oregon has a desert so vast, Jerry Deffenbaugh must drive 260 miles round trip to watch his son play high school basketball. Some weeks he does that 3 times. The school draws just 50 students from a district the size of Massachusetts.
AND YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A LONG COMMUTE.
Kid Billionaire
Jared Issacman became a billionaire before he could drive. He as so young, he hired his dad to wine and dine clients. His mom worked for him too. Issacman used some of his money to pilot Elon Musk’s all-civilian mission to the edge of the universe. Purchased purchased all four seats. Kept one for himself. Donated the other three to charity. He made his billions by figuring out a way for businesses to process credit cards more quickly. It all began in his basement. He was just 16. This was the first story ever done on the kid who defies the odds.
A Picture that Touched America
For families who lived in the 1930’s Dust Bowl, “depression” was not an abstract economic term. Their farms were buried in burned out soil, and with nowhere to turn, they moved on. Florence Thompson was 27 years old when the depression started. She had five children and was pregnant with another — and her husband had died. Did she ever lose hope? “Nope, if I’d a lost hope, we never would have made it”
Blind Musher
Some races in life begin far from the starting line. That’s why Rachael Scdoris and her dad drove 25-hundred miles, to the top of the globe, in the dead of winter, to help her chase a dream she cannot see.
Hiding for Half a Century
When Private D.B. Benson decided to hide out from World War Two, he was able to disappear completely for 36 years. Benson slipped into the Kiamichi Wilderness in 1943, after a sergeant told him to go home because he could not read. He thought he was being...
Still Got Life to Go – BOB DOTSON’S FIRST NATIONAL EMMY NOMINATION, 1971
Four out of five felonies are committed by repeaters, those who have been through our corrections system. Out of every 10 persons imprisoned for serious crime, four will return to that way of life again. Our failure to rehabilitate is costing us 20 billion dollars in...
Smoke and Steel
Some holiday gifts for you this week. Today, one my first films. It WAS shot on film. An investigative documentary about high rise fires. We not only uncovers problems, but offer a solution, a theme my stories would follow throughout my career. Stick around for the commentary at the end of this half hour program.
Biggest Test of Her Life
Michael Carter is leaving his Fayetteville, North Carolina, school in search of a new kidney, while his teacher, Jane Smith, prepares for the biggest test of her life.
Face of God
Deborah Evans looks to God for help. She says, He told her to look a little closer to home. She believes a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina. is the closet she’s come to the face of God.
A Life Lesson
Keith Lyle is a nice kid from a nice part of town. He has had a terrible struggle with drugs. Now, he has an even bigger problem.
$2 Doc’s “Big” Pay Raise
An update to the story about Dr. Russell Dohner. 27 years later, he had raised his fee for a visit from $2 to $5. He looked after his neighbors for 55 years, charging them about what we pay for a fancy cup of coffee. Most of his nurses had been with him nearly as long as his furniture. They were paid well because Doc worked around the clock. He would go anywhere, at any time, to help those in need, often arriving before emergency crews.
Delivering News on Foot
We can all learn what’s going on with a touch of a thumb, but there was a time when people in Mountain Home, Arkansas, waited for Nellie Mitchell to deliver the news. She handed them their morning newspaper, 7 days a week, rain or shine. Never called in sick. Never took a vacation or a day off. At 86 she was still on her morning route, walking 5 miles a day, when trudged along with her. A gracious reminder of how life used to be.
A Living Statue of Liberty
Each evening the scruffy tabby cats listen for a single voice, the distant squeak of a rusty cart. Mary Burns, making her rounds, For more than a quarter of a century, she has fed the lost cats of Miami Beach. 8 Hours a day. Every day. Restaurants along her way give food. Veterinarians help her tend the sick. Mary has been a voyager all her life. She came from Yugoslavia. She simply took the Statue of Liberty at its word.
Geezer Rock
This story is something of a mystery. It begins on a quiet street in Rochester, New York. You won’t believe where it ends. Something strange is happening over at Dave Hickey’s house. He bought a set of drums and disappeared with his brother Bruce and their pals. Together, they helped each other find the notes that had been missing from their lives. They practiced 18 hours. Weekend after weekend. For six months. Back in the 1960’s they had a garage band called the Invictas that had one hit song.
Coal Miner’s Daughter
Brenda Brock went looking for a job in a coal mine. She showed up hungry and broke on a mine foreman’s doorstep. All she had was a sleeping bag. Her work below was a trade off for her life above. Brenda had seen the ugliness that her mom and dad had escaped. “And yet, you get here and lose your heart.”
Bedrock America
Of all the folks who went west looking for gold, one family went further, dug deeper and stayed longer. They settled in the Marble mountains of Northern California, in a region so difficult to reach, they still don’t have electricity. Each day Chet McBroom did what his father did. Pick down 6 tons of ore. If he’s lucky, he’ll find a few flecks of gold. “If I had to do it over again, you know what I’d change?” Chet asked. “Nothing.”
Charles Banks Wilson
For years artist Charles Banks Wilson crisscrossed the West stopping in small town pool halls and churches seeking faces that make each Indian tribe unique. Native Americans can look as different from one another as a Turk from a Swede, but that is changing.
Santa Creek
Dee Newberry teaches kids in a two room school house in a vast wilderness. A billion ounces of silver were pulled from a nearby valley. Discovered after Noah Kellogg tossed one of those silver rocks at a mule that ran away. The town that bear his name once put up a sign that said, “Discovered by a jackass. Inhabited by his descendants.”
Junk Food Critic
Most food critics get the benefit of dining in some fine restaurants. Not George Tumor. He reviews food that most of us eat. George sports a 280 pound resume to prove his dedication to the work. https://youtu.be/PSQIokIT_CM
102 Year Old files for Social Security
Joe Carter had just turned 102, but he didn’t stand for much fuss. There was work to be done. Carter was a farmer. He still puttered about on an old A Model John Deere tractor, the one he bought in 1954, the year before farmers were brought under Social Security. As a group, people on Social Security are healthier, less frail and living longer than ever before. The year Joe Carter got married, all the Americans over 85 would have fit on his small farm. Their number has been doubling every 20 years. Twice as fast as the rest of the population. By the time today’s Baby Boomers reach that age, there could be 16-million Americans over 85.
The Sidelines of Life
David Edwards stood on the sidelines of life until Patricia Fulton asked him to dance. His mind is not quick. She doesn't care. Being less than perfect is the fragile thread that binds all of Fulton's dance partners. Patricia Fulton pulls them from the sidelines...
Social Security Anniversary, Part One
They jam the southbound lanes. 12-thousand people a month. Retired Americans. Looking for paradise. Today’s elderly are pioneers. The first generation with enough health and enough wealth to choose where they will spend their last years. Most who move come to Florida. It is unique among states. One person in five is retired. The biggest source of personal income is Social Security.
Bogging
Grownups have finally found out that mud can be fun. On Sunday afternoons in Coon Mizell’s cornfield, anyone with a pickup truck worth its pull is pitted against slime in the local Boggin’ hole. The winner is the driver who goes the farthest before getting stuck.
Vaudeville’s Back
An ancient truck carries a couple who dream of another time. Denise and Benny Reel gathered together a small group of vaudevillians. They were not kids with more ambition than ability. They were professional performers who set aside New York City careers to live in the country. And soon, people paid to see them; to sit in a frozen town hall, heated by a single stove.
A New Standard of Caring
We returned to San Francisco a year later to see how the survivors of a terrible earthquake were doing. Betty Kelly still cannot cross a bridge without flinching. She and her husband were on vacation in 1989, high over San Francisco Bay, just as the Earthquake struck. A section of the Bay Bridge dropped like a deadly trapped door. The Kelly’s honked their horn to warn others. But Anna Annalonghu died. Everything Adeen Murphy owned was 4 flights up a twisted staircase. Adeen had lived through a thousand air raids in World War Two London, so she crossed police barrier and found something she had bought only a week before — $2-thousand dollars worth of Wedgewood China.
Family Front Lines
Dear Mom. I’m writing this letter from the family front lines. You always said, “Just wait, someday you’ll be one.” Well, now I am. A parent. And ma, it’s rough out here. Family restaurants are different these days. They’ve got electronic games. Singing gorillas. And dancing rats. Last Saturday, I stood in line so long to get food, I could have eaten the last member of an endangered species. Parents survive on what their kids don’t eat. They wouldn’t care much for your carrot salad. A food critic from Dallas joined us for dinner the other night. He reviews the kind of food most of us eat. Fast food. “You know the difference between swill and slop?'” George Toomer asked me. ”No.” “Three days.”
Circus Children
There is something to be said for summertime in a small town. The circus still comes in a tent. There aren’t many left that stretch their big tops like the imagination. Perhaps that’s why the ones that do, go to so many places. Seminole, Oklahoma, was the 70th city in 70 days for the Carson and Barnes Circus.
Special Kids
Children with special needs sometimes have thoughts locked locked in the darkness of their minds. But a machine can help these kids communicate. Not just their needs, but ideas.
The Man Who Found the Red Baron
Gurd Heindrich lives in the powdery landscape of memory. All the roses of his dreams scattered about. He was one of the world’s great naturalists, a World War One German flying ace, who later lost his home in Poland to the Communists and for a time was as one with the creatures he pursued. For five years he raised his son deep in the woods, selling stuffed mice dressed to look like Mickey Mouse. They now live in Vermont. His son is now a naturalist, too.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part Three
My first NBC News Investigative series on the legal use of Sodium Valproate to combat epilepsy. This is is the last of three stories.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part Two
My first NBC News Investigative series on the legal use of Sodium Valproate to combat epilepsy. This second of three stories.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part One
Want to see what I looked like when the earth was cooling? This is my 1st NBC News Investigative series on a drug that could combat epilepsy. Part one of three.
Corporate Daycare Begins
Since World War Two, the way to success for most Americans was to hop on that corporate wagon train, moving their families from city to city, following the economic frontier. That kind of life has taken a toll on the American family. Torn from the familiar. Far from family and old friends. Today’s families often find themselves alone. This is the story of one of the first companies to change all that.
Modern Farming
Gary Young farms 320 acres. Not big by Nebraska standards, but on that land he is raising 30 cows and 6 daughters. That can make a man watch his pennies. He built a solar panel to dry his harvest for 2 cents a bushel instead of the 15 cents his neighbors pay for propane. Young can process 7 times the grain for the same amount of money.
A Farm Family Hangs on
The disintegration of the family farm is an old song. 20-thousand were auctioned or abandoned in just four years. There were so many family farms on the market in 1985, they gutted the value of those that remained. Marty Kleinschmidt survived by recycling.
Hard Roe to Hoe
Joleen’s cafe was once filled with farmers who carried only the name. Some folks were getting food stamps after farming all their lives.
Most Accurate Weather Station
Farmers are so tied to the seasons, they have developed a wealth of weather lore that dates back 4-thousand years. To get the temperature, they learned to count the cricket chirps. To get the forecast, they watched the insects. Ducks quacking called for rain. So it is no wonder that the most accurate U.S. Weather station is Crab Orchard, Tennessee.
Rodeo Doc
Dr. James Allen is his own best patient. He’s had more broken bones than a bucket full of chicken at a Baptist picnic. 30. He’s also dislocated both of his shoulders. Fractured his spine and collar bone, while competing in the National Calf Roping Championship. His dream may now be out of reach. A rope tore off two fingers he uses for surgery.
John Henry
They say, if you listen quietly, up on Big Bend Mountain, you can still hear him hammering. Old John Henry’s ghost fighting progress with his big, broad arm. Legend has it that John Henry fought his famous battle with the steam drill near here, man against machine to see who could lay more railroad track. John Henry won, then collapsed, dead of a broken heart. His legend still clings to the valley like the mist, and its drama has inspired a unique theater in Talcott, West Virginia.
3 year old photographer
Elizabeth and Bob Williams bought their son Robert a toy camera. He preferred his dad’s. Robert’s father was a freelance photographer. He started submitting Robert’s pictures with his own. Time and again, Robert’s pictures were the ones that were chosen. The editors had no idea the man behind the camera was 3 years old.
Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger
Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger
Charles Davis hoisted his cane for attention. “Bass Reeves!” he shouted. We looked at one another for some clue as to what was to come. The only sound was an industrious bee in a honeysuckle bush. “I can tell you more about him than perhaps you ever heard.” Bass was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger.
Bubble Gum World Record
Brett Nichols was just another face in the crowd, until one day he started blowing bubbles. It put him in the Guinness Book of World records.
Lives Lost
Four little girls were murdered in an Arkansas school yard. The tragic event had been updated for days. I thought it was time to remind viewers that there was more to this tale. Looking at a school year book one day, gave me an idea: Our children are like library books with a due date unknown. These lives stopped at the start of their story. But their stories live on in friends who can tell them. Why not get students together to talk about their classmates? Those murdered children were more than what happened to them.
Cave Rescue
“Shadows chase shadows. Now and then a whisper of sliding rope. The anxious, uneven breathing of 60 people lugging one of their own to safety.” I keep an Ideas notebook. When something prompts an idea, I type it into my cellphone. These thoughts may not always fit the story I’ve been assigned, but I don’t throw them away. The next time I’m pressed for an opening line, I scroll through those thoughts. Two words “Darkness” and “Friendship” inspired that opening narration.
Make it Memorable
The shortest distance between two people is a good story. I learned that lesson back when the earth was cooling. When my hair was still red and I started telling stories of seemingly ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
The technique of memorable storytelling hasn’t changed since the first cave man painted pictures on a wall. Technology comes and goes. How to tell a memorable story is the same.
Not Just a Commune with Haircuts
Imagine a place where folks care as much for each other as they do their lawn. At Muir Commons in Davis, California, working parents don’t have to rush home to cook dinner. Neighbors do it for them. Each small town house is privately owned, but families also get day care, a dining hall and rooms for visiting grandparents.
This is not just a commune with hair cuts. At its heart is an attempt to create an old fashioned neighborhood where folks come together to shoulder the stress of modern living.
Marine Minister
Sailors labor on gliding high rises. Freighters are run by fewer than two dozen people. They may stop at half a hundred ports and never go ashore. For them, Boston harbor is some place special. Wally Cedarling lives here. He is a minister who has no church. Each ship is his congregation. In the few short hours between the tides, he wanders the decks offering a touch of home.
A Bank Close to the Clouds
Hinsdale County, Colorado is up close to the clouds where sun and snow interchange and know no seasons. 621-thousand square miles, a mile and a half high. It is one of the largest, least populated counties in the country. Only 400 people live here. But this day, they are reopening a bank that has been closed for 69 years.
Trespassing on their own land
Carrie Dann lives out where clouds leave only shadows on the earth. Her people remember bone gray better than rainbows. But they have clung to that land for tens of thousands of years. Now the federal government says they are trespassing.
Mississippi River Essay
The Mississippi River meanders down the spine of America. Stretched straight, it would spread from New York City to Los Angeles. But it winds back on itself in great chocolate loops. Mae West was right. “The loveliest distance between two points is a curved line.”
Chase One Dream, Find Another
Mickey Carroll had been writing songs for 30 years. All those years he had looked within. convinced he had the road map to success in his soul. He never figured on the detours.
Museum Guide (Dust Bins of the Mind)
Sometimes we look to the past to find something new. Most of what’s supposed to be news, we’ve seen before. It’s not really news to us. The past — because it sits in the dust bins of the mind — still hold some mystery. And there in lies the charm of Doc Nightengale’s priceless knowledge.
Alcohol Lake
There once was a place called ALCOHOL Lake. It was a dusty little town with a big curse. Practically everyone was an alcoholic. Even some of the children. Then, Phyllis Chelsea decided to stop drinking and persuaded neighbors to fix up anyone’s home who stopped drinking. She also built the town’s first grocery store out of discarded lumber. 8 out of 10 of her neighbors were unemployed. She sobered up her husband and together they opened a hog farm, greenhouse and cafe. 500 people live here. All but 12 have stopped drinking.
Polio is Back
Polio has been detected in New York City wastewater. The announcement came three weeks after a man north of the city in Rockland county was diagnosed with a case of polio that left him paralyzed. The virus we thought we had beat is back in the USA. Polio...
America’s First Gold Rush
America’s first gold mines were not out west. The first gold strike was in the north Georgia mountains. If Matthew Stevenson had his way, Tony Bennet would be singing, “I Left My Heart” in Lumpkin County. Back in 1849, Stevenson stood in the Dalonagah town square and tried to convince Georgia miners not to follow the 49er’s out to California. Mark Twain later paraphrased Stevenson’s speech when he said, “There’s gold in them thar’ hills.”
Surprising Books
For most of his life, A.W. Yeats never put a bolt to a nut. He was an English professor who surrounded himself with books. Rare books of great beauty and surprise. In every work of genius, he saw his own rejected thoughts.
Junior Firefighters
All but 3 of the volunteer firemen in Lumberton, Texas, weren’t old enough to go to their high school prom. Most folks who lived there worked miles away at the big oil refineries along the gulf coast. Kids were trained to handle emergencies when the grown ups were gone. They had have passing grades both in school and on the fire truck. And there was one other lesson.
Cleveland Works
I found myself on a street of dead eyes. People here have all seen life go off and leave them. Cleveland was one of the toughest places in America for someone young and black to find a job. One of the roughest for someone of any color. But a program called Cleveland Works has begun to break that cycle of poverty. They only train people for jobs that pay more than the minimum wage. Lawyers clear criminal records. Doctors help them battle drugs and alcohol. Daycare watches their kids.
All that is expensive. About twice as much as other county programs, but 70% have found good paying jobs with health benefits. So, welfare savings have been dramatic. $3 back for every dollar invested in Cleveland Works.
Bob Dotson’s Atlanta
Rand McNally picked Atlanta as the best city in the country back in 1982. I lived there at the time and told TODAY viewers why.
The Good Life, Texas Style
In Texas there is an apartment complex so big, it has 26 swimming pools. It is called the Village, a small city really – ten thousand single adults, half of them in their early 20’s, hardly anyone over 34 — young, good looking and well off. Unfortunately, the things that make them happy also make them prime targets for crime. What to do? Well, remember, this is Texas. The Village did what a town’s got to do — it went looking for a lawman on horseback.
The New Fashioned Way
Loraine Metcalf was on welfare. Now she lives in a neighborhood of fine homes. Her daughter does too. No, they didn’t win a lottery. They earned it. The NEW fashioned way. Their tiny band of Native Americans — called the Siletz — does market studies to see what will sell and then bankrolls new businesses.
Aspen Music
Summer in the high country has a sound all its own. Mountain streams unlocked by spring. Animals looking for the sun. Since 1949, the deer and the chipmunks in this valley have moved to different sounds. This is the home of the Aspen music festival. For 9 weeks each summer, musicians gather in the Rockies to study and to play.
Al Lee Gator
Some Americans were fighting crime with the only weapon they had. Fear. Then, they turned to television. Police departments across the country began reenacting crimes, broadcasting them to gather information and help solve the problem. Crime Watch was an electronic extension of the old neighborhood block watch. People looking out for one another. The reenactments sometimes featured the actual victims. During the first four years, the Crime Watch program helped solve 460 major crimes in Orlando, Florida, and recover $4,500,000 in stolen property. The day we tagged along, the cops were taping a show on folks who steal alligators. If you have knowledge of the whereabouts of Al Lee Gator, a green male, 6-2, 68 pounds, contact the Orlando Police department.
A Journey into the Unknown
67-hundred Japanese companies operate in the United States. More than 40-thousand families have moved here. It is pioneer journey that covers more than miles. They will live in a world which to them is both exotic and enticing. When different cultures manage to live together in friendship, they sometimes create something better. It has happened before. In America.
Civil Rights Era’s Forgotten Women
Virginia Durr, born to privilege and high place, battled intolerance whatever its form. She took a Japanese family into her home during World War Two because they had nowhere to live. Was branded a Communist for her compassion and hauled before a Senate subcommittee in the 1950’s. Successfully fought the pole tax that freed the vote for women. And was one of the few, the very few, white southerners who openly resisted the violent currents of her time.
A little Scary
Eric Gray worked nights as a flight attendant, so he could take pharmacy classes by day. His family pitched in to keep him in college. Five of them lived on $22-thousand dollars a year. Eric faced a hard choice. Get insurance or eat. The family opted for food.
Eric Gray got his Phd. But just days before he could take a job that would provide him with insurance coverage, he learned his son, Eric, jr. had cancer. After one hospital stay, two weeks, the bill was $43-thousand dollars.
Devil’s Tower, Church vs. State
One man’s rock climb could be another’s cathedral. 23 Native American tribes hold Devils Tower National monument sacred. In recent years their services have had to compete with noisy climbers. National Park rangers tried to help, steering climbers away. Most left. Frank Sanders did not. “If it’s going to be closed for one set of people, then we should have another week where its closed to everyone, but Frank Sanders.” Native Americans have been coming to Devils Tower for 12-thousand years. Is it protected by the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom or should the climbers be left alone, exercising their right to keep church and state separate? The Indians feel there are plenty of places to climb. Not enough to look up to.
Job Saver
Jack Copley saw cutbacks coming. That was his job, reviewing budgets for a telephone company. There were 53-hundred empty desks around him. He figured his work, too, might disappear. One thing he had learned. Not to be a victim. Copley set out to find Bell Atlantic a new source of income, enough to maintain his pay. For all the hours Jack worked, he didn’t even make minimum wage. His daughter made more baby sitting. But he bombarded Bell with ideas. One stuck.
The Good Guys Ride Bikes
The Good Guys Ride Bikes
All John Finello ever wanted was to ride a motorcycle. It carried him away from school in the 10th grade. He never returned. That free life John chased so loudly had some unexpected snares. Heroin. Cocaine. And booze. He started stealing to support his habits. Finally, was arrested for armed robbery in Saugus, Massachusetts.
“The only thing left for me was either death or prison,” Finello said.
But a remarkable thing happened. He found a job. Got married. And became a dad. He was free of the alcohol and drugs that held him half his life. John and his biker friends decided to form a group that did not get high and began making converts. There are 70 of them now, counseling high school kids.
Bulldog’s Pickers
Bulldog’s Pickers
An aging group of friends moved to south Texas one winter because they didn’t like weather they had to lift. The friends noticed that machines only harvested one vegetable at a time. They missed a lot. On one farm in the Rio Grande Valley, 6 million pounds of vegetables — that were too small or too ripe — were left to be plowed under. So the elderly went after them, gathering left over vegetables for the poor.
Unwed Fathers
Manny Cardona seeks out teenage fathers and leads them back to the families they created. He gets their girlfriends medical attention. Guides them off welfare. And tries to keep them in school.
Cardona was once like them, an unwed teen father, who put himself through college, got a masters degree and a job at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, YMCA. Manny represents something in short supply this neighborhood. Success.
Anti-smoking Tobacco Heir
Anti-smoking Tobacco Heir
In the 1980’s Americans started smoking fewer cigarettes for the first time since 1913, that’s when R.J. Reynolds took a picture of a circus camel and stuck it on the side of a pack. Six years later, nearly half of the people in America who smoked cigarettes, smoked that one brand — Camels. His ads were the first to link smoking with the good life. That didn’t just sell cigarettes. That made them part of our culture. NBC’s first TV newscast gave them to lucky viewers.
One of R.J. Reynold’s grandsons, Patrick, twisted those advertising techniques to get people to stop smoking.
Scoop City
Scoop City
Focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. That’s the key to a long and happy career. I learned that lesson in a small city, half way between St. Louis and Kansas City, where stories seldom go untold.
Everglades Changing
Everglades Changing
Out here, the alligators look like they’re sighting down a gun barrel. Survival goes to the swift. But even the fastest cannot run from the pollution that seeps from sugarcane fields. In south Florida over the years, the Federal Government drained the heart of the Everglades. 700-thousand acres were turned into some of the richest farm land in America. Now, environmentalists are battling to cleans the deadly phosphorus that the draining unleashed.
Final Choice
Before hi-tech medicine, death was a member of the family, something families nearly always chose to have happen at home. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans die in hospitals, surrounded by strangers. Often alone in webs of wires and tubes. Hospice care gives the terminally ill a chance to live a near normal life, until they die. A quarter of million Americans at the end of their lives have checked themselves out of hospitals and into hospice programs. In 1974 there was one hospice in America. Twenty years later there were 2,000. Mostly staffed by volunteers. That keeps costs low. On average, about $80 a day. Nearly 10 times cheaper than some hospital stays. Add in Medicaire and Medicaid, the out of pocket cost — $16 bucks a day. Nine out of ten hospice programs are in people’s homes. For those whose final choice is to go gently, they will not be forced to do otherwise.
Animal Beauty Aids for People
Animal grooming products have become some of the hottest beauty aids for people. A lot of folks who’d never been inside a feed store began using them. 90 % use horse products for themselves. That pushed sales for “Main and Tail” from $500,000 to $30 million. Farm mothers have quietly used these protein lotions for years. They are about half as expensive as what comparable products cost in the beauty shop.
Desoto Hour
Most of the time Georgia Tech’s Rambling Wreck radio sounds like a three car pile up. Even among college stations, its programming is considered extreme. But stuck between “Concussion Theater” and a show called “Tongue Bath” is the station’s longest running program — Fred Runde’s Desoto Hour — the show with the most listeners. The 77-year-old disc jockey is not a Georgia Tech student. Nor a teacher. Never was. He’s been spinning Big Band magic here since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Fred wandered through the door looking for something to do in retirement. Students swooned for his oasis of sound. Runde believes that noise is merely music someone doesn’t want to hear.
Rosewood
There are few traces of Rosewood. Graves hidden in the weeds of time. A fist full of photographs. Fading, like the memory of what happened in the north Florida woods. The tragedy began after a White woman, Fanny Taylor, said she was beaten by a Black man, a story she may have made up to cover a fight with her White lover. The attacker was never found. But a mob raged through Rosewood for 8 days. The sheriff did not stop them. The governor did not send help. The burnings. The beatings. The looting continued for a week. A least 8 people lost their lives. Rosewood had been a prosperous place. The families owned a turpentine plant and cut much of the Cyprus for school pencils in this country. No one was prosecuted. Ever. Fear kept Black families from returning, even to sell their land. Rosewood’s survivors became an address list of long forgotten names. Their story nearly died with them. But now, justice — a long last.
Wrong Man
Darryl Hunt was arrested, charged, and convicted of a 1984 North Carolina murder he didn’t commit. Although DNA results proved his innocence in 1994, it took another 10 years of legal appeals to exonerate him. He was just 19.
Empty Mansions Update
The fate of Hugette Clark, the 104 year old woman, whose father was once the second richest man in America. She was worth half a billion dollars. Had no heirs. And hadn’t been seen in public for more than half a century.
Empty Mansions
This was one of the first stories that aired about the mysterious Huguette Clark, a 104 year old woman, whose father was once the second richest man in America. She was worth half a billion dollars. Had no heirs. And hadn’t been seen in public for more than half a century.
The Evolution of the American Story
The Evolution of the American Story
Bob Dotson spent four decades as a reporter at NBC. For most of that time, he hosted a segment on The Today Show called The American Story, which created intimate portraits of Americans who wouldn’t normally make the news. In this live episode of StoryTech, Bob Dotson talks about changes in technology, from wireless microphones to home video to iPhones, changed the way he told The American Story.
Candy Heart Update
Bud Kohlbrenner was enjoying an active retirement. Just 54, he traveled widely and lived well after selling a candy company in St. Louis for a sweet profit. But one day, he got a call from a couple of long time employees who needed help. Bud did something unthinkable. He opened a new candy company, hired back all of his staff and set about teaching them how to run the business. His plan? Give it to them.
IT DIDN’T TURN OUT AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT.
Candy Heart
There comes a time when we try to figure out who we want to be. Bud Kolbrener’s recipe for life came wrapped in chocolate. He made millions creating candy. Sold his St. Louis company for a sweet profit. Took early retirement at 54. Bud looked forward to a life of travel, but he got a call from a couple of long-time employees—Debbie and Marley Otto.
WHAT BUD DID NEXT IS MIND BOGGLING.
Black Land
Philip Barker was cutting wood, when a tree top snapped and fell on him. Broke his neck in three places. $70-thousand later, he could work again. But he was bankrupt. Barker already owed half a million dollars. He had bought the family farm a dozen years before. Lost half his cattle herd two years later to disease. Took two more jobs to help pay off the mortgage. Half the Black farmers in North Carolina went out of business during the 1980’s. “In the White community, you can fail a couple of years and still get enough credit to keep going,” Barker points out. “But in the Black community, don’t fail one year or else your credit is ruined, not just for you. Your family too.” His three jobs don’t leave him time to go where deals are made in a small town. Bankers only see him hat in hand. “I don’t have the opportunity to go to the golf course and play golf with my banker on Saturdays. White folks have his ear. I don’t.”
Mississippi Moving
The Mississippi is a moving grocery store. Just one tow boat pushes 160-thousand acres of grain into the world. So, the river has to be controlled.
From Slavery to Friendship
A rare American story that began in slavery and blossomed into friendship. There is nothing sentimental about slavery, but this is a story unique in our history. In 1834 a white family bought a black family. At the end of the Civil War something special happened that set them together against the grain of the time.
Bonds of Love
Jeff Wright is one of those teachers students never forget. More show than tell. Exploding with fun. His science classes at Louisville Male Highschool in Kentucky are filled with odd experiments. Surprisingly, it is a lecture without props that leaves a lasting impression. The talk is about Wright’s son Adam. Born with a rare combination of genes that only about 450 people in the world have. It is a lesson on the meaning of life.
Looks Good on Paper
Looks Good on Paper
Miami has a program that requires taxpayers to pay for art in public places. It is a good idea on paper. But some say, that’s where it should have stayed.
Samaritan Fling
John Fling delivers auto parts for a car dealer, but he also makes stops where the sum seems reluctant to shine.
Caught in the Middle
Jim Tchaikovsky goes to work under a sun that has no heat. He is out at dawn with the windchill at 30 below, to check on cows about to calve. Jim and his wife Karen are the 5th generation on this land. They may lose it all.
Dog with Big Dreams
The odds on favorite to win the title of world animal Frisbee champion in 1979 was a tiny dog name Toke. Just 14 inches at the shoulders. The smallest world contender ever. But he could jump four times his height.
HOW’D HE DO?
One family Saves Another
Come on. Take a walk with me. I want you to meet Jim and Marty Dwyer and their five boys. The Dwyers always wanted a baby girl but figured it wasn’t going to happen after those five boys. So they agreed to raise someone else’s. But she...
Wanted: Alligator Wrestler
Used to be only Seminoles wrestled alligators. The tribe lived in the Florida swamps. Gators were their major source of food and profit. But today, the 26 hundred members make big money running gambling casinos, enough for kids to afford college and dreams beyond the swamp. None of them wants to learn this dangerous, ancient skill. Chief James Billy tried to keep the tradition alive. It cost him. Big time.
Boys of Winter
One afternoon in St. Petersburg, Florida, I stopped to watch Fred Broadwell waiting for a pitch, crouching over the strike zone, leaning into the wind, seemingly suspended. The ball floated toward the plate. He chopped it toward the shortstop and shuffled off toward first base on stiff legs. It was a big day for Fred. A couple of years ago he was sidelined with pneumonia. Now he was back at 95.
DID HE SCORE?
Four Corners
There was a time in America where neighbors were considered part of your wealth. In Four Corners, Louisiana, they still are. Hardly a family here makes $10,000 a year. But together, they had rebuilt eleven homes. They linked up with trade people who taught them how.
Singalong Sound of Music
The Sound of Music movie was re-released with a twist. The audience showed up in costumes and was encouraged to sing along. I did. Want to see?
Yellowstone National Park in Winter
150th celebration Yellowstone National Park. It does not give up winter easily. The geysers cough and crackle and keep their warmth inside. Old Faithful is the first to break its glass jail. Splashing in the sun like a ghost train in the Rockies. Warm rivers are the only winter fire. Snow the only blanket. Animals who survive are as stubborn as the land itself. Bison have passed through the ice and the pain, standing dark and still, trembling in the wind. Trumpeter swans preen and float. The plain begin to look beautiful. Swirling through snow on currents of ice, they spin free. The Aspens are crystal. The pines are glass. An iridescent bone yard, waiting for the world to thaw.
Black Pioneers
Black history in Oklahoma is unique. Some were cowboys. Some were Indians. And all of them were pioneers. Charles Davis knew them well. Most of them he buried.
Until It’s Not Here No More
150 years ago, the plains Indians of Oklahoma were refugees of war. The tattered remains of once proud tribes who had become foreigners in their own land. Practically overnight, they were faced with a new language, new religion and a new way of life. In the struggle to survive some of the old ways were forgotten. But Katie Osage remembers. “I was born in a tent and raised in a tent. Yeah, I still live in a tent.” For nearly a century, she has lived in two worlds. And she has survived.
Babies Behind Bars
Pete Weststein used to live in a place of blue distances, tending his dairy herd. It is now a valley of prisons. Four of them, nudging aside the cows and the quiet. His wife Frieda is raising her family next to those prisons. She wondered, what became of the babies that were born inside.
Singing Sullivans
On Betty Sullivan’s 75th birthday, her kids got together to sing for their mom in a place polished with dreams and hard work. Carnegie Hall. She was set to perform again at Carnegie Hall on her 90th birthday. Coronavirus canceled the celebration.
Jim and Betty Sullivan just wanted their eight kids to learn music. They began to teach them in an old home, now covered in weeds. Son Tim sang country songs. His sister, Heather, wrote themes for television shows. Her sister, Stacy, had a recording career, and big sister, K.T., was a world-class cabaret singer.
She sang them a song with her favorite line.
“You have never left my mind long enough to leave me …”
No Phones
Silverton, Washington has a hang up about being in touch. Out here, rivers sparkle like winter stars. And the air smells like it was just made. Denny Boyd grew up in asphalt meadows dreaming of such a place. So 15 years ago, he left city life to open a store in the mountains of western Washington. He neglected to notice the small print in his dream. Silverton, Washington was one of the last towns in America where you cannot make a phone call.
A Normal Life
Seth Chwast cannot hold a conversation or a complex thought. At two he was diagnosed with Autism. His mother was determined to give him a normal life.
A counselor suggested that Seth consider mopping floors for a career. Instead, his mom enrolled him in one last therapy class at the Cleveland, Ohio, Museum of Art.
Painting his Soul
His eyes were turned to beauty only he could see, a gallery of gods. Native American spirits, watching over Christ.
“Some of my Zuni people won’t go along with this,” Alex Seowtewa told me, but he painted his vision on the walls of a church for more than half a century. This old mission in the heart of the pueblo was not in the heart of most Zuni’s. It reminded them of a time when Coronado came calling, looking for gold. And paid with death. The priests who ordered the Zuni’s to build the mission were found dead, buried beneath its floor.
“I was told not to look at the color of skin by my grandfather,” Seowtewa said. He dipped his brush into his own soul and painted what seemed best. For Alex, religion is a search, not certainty. He spent his life capturing clouds and sunsets to hang on a church wall.
He reached into the world and found its vagrant beauty.
If America Had a King
When George Washington took the oath of office, the presidency was a uniquely American institution. Back then, kings ruled most of the world. They believed they were divinely chosen. Of course, the first presidential inauguration changed all that. But what if the popular general had decided to become king? Who would be our king today?
Baseball Tryouts
Jeff Hall’s buddy asked him, “Are you going?’ 290 guys, most of them from the Philadelphia area, were driving 19 hours non-stop to tryout for their beloved Phillies in Florida. Hall had pitched for dozens of minor league teams for 8 years, until a sore arm...
Never Park in Space Reserved for Umpires
ohn McSherry ran a school like no others. He taught how to be UN-loved. His students were would-be big league umpires. McSherry, a National League umpire, worked his class like a drill sergeant. Get by John McSherry, the rest of the world seems like a smile.
Eyewitness to Terror
When my wife Linda and I returned from our honeymoon, I went to cover my first Olympics. It was in Munich, Germany. 1972. 50 years ago today. I soon became an eye witness to terror. A group calling themselves “Black September” abducted...
Beer Cans Heat home
Beer Cans Heat home PIX
Now you can enjoy heating your home. An inventor in Woodsdale, Ohio, gets all the warmth he needs from empty beer cans. Add a garbage pail and a copper coil buried in compost. You get heat. Wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit.
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Three
A PBS interview with the team that won a National EMMY for what was — at the time — an untold story: African American history in the old west. Their 1973 documentary, “Through the Looking Glass Darkly,” had higher ratings than any of the network shows the nights it aired. A high definition restoration of the original program was paired with this interview on the 30th anniversary. Bob Dotson, produced, wrote and narrated. Photojournalist Oliver Murray was also an associate producer, as was George Wesley.
Country Mardi Gras
Country Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras comes with fancy masked balls and big parades. Thousands spent on costumes and parties. But for a Cajun in Mamou, the celebration costs only $7.50. For that, you get a beer, hard boiled eggs, sausage and the answer to the age old question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Two
Listen to Logan Jackson’s story: “Dan Porter was an old Civil War veteran. I was a little boy. At the time we met, they were enforcing the Jim Crow law, which said black men could not vote. ‘Man told Dan Porter, says, ‘Don’t you go in there and try to vote.’ Says, ‘You can’t read.’ “Porter says, ‘That don’t make no difference. I’m one of the men who made General Lee surrender!’” Logan stared into the faces around him, ‘You don’t know who General Lee was, do you? He was a general in the Civil War. Yeah, an old soldier.’ Well, Dan, he voted.”
How a diverse group of Americans succeeded in living together is a fascinating tale that has made an extraordinary difference for the millions who came after them. Of course they had racial problems, and still do, but the way they worked them out holds lessons for our own time.
Shadows Play On This Stage
Only shadows play in the Tabor Opera house. But for Evelyn Furman, it is an attic filled with memories. They survive because of her single minded devotion to the old theater in Leadville, Colorado. She saved it from the wrecking ball until younger...
Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part One
One of the most diverse places in America is not where you might expect. Oklahoma once had 28 towns settled by former slaves, scattered throughout 37 Indian Nations. For nearly a century it was primarily a land of the Red and the Black, a checkerboard of Indians and ex-slaves who very nearly got their own state until thousands of immigrants from around the world joined them seeking free land — land they got in a single day.
Odyssey of Words
Odyssey of Words
Professor Doug Brinkley was worried that his students had never seen skyscrapers made of ice. Never known a silent world. Never traveled much at all. Not even in books. He loaded 27 students into a bus and drove from Hofstra University in New York to Denali National Park, Alaska. Along the way, the library came alive.
Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?
Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?
People buy more than 1-BILLION Valentines each year. Ever wonder who writes all those cards? What kind of mind comes up with “Be My Tootsie Wootsie or I’ll Break Your Armsy Warmsy?” Well, I did. Went to the center of all this creativity, to the cupids of Kansas City.
Smoking Pens
A third of all the paperback books sold in America are romance novels. One company has published a billion books in ten years. Enough to give a copy to every man, woman and child in China. The author of those books, Laura London, was voted “the most sensuous writer.” She is a man. His real name is Tom Curtis, a cross country trucker.
Book of Love
Book of Love
Now here’s something that Valentine cards just can’t convey — the depth of your love. In this age of social media, where anyone can be a star, here’s a consolation prize, Romance novels that let you and the one you love — or would like to love — be the main characters.
Maiden in Shining Armor
Maiden in Shining Armor
There hasn’t been much swordplay in the south since the Yankees left. Few southern women ever fought their way onto an Olympic fencing team, until now. Atlanta’s own Nee Lee struggled for 12 years, training with no sponsors and little money. One thought, “I want to be a maiden in shining armor.”
Olympic Memory
At the beginning of this century, Rulon Gardner won a gold medal virtually no one else in the world thought he could, beating Aleksandr Karelin, a Russian wrestler so good, opponents had not scored a single point against him in 10 years. Karelin started his amazing run when Gardner was a junior in high school. Back then, Rulon didn’t make the Varsity team. He and a brother wrestled for the final spot. Rulon let him win. His brother was a senior. That would have been his last chance to compete.
Coach Abe Lemons for the Laugh
My first job for NBC News was at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That’s where I met legendary basketball coach Abe Lemons. He was president of the College Coaches Association that year, but told me he couldn’t get tickets to any Olympic basketball games. Instead, he scored a seat to the finals of the hammer throw.
I asked Abe: How was it?
“Well, our seats were kinda high up,” he said with a slow grin.
“How high?”
“When one of those hammer guys wound up and tossed, the fellows around me all yelled down, ‘How’d he do?’ And the fans down below would turn, cup their ears, and say: ‘Huh?’”
Small Town Football
A friend of mine played football for a school so small, the players changed uniforms at half time and came back as the band. There were so few girls, they borrowed cheerleaders from another town. It made for some close relationships. My pal married a cheerleader. She also played flute in the band. She also moved the yard markers. That’s the way it is with small town football — a family affair.
The OTHER Moscow Olympics
Efforts to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow did not go well. No alternative site was picked. In the midst of all this, here came Moscow, Kansas, with what it hoped was the answer. The 250 people in town started passing out bumper stickers. They wanted to keep the games in Moscow, if not Russia, then Kansas. At Moscow International airport, they expected big crowds, if they could find a plane that seats more than one. “We have a man who works at the post office,” said Doug Bell. “He knows all about air mail. And then there’s the guy who cleans the sewer tanks here. He knows all about rapid transit.”
Olympic Athlete’s wife
My first job for NBC News was the Munich Olympics in 1972. Before the games began, I was sent out with a silent film camera to shoot minute-30 feature stories. Each one had to be shot — in a few minutes — on a single roll of film. Just 3 minutes of video. No natural sound. No interview.
Changing Racial History
Changing Racial History
Macon county, Tennessee, is so lovely folks like to say, “If you stay long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you’ll never leave.” Not everyone was given that chance. Black people used to be run out of the county. Some were hung from a tree on the courthouse square. Fred Thomas’ friends thought he was crazy when he opened a medical clinic in Macon county. “If I had listened to what people said,” Dr. Thomas pointed out, “I would have been a plumber.” Fred Thomas ignored the county’s racial history. He began to forge his own.
The Trouble We All Live With
A 6-year-old girl became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. Ruby Bridges always said her mother was the hero of the moment. She put her family and her husband’s job in jeopardy to open schools for...
Doctor Finds Poor Friends
Jack McConnell stopped to pick up a man who was walking down a dirt road without an umbrella on a drizzly day.
“Where you headed?” McConnell called out the window.
“To look for a job,” the man answered. “Any one I can get.”
“What’s your name?”
“James.”
“You married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids and my wife is pregnant with our third.”
“What do you do for medical care?” McConnell wondered. He was a retired doctor.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” James said. “No one else is going to help us.”
His answer would change thousands of lives across the country.
Grand Central Station’s Hidden Secrets
A secret room. A walled up tomb. A priceless jewel. No, not on the set of the next Indiana Jones movie. They lay hidden in America’s busiest railroad station. Train travel still thrives in New York City. Grand Central Terminal sees as many trains today as it did in the golden age of steam and steel. Picture the population of Atlanta and Buffalo pouring out of trains and subways. Seven hundred thousand travelers every day. Ten thousand pause to grab a meal, a thousand stop to ask directions. Some lose more than their way. In one month, train crews sent Grand Central’s Lost and Found three hundred cell phones, one hundred and fifty eyeglasses and an engagement ring.
Music from the Edge of Nowhere
Gordon Wright was the conductor of the Arctic Chamber orchestra, a group he formed to take classical music to the remote villages of Alaska. His musicians have performed in places so cold, the violinists play wearing gloves.
Hands Free Hero
Marty Revellette lived his life with a single mindedness that blocked out everything but challenge. He was a man with no arms, but he pulled a women from her burning car. She survived. This story tells not only “how,” but “why.”
The country owes its success to those who are willing to try regardless of disability, people who risk their lives for country, family, even strangers.
Professor Longhair
Henry Byrd lived on a side of New Orleans most folks never see, the forgotten side of morning. Byrd never left the city. Never followed his fame. But most modern Rock stars can trace their heritage to his pounding piano style. They call him Professor Longhair.
All of America is their backyard
Dan and Susie Kellogg sold their home in Colorado. Bought an RV. And set out traveling into the unknown. They decided to live full time in a mobile home with enough kids to field a football team. 12.
One Hole, Par 70
Laughter echoes down Pillar Mountain. Two duffers in Kodiak, Alaska, are ice picking their way up the snow-covered cliffs. Carrying golf clubs. The course is practically straight up, fourteen hundred feet, from the valley floor to the green. Pebble Beach, it ain’t. But it is a golf tournament. One hole, par 70. That’s right. One hole, par 70.
Life in a Jar
Life in a Jar
The keys to history’s treasures are often discovered in unexpected places. One of them turned up in a tiny Kansas town, unlocking a story half a world away. This week let’s celebrate the 100th anniversary of a woman who saved 2,500 children. In 1940 the Nazis walled off a neighborhood near Irena Sendler’s home in Warsaw, Poland. Pressed almost half a million people into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park – with not enough food to keep them alive. Five thousand were dying each month. Sendler, a public health service nurse, devised a daring plan to save the children.
Blind Kayaker
Lonnie Bedwell never let a handicap, handicap him. The man is lights out blind. Lives far from fast water, but Bedwell was the first blind person to kayak the Grand Canyon. He navigated the rapids listening closely, as friends called out the way.
WHAT INSPIRED HIS QUEST? THE FRIEND WHO SHOT HIM.
Arctic Explorer
Will Steiger searches for land that hasn’t felt footsteps, the coldest parts of our earth, where the north wind bullies and temperatures cower—to seventy below. In this vast wilderness near the North and South Poles he seems oddly out of place—plodding carefully through the massive ice, alone. Will Steger explored the unknown—one step at a time—for more than forty years. Some ice fields are now so thin, his sled dogs fall through. But science alone won’t fix this. Will thinks people coming together and working for the common good might. We may get blisters on our hands, and calluses on our dreams, but the ally he seeks is the part in all of us that knows what is right. Many preach about saving the planet. Will just puts his boots on and goes.
Orphan Train
Five little boys rattled across America in the fall of 1922. They were part of a remarkable odyssey. One hundred thousand such children were plucked from the streets of New York City and sent west, to a new life. Most were the sons and daughters of immigrants, found starving and alone. The Children’s Aid Society swept them up and shipped them to villages all across the country. At each stop their arrival was advertised. Kids trouped off the train, lined up, and couples simply picked the one they wanted. The brothers had very different experiences, but survived — with the help of each other.
Rejecting Stardom
Many people in Goose Creek, South Carolina, were speechless when Braeden Kershner turned his back on celebrity. It seemed somehow un-American. Don’t we all want to be somebody special? Don’t we try to become our dreams? It’s not that Braeden...
Pops Dream
Braeden Kirchner likes to conduct music with his eyes closed, so he can see his dream. The boy from Goose Creek, South Carolina, wanted to conduct the Boston Pops. Never mind that Braeden was just 18. To prepare for a career in conducting, he learned to play every instrument in the orchestra. He finally got his chance.
Photo Wagon
John Coffer turned his back on modern times to wander America in a wagon pulled by oxen, stopping only to take portraits with his antique camera. Coffer traveled at two and a half miles an hour for five years. 25 states. 10-thousand miles. He crisscrossed America so slowly, everywhere he went, folks joked he was a temporary resident. Coffer captured old fashioned images of modern America.
Refugee Wins Nobel Prize
I’d like you to meet Mario Capecchi. He’s the son of a single mom, a poet, who thought she could defeat the Nazis with her pen. She didn’t, but he became one of the scientists who saved us.
Singer Saves a Town
Singer Saves a Town
I was sitting in a small cafe. At the other end of the counter was a man who looked like Lincoln. He was big and rawboned and about 80. His voice pierced and rattled like an old bugle. I couldn’t help overhearing. He was holding forth about a fellow named Paul Sykes, who arrived in Oklahoma with 600 former slaves from Alabama the year before one of those big land runs that offered up free homesteads out west.
Photographer for Life
Photographer for Life
Milton Rogovin grew old watching his neighborhood grow up, sharing the yearbook of their lives. He was still photographing them at age 100, surrounded by friends who were now taking his picture — the “forgotten ones,” who did not forget him.
Birth of the Ice cream Cone
A lot of what we love today —ice cream cones, hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter, iced tea, the club sandwich, cotton candy — were all introduced in a single summer in 1904. Americans also got their first glimpse of the Olympic games and the Democrats managed to shoehorn in a National Convention. All three events in one city at the same time. Never happened again.
The Rescued Save the Rescuers
Roby Albouy spent most of his adult life in the Colorado mountains. But he carries faces from France framed in his mind, the fellows he passed on to freedom during World War Two. They were the downed crew of an America bomber. He was a fighter with the French Resistance. They never knew each other’s names. After we did a story on Albouy, the crew and their French saviors found each other again. They had all lived long enough to joke about things that once were breaking their hearts. Without each other, they may not have grown old at all.
A Chance to Grow Old
Every veteran carries faces framed in their minds, comrades who did not return from war. Roby Albouy and I were walking through the Aspen meadows out in Colorado one summer when he pulled a yellowing snapshot from his pocket and showed me the ones he can’t forget.
Nickname Telephone book
If you go looking for folks in Cajun country, it helps to have a nickname handy. In Beaux Bridge, Louisiana, the phone book lists people by the names they are actually known. Nicknames. Too many residents have the same last names. There are 78 Broussard’s. 45 Tibedeaux’s. And 46 different Champagne’s. 2 of them have the same first name. Nicknames here are a necessity.
Mama Hale
Childhood should be a season of dreams, but some children awoke each morning from an American nightmare: They are born addicted to drugs. Clara Hale saved hundreds of them. One morning she found a baby by her door. Mrs. Hale took him in. Word got around. Soon her tiny apartment was jammed with cribs.
Old Believers
Behind America's success story are untold tales of endurance. The people who succeed in this country come from sturdy stock, the ones who have always carried on when the going got tough. Their ancestors thought America’s streets would be paved with...
The Ring that Saved a Life
Motts Tonelli enlisted in the New Mexico National Guard to play with an Army basketball team. The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he traded his ball for a gun. Tonelli was captured in the Philippines in the opening days of World War Two. Forced to walk 70 miles to a prisoner of war camp. Along the way, a Japanese soldier gave Motts an extraordinary gift.
Farm to Fame
Chuck Taylor waved at a hawk strafing the wheat field in front of him. “There is beauty everywhere. I just want to express what I am feeling.”
He pushed up his feed company cap and began to sing louder than his farm tractor engine. Chuck’s voice boomed over that Colorado field, keeping time to the rhythm of his motor. The tractor turned into the setting sun, revealing a big man, close to three hundred pounds, haloed in the cab. Chuck Taylor was wondering why that sun wasn’t a spotlight.
TURNS OUT, IT WAS.
Family Music
The Knight family, Laura and John and six kids, manage to survive, no thrive, on $4-thousand dollars a year. That’s something to sing about. On their farm, music is all around them. https://youtu.be/e8MQLVt7r7k
Puppy Rescuer
Ready for a happy puppy story? Sure you are. George Mahle takes pups on a 4,200-mile odyssey to loving arms. https://www.today.com/news/puppy-rescuer-takes-dogs-4-200-mile-odyssey-loving-arms-2D79517768
Dog Tags
Stacey Hansen, a fire fighter in San Jose, California, found an old dog tag while vacationing in Vietnam. It belonged to Marine Corporal Steven Zucroff who died during the War – the day after Mother’s day — his 21st year. She brought Steven’s dog tag home. His brother Brad lived just an hour away, They met in a park overlooking the Pacific near Stacey’s fire station. Brad carried an old box with his brother’s things.
“You’ve seen his name,” he said, as the two walked across the bluff and sat on a bench, “Now you should see the person.”
He lifted the lid and pulled out a picture. It was not the image of a weary warrior Stacey expected.
Worst Weather in America
Who gets the roughest weather in America. The place looks looks gentle, like a smiling stranger with an offer of candy, but more than a hundred people have died there because winter can come in any month. One day in three, hurricane force winds slap the landscape. Since 1932, a small band of scientists has struggled into this arctic laundromat to be tumbled around in search of the worst weather in the world.
Truck Driver Surgeon
Wisdom is found in unexpected places. Tools for some of the first microsurgeries were invented in a garage. An out of work truck driver tinkered and perfected them until they changed our world. https://youtu.be/e6tI0AmehG4
America’s Main Street
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Animal Hospital
Peter Holworth is a foster parent to hundreds of sick little seals that wash up on his shore. Some are near death from starvation when he finds them. Peter nurses these babies back to health.
Teens Overcome Racism
Teenagers in this summer camp have lost something, the wishful, youthful belief that prejudice would never find them. It is easier to see racism in others. Here teenagers find it in themselves. They had learned to rely on one another in these woods. Now they were being torn apart. Camp “Any Town” teaches how to battle discrimination. Councilors point out that prejudice behaviors are learned. If they catch it in a 15 year old, they have a better chance of doing something. Those teens have have a lot time to live and will effect more lives.
Teen Cinema
There are places where the past is not past. It keeps circling back around. Many towns in America are like that. Petaluma, California, continually celebrates a magical time when kids showed up to shoot a low budget movie called “American Graffiti.” It launched some big name careers and boosted an unknown director, George Lucas, into an orbit that would lead to his epic — Star Wars. History in Petaluma is never far, far way. Sadly, this town — so tied to movie history — lost its last picture show. Kids could have just hopped into a car. Their moms would have driven them to the movies in another town.
“Oh, no!” Madison Webb looked stricken. “You’re not supposed to go with your parents!”
So, the teens created a business plan that would reopen their theater.
A New Life
Working folks have always been the great voyagers of America. There were always new businesses, new jobs, new frontiers just over the next hill. But something fundamentally is changing in the American economy. Old skills don’t always fit new jobs. The American instinct to move on when times get tough can no longer solve the problem.
We caught up with Jim and Deborah Carey and their daughter Chastity once again. The bankrupt farmers still had not harvested a dream. Jim had won and lost six jobs in a year. Six jobs. In three different states. And he had a new baby. All was not bleak. Two things were about to happen that would change their lives for the better.
Born to Farm
Boom times in the past have doubled the cost of farmland in this country, a price that few can afford to pay. Southeastern Massachusetts has lost more farmland in the last 30 years than it did in the previous 300. Folks in Wesport bucked that trend. Taxed...
Living Ghost Town
During this dark time, it is well to remember the families in this country who help others end nightmares and find dreams. It is the very core of our American story because most of us also have ancestors who risked everything for a better life. The communities they built prospered because people took care of one another. Some still do.
Ballet Dancer
Elliot Feld would hide his dance slippers in a brief case, so his neighbors would think he had an ordinary job. He would become one of America’s finest ballet choreographers, but ballet is still out of the question for most of the kids in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Too expensive. He did not recruit from the specialized schools for the performing arts. He traveled to the public classrooms to look for ordinary 8 year olds with potential.
Post Pawley’s Island school closes
Beloved teacher Ruby Forsyth had died. The classroom where she taught for half a century was now quiet. The school she started for Black children was about to close. Her former students share their memories of what she taught them.
Veteran’s Legacy
Jeff Steiner is building a sanctuary. He is planting trees on a hundred acres he bought after returning from the Vietnam war. Half a year after high school graduation he was evacuating wounded G.I.’s. A shell exploded in his face. After his discharge, he became an alcoholic. Got divorced. Attempted suicide. Then, he decided to do something positive. Plant one tree for each of the 60-thousand fellow soldiers killed or missing in Vietnam. He had planted 30-thousand, when I met him.
Beats a 260 mile School Bus Ride
Crane High is the only locally tax supported public boarding school in America. It was built in a part of Oregon you seldom see in the travel brochures. Out here, people remember bone grey better than rainbows. Southeastern Oregon has a desert so vast, Jerry Deffenbaugh must drive 260 miles round trip to watch his son play high school basketball. Some weeks he does that 3 times. The school draws just 50 students from a district the size of Massachusetts.
AND YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A LONG COMMUTE.
Kid Billionaire
Jared Issacman became a billionaire before he could drive. He as so young, he hired his dad to wine and dine clients. His mom worked for him too. Issacman used some of his money to pilot Elon Musk’s all-civilian mission to the edge of the universe. Purchased purchased all four seats. Kept one for himself. Donated the other three to charity. He made his billions by figuring out a way for businesses to process credit cards more quickly. It all began in his basement. He was just 16. This was the first story ever done on the kid who defies the odds.
A Picture that Touched America
For families who lived in the 1930’s Dust Bowl, “depression” was not an abstract economic term. Their farms were buried in burned out soil, and with nowhere to turn, they moved on. Florence Thompson was 27 years old when the depression started. She had five children and was pregnant with another — and her husband had died. Did she ever lose hope? “Nope, if I’d a lost hope, we never would have made it”
Blind Musher
Some races in life begin far from the starting line. That’s why Rachael Scdoris and her dad drove 25-hundred miles, to the top of the globe, in the dead of winter, to help her chase a dream she cannot see.
Hiding for Half a Century
When Private D.B. Benson decided to hide out from World War Two, he was able to disappear completely for 36 years. Benson slipped into the Kiamichi Wilderness in 1943, after a sergeant told him to go home because he could not read. He thought he was being...
Still Got Life to Go – BOB DOTSON’S FIRST NATIONAL EMMY NOMINATION, 1971
Four out of five felonies are committed by repeaters, those who have been through our corrections system. Out of every 10 persons imprisoned for serious crime, four will return to that way of life again. Our failure to rehabilitate is costing us 20 billion dollars in...
Smoke and Steel
Some holiday gifts for you this week. Today, one my first films. It WAS shot on film. An investigative documentary about high rise fires. We not only uncovers problems, but offer a solution, a theme my stories would follow throughout my career. Stick around for the commentary at the end of this half hour program.
Biggest Test of Her Life
Michael Carter is leaving his Fayetteville, North Carolina, school in search of a new kidney, while his teacher, Jane Smith, prepares for the biggest test of her life.
Face of God
Deborah Evans looks to God for help. She says, He told her to look a little closer to home. She believes a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina. is the closet she’s come to the face of God.
A Life Lesson
Keith Lyle is a nice kid from a nice part of town. He has had a terrible struggle with drugs. Now, he has an even bigger problem.
$2 Doc’s “Big” Pay Raise
An update to the story about Dr. Russell Dohner. 27 years later, he had raised his fee for a visit from $2 to $5. He looked after his neighbors for 55 years, charging them about what we pay for a fancy cup of coffee. Most of his nurses had been with him nearly as long as his furniture. They were paid well because Doc worked around the clock. He would go anywhere, at any time, to help those in need, often arriving before emergency crews.
Delivering News on Foot
We can all learn what’s going on with a touch of a thumb, but there was a time when people in Mountain Home, Arkansas, waited for Nellie Mitchell to deliver the news. She handed them their morning newspaper, 7 days a week, rain or shine. Never called in sick. Never took a vacation or a day off. At 86 she was still on her morning route, walking 5 miles a day, when trudged along with her. A gracious reminder of how life used to be.
A Living Statue of Liberty
Each evening the scruffy tabby cats listen for a single voice, the distant squeak of a rusty cart. Mary Burns, making her rounds, For more than a quarter of a century, she has fed the lost cats of Miami Beach. 8 Hours a day. Every day. Restaurants along her way give food. Veterinarians help her tend the sick. Mary has been a voyager all her life. She came from Yugoslavia. She simply took the Statue of Liberty at its word.
Geezer Rock
This story is something of a mystery. It begins on a quiet street in Rochester, New York. You won’t believe where it ends. Something strange is happening over at Dave Hickey’s house. He bought a set of drums and disappeared with his brother Bruce and their pals. Together, they helped each other find the notes that had been missing from their lives. They practiced 18 hours. Weekend after weekend. For six months. Back in the 1960’s they had a garage band called the Invictas that had one hit song.
Coal Miner’s Daughter
Brenda Brock went looking for a job in a coal mine. She showed up hungry and broke on a mine foreman’s doorstep. All she had was a sleeping bag. Her work below was a trade off for her life above. Brenda had seen the ugliness that her mom and dad had escaped. “And yet, you get here and lose your heart.”
Bedrock America
Of all the folks who went west looking for gold, one family went further, dug deeper and stayed longer. They settled in the Marble mountains of Northern California, in a region so difficult to reach, they still don’t have electricity. Each day Chet McBroom did what his father did. Pick down 6 tons of ore. If he’s lucky, he’ll find a few flecks of gold. “If I had to do it over again, you know what I’d change?” Chet asked. “Nothing.”
Charles Banks Wilson
For years artist Charles Banks Wilson crisscrossed the West stopping in small town pool halls and churches seeking faces that make each Indian tribe unique. Native Americans can look as different from one another as a Turk from a Swede, but that is changing.
Santa Creek
Dee Newberry teaches kids in a two room school house in a vast wilderness. A billion ounces of silver were pulled from a nearby valley. Discovered after Noah Kellogg tossed one of those silver rocks at a mule that ran away. The town that bear his name once put up a sign that said, “Discovered by a jackass. Inhabited by his descendants.”
Junk Food Critic
Most food critics get the benefit of dining in some fine restaurants. Not George Tumor. He reviews food that most of us eat. George sports a 280 pound resume to prove his dedication to the work. https://youtu.be/PSQIokIT_CM
102 Year Old files for Social Security
Joe Carter had just turned 102, but he didn’t stand for much fuss. There was work to be done. Carter was a farmer. He still puttered about on an old A Model John Deere tractor, the one he bought in 1954, the year before farmers were brought under Social Security. As a group, people on Social Security are healthier, less frail and living longer than ever before. The year Joe Carter got married, all the Americans over 85 would have fit on his small farm. Their number has been doubling every 20 years. Twice as fast as the rest of the population. By the time today’s Baby Boomers reach that age, there could be 16-million Americans over 85.
The Sidelines of Life
David Edwards stood on the sidelines of life until Patricia Fulton asked him to dance. His mind is not quick. She doesn't care. Being less than perfect is the fragile thread that binds all of Fulton's dance partners. Patricia Fulton pulls them from the sidelines...
Social Security Anniversary, Part One
They jam the southbound lanes. 12-thousand people a month. Retired Americans. Looking for paradise. Today’s elderly are pioneers. The first generation with enough health and enough wealth to choose where they will spend their last years. Most who move come to Florida. It is unique among states. One person in five is retired. The biggest source of personal income is Social Security.
Bogging
Grownups have finally found out that mud can be fun. On Sunday afternoons in Coon Mizell’s cornfield, anyone with a pickup truck worth its pull is pitted against slime in the local Boggin’ hole. The winner is the driver who goes the farthest before getting stuck.
Vaudeville’s Back
An ancient truck carries a couple who dream of another time. Denise and Benny Reel gathered together a small group of vaudevillians. They were not kids with more ambition than ability. They were professional performers who set aside New York City careers to live in the country. And soon, people paid to see them; to sit in a frozen town hall, heated by a single stove.
A New Standard of Caring
We returned to San Francisco a year later to see how the survivors of a terrible earthquake were doing. Betty Kelly still cannot cross a bridge without flinching. She and her husband were on vacation in 1989, high over San Francisco Bay, just as the Earthquake struck. A section of the Bay Bridge dropped like a deadly trapped door. The Kelly’s honked their horn to warn others. But Anna Annalonghu died. Everything Adeen Murphy owned was 4 flights up a twisted staircase. Adeen had lived through a thousand air raids in World War Two London, so she crossed police barrier and found something she had bought only a week before — $2-thousand dollars worth of Wedgewood China.
Family Front Lines
Dear Mom. I’m writing this letter from the family front lines. You always said, “Just wait, someday you’ll be one.” Well, now I am. A parent. And ma, it’s rough out here. Family restaurants are different these days. They’ve got electronic games. Singing gorillas. And dancing rats. Last Saturday, I stood in line so long to get food, I could have eaten the last member of an endangered species. Parents survive on what their kids don’t eat. They wouldn’t care much for your carrot salad. A food critic from Dallas joined us for dinner the other night. He reviews the kind of food most of us eat. Fast food. “You know the difference between swill and slop?'” George Toomer asked me. ”No.” “Three days.”
Circus Children
There is something to be said for summertime in a small town. The circus still comes in a tent. There aren’t many left that stretch their big tops like the imagination. Perhaps that’s why the ones that do, go to so many places. Seminole, Oklahoma, was the 70th city in 70 days for the Carson and Barnes Circus.
Special Kids
Children with special needs sometimes have thoughts locked locked in the darkness of their minds. But a machine can help these kids communicate. Not just their needs, but ideas.
The Man Who Found the Red Baron
Gurd Heindrich lives in the powdery landscape of memory. All the roses of his dreams scattered about. He was one of the world’s great naturalists, a World War One German flying ace, who later lost his home in Poland to the Communists and for a time was as one with the creatures he pursued. For five years he raised his son deep in the woods, selling stuffed mice dressed to look like Mickey Mouse. They now live in Vermont. His son is now a naturalist, too.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part Three
My first NBC News Investigative series on the legal use of Sodium Valproate to combat epilepsy. This is is the last of three stories.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part Two
My first NBC News Investigative series on the legal use of Sodium Valproate to combat epilepsy. This second of three stories.
New Epilepsy Drug Series, Part One
Want to see what I looked like when the earth was cooling? This is my 1st NBC News Investigative series on a drug that could combat epilepsy. Part one of three.
Corporate Daycare Begins
Since World War Two, the way to success for most Americans was to hop on that corporate wagon train, moving their families from city to city, following the economic frontier. That kind of life has taken a toll on the American family. Torn from the familiar. Far from family and old friends. Today’s families often find themselves alone. This is the story of one of the first companies to change all that.
Modern Farming
Gary Young farms 320 acres. Not big by Nebraska standards, but on that land he is raising 30 cows and 6 daughters. That can make a man watch his pennies. He built a solar panel to dry his harvest for 2 cents a bushel instead of the 15 cents his neighbors pay for propane. Young can process 7 times the grain for the same amount of money.
A Farm Family Hangs on
The disintegration of the family farm is an old song. 20-thousand were auctioned or abandoned in just four years. There were so many family farms on the market in 1985, they gutted the value of those that remained. Marty Kleinschmidt survived by recycling.
Hard Roe to Hoe
Joleen’s cafe was once filled with farmers who carried only the name. Some folks were getting food stamps after farming all their lives.
Most Accurate Weather Station
Farmers are so tied to the seasons, they have developed a wealth of weather lore that dates back 4-thousand years. To get the temperature, they learned to count the cricket chirps. To get the forecast, they watched the insects. Ducks quacking called for rain. So it is no wonder that the most accurate U.S. Weather station is Crab Orchard, Tennessee.
Rodeo Doc
Dr. James Allen is his own best patient. He’s had more broken bones than a bucket full of chicken at a Baptist picnic. 30. He’s also dislocated both of his shoulders. Fractured his spine and collar bone, while competing in the National Calf Roping Championship. His dream may now be out of reach. A rope tore off two fingers he uses for surgery.
John Henry
They say, if you listen quietly, up on Big Bend Mountain, you can still hear him hammering. Old John Henry’s ghost fighting progress with his big, broad arm. Legend has it that John Henry fought his famous battle with the steam drill near here, man against machine to see who could lay more railroad track. John Henry won, then collapsed, dead of a broken heart. His legend still clings to the valley like the mist, and its drama has inspired a unique theater in Talcott, West Virginia.
3 year old photographer
Elizabeth and Bob Williams bought their son Robert a toy camera. He preferred his dad’s. Robert’s father was a freelance photographer. He started submitting Robert’s pictures with his own. Time and again, Robert’s pictures were the ones that were chosen. The editors had no idea the man behind the camera was 3 years old.
Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger
Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger
Charles Davis hoisted his cane for attention. “Bass Reeves!” he shouted. We looked at one another for some clue as to what was to come. The only sound was an industrious bee in a honeysuckle bush. “I can tell you more about him than perhaps you ever heard.” Bass was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger.
Bubble Gum World Record
Brett Nichols was just another face in the crowd, until one day he started blowing bubbles. It put him in the Guinness Book of World records.
Lives Lost
Four little girls were murdered in an Arkansas school yard. The tragic event had been updated for days. I thought it was time to remind viewers that there was more to this tale. Looking at a school year book one day, gave me an idea: Our children are like library books with a due date unknown. These lives stopped at the start of their story. But their stories live on in friends who can tell them. Why not get students together to talk about their classmates? Those murdered children were more than what happened to them.
Cave Rescue
“Shadows chase shadows. Now and then a whisper of sliding rope. The anxious, uneven breathing of 60 people lugging one of their own to safety.” I keep an Ideas notebook. When something prompts an idea, I type it into my cellphone. These thoughts may not always fit the story I’ve been assigned, but I don’t throw them away. The next time I’m pressed for an opening line, I scroll through those thoughts. Two words “Darkness” and “Friendship” inspired that opening narration.
Make it Memorable
The shortest distance between two people is a good story. I learned that lesson back when the earth was cooling. When my hair was still red and I started telling stories of seemingly ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
The technique of memorable storytelling hasn’t changed since the first cave man painted pictures on a wall. Technology comes and goes. How to tell a memorable story is the same.
Not Just a Commune with Haircuts
Imagine a place where folks care as much for each other as they do their lawn. At Muir Commons in Davis, California, working parents don’t have to rush home to cook dinner. Neighbors do it for them. Each small town house is privately owned, but families also get day care, a dining hall and rooms for visiting grandparents.
This is not just a commune with hair cuts. At its heart is an attempt to create an old fashioned neighborhood where folks come together to shoulder the stress of modern living.
Marine Minister
Sailors labor on gliding high rises. Freighters are run by fewer than two dozen people. They may stop at half a hundred ports and never go ashore. For them, Boston harbor is some place special. Wally Cedarling lives here. He is a minister who has no church. Each ship is his congregation. In the few short hours between the tides, he wanders the decks offering a touch of home.
A Bank Close to the Clouds
Hinsdale County, Colorado is up close to the clouds where sun and snow interchange and know no seasons. 621-thousand square miles, a mile and a half high. It is one of the largest, least populated counties in the country. Only 400 people live here. But this day, they are reopening a bank that has been closed for 69 years.
Trespassing on their own land
Carrie Dann lives out where clouds leave only shadows on the earth. Her people remember bone gray better than rainbows. But they have clung to that land for tens of thousands of years. Now the federal government says they are trespassing.
Mississippi River Essay
The Mississippi River meanders down the spine of America. Stretched straight, it would spread from New York City to Los Angeles. But it winds back on itself in great chocolate loops. Mae West was right. “The loveliest distance between two points is a curved line.”
Chase One Dream, Find Another
Mickey Carroll had been writing songs for 30 years. All those years he had looked within. convinced he had the road map to success in his soul. He never figured on the detours.
Museum Guide (Dust Bins of the Mind)
Sometimes we look to the past to find something new. Most of what’s supposed to be news, we’ve seen before. It’s not really news to us. The past — because it sits in the dust bins of the mind — still hold some mystery. And there in lies the charm of Doc Nightengale’s priceless knowledge.
Alcohol Lake
There once was a place called ALCOHOL Lake. It was a dusty little town with a big curse. Practically everyone was an alcoholic. Even some of the children. Then, Phyllis Chelsea decided to stop drinking and persuaded neighbors to fix up anyone’s home who stopped drinking. She also built the town’s first grocery store out of discarded lumber. 8 out of 10 of her neighbors were unemployed. She sobered up her husband and together they opened a hog farm, greenhouse and cafe. 500 people live here. All but 12 have stopped drinking.
Polio is Back
Polio has been detected in New York City wastewater. The announcement came three weeks after a man north of the city in Rockland county was diagnosed with a case of polio that left him paralyzed. The virus we thought we had beat is back in the USA. Polio...
America’s First Gold Rush
America’s first gold mines were not out west. The first gold strike was in the north Georgia mountains. If Matthew Stevenson had his way, Tony Bennet would be singing, “I Left My Heart” in Lumpkin County. Back in 1849, Stevenson stood in the Dalonagah town square and tried to convince Georgia miners not to follow the 49er’s out to California. Mark Twain later paraphrased Stevenson’s speech when he said, “There’s gold in them thar’ hills.”
Surprising Books
For most of his life, A.W. Yeats never put a bolt to a nut. He was an English professor who surrounded himself with books. Rare books of great beauty and surprise. In every work of genius, he saw his own rejected thoughts.
Junior Firefighters
All but 3 of the volunteer firemen in Lumberton, Texas, weren’t old enough to go to their high school prom. Most folks who lived there worked miles away at the big oil refineries along the gulf coast. Kids were trained to handle emergencies when the grown ups were gone. They had have passing grades both in school and on the fire truck. And there was one other lesson.
Cleveland Works
I found myself on a street of dead eyes. People here have all seen life go off and leave them. Cleveland was one of the toughest places in America for someone young and black to find a job. One of the roughest for someone of any color. But a program called Cleveland Works has begun to break that cycle of poverty. They only train people for jobs that pay more than the minimum wage. Lawyers clear criminal records. Doctors help them battle drugs and alcohol. Daycare watches their kids.
All that is expensive. About twice as much as other county programs, but 70% have found good paying jobs with health benefits. So, welfare savings have been dramatic. $3 back for every dollar invested in Cleveland Works.
Bob Dotson’s Atlanta
Rand McNally picked Atlanta as the best city in the country back in 1982. I lived there at the time and told TODAY viewers why.
The Good Life, Texas Style
In Texas there is an apartment complex so big, it has 26 swimming pools. It is called the Village, a small city really – ten thousand single adults, half of them in their early 20’s, hardly anyone over 34 — young, good looking and well off. Unfortunately, the things that make them happy also make them prime targets for crime. What to do? Well, remember, this is Texas. The Village did what a town’s got to do — it went looking for a lawman on horseback.
The New Fashioned Way
Loraine Metcalf was on welfare. Now she lives in a neighborhood of fine homes. Her daughter does too. No, they didn’t win a lottery. They earned it. The NEW fashioned way. Their tiny band of Native Americans — called the Siletz — does market studies to see what will sell and then bankrolls new businesses.
Aspen Music
Summer in the high country has a sound all its own. Mountain streams unlocked by spring. Animals looking for the sun. Since 1949, the deer and the chipmunks in this valley have moved to different sounds. This is the home of the Aspen music festival. For 9 weeks each summer, musicians gather in the Rockies to study and to play.
Al Lee Gator
Some Americans were fighting crime with the only weapon they had. Fear. Then, they turned to television. Police departments across the country began reenacting crimes, broadcasting them to gather information and help solve the problem. Crime Watch was an electronic extension of the old neighborhood block watch. People looking out for one another. The reenactments sometimes featured the actual victims. During the first four years, the Crime Watch program helped solve 460 major crimes in Orlando, Florida, and recover $4,500,000 in stolen property. The day we tagged along, the cops were taping a show on folks who steal alligators. If you have knowledge of the whereabouts of Al Lee Gator, a green male, 6-2, 68 pounds, contact the Orlando Police department.
A Journey into the Unknown
67-hundred Japanese companies operate in the United States. More than 40-thousand families have moved here. It is pioneer journey that covers more than miles. They will live in a world which to them is both exotic and enticing. When different cultures manage to live together in friendship, they sometimes create something better. It has happened before. In America.
Civil Rights Era’s Forgotten Women
Virginia Durr, born to privilege and high place, battled intolerance whatever its form. She took a Japanese family into her home during World War Two because they had nowhere to live. Was branded a Communist for her compassion and hauled before a Senate subcommittee in the 1950’s. Successfully fought the pole tax that freed the vote for women. And was one of the few, the very few, white southerners who openly resisted the violent currents of her time.
A little Scary
Eric Gray worked nights as a flight attendant, so he could take pharmacy classes by day. His family pitched in to keep him in college. Five of them lived on $22-thousand dollars a year. Eric faced a hard choice. Get insurance or eat. The family opted for food.
Eric Gray got his Phd. But just days before he could take a job that would provide him with insurance coverage, he learned his son, Eric, jr. had cancer. After one hospital stay, two weeks, the bill was $43-thousand dollars.
Devil’s Tower, Church vs. State
One man’s rock climb could be another’s cathedral. 23 Native American tribes hold Devils Tower National monument sacred. In recent years their services have had to compete with noisy climbers. National Park rangers tried to help, steering climbers away. Most left. Frank Sanders did not. “If it’s going to be closed for one set of people, then we should have another week where its closed to everyone, but Frank Sanders.” Native Americans have been coming to Devils Tower for 12-thousand years. Is it protected by the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom or should the climbers be left alone, exercising their right to keep church and state separate? The Indians feel there are plenty of places to climb. Not enough to look up to.
Job Saver
Jack Copley saw cutbacks coming. That was his job, reviewing budgets for a telephone company. There were 53-hundred empty desks around him. He figured his work, too, might disappear. One thing he had learned. Not to be a victim. Copley set out to find Bell Atlantic a new source of income, enough to maintain his pay. For all the hours Jack worked, he didn’t even make minimum wage. His daughter made more baby sitting. But he bombarded Bell with ideas. One stuck.
The Good Guys Ride Bikes
The Good Guys Ride Bikes
All John Finello ever wanted was to ride a motorcycle. It carried him away from school in the 10th grade. He never returned. That free life John chased so loudly had some unexpected snares. Heroin. Cocaine. And booze. He started stealing to support his habits. Finally, was arrested for armed robbery in Saugus, Massachusetts.
“The only thing left for me was either death or prison,” Finello said.
But a remarkable thing happened. He found a job. Got married. And became a dad. He was free of the alcohol and drugs that held him half his life. John and his biker friends decided to form a group that did not get high and began making converts. There are 70 of them now, counseling high school kids.
Bulldog’s Pickers
Bulldog’s Pickers
An aging group of friends moved to south Texas one winter because they didn’t like weather they had to lift. The friends noticed that machines only harvested one vegetable at a time. They missed a lot. On one farm in the Rio Grande Valley, 6 million pounds of vegetables — that were too small or too ripe — were left to be plowed under. So the elderly went after them, gathering left over vegetables for the poor.
Unwed Fathers
Manny Cardona seeks out teenage fathers and leads them back to the families they created. He gets their girlfriends medical attention. Guides them off welfare. And tries to keep them in school.
Cardona was once like them, an unwed teen father, who put himself through college, got a masters degree and a job at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, YMCA. Manny represents something in short supply this neighborhood. Success.
Anti-smoking Tobacco Heir
Anti-smoking Tobacco Heir
In the 1980’s Americans started smoking fewer cigarettes for the first time since 1913, that’s when R.J. Reynolds took a picture of a circus camel and stuck it on the side of a pack. Six years later, nearly half of the people in America who smoked cigarettes, smoked that one brand — Camels. His ads were the first to link smoking with the good life. That didn’t just sell cigarettes. That made them part of our culture. NBC’s first TV newscast gave them to lucky viewers.
One of R.J. Reynold’s grandsons, Patrick, twisted those advertising techniques to get people to stop smoking.
Scoop City
Scoop City
Focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. That’s the key to a long and happy career. I learned that lesson in a small city, half way between St. Louis and Kansas City, where stories seldom go untold.
Everglades Changing
Everglades Changing
Out here, the alligators look like they’re sighting down a gun barrel. Survival goes to the swift. But even the fastest cannot run from the pollution that seeps from sugarcane fields. In south Florida over the years, the Federal Government drained the heart of the Everglades. 700-thousand acres were turned into some of the richest farm land in America. Now, environmentalists are battling to cleans the deadly phosphorus that the draining unleashed.
Final Choice
Before hi-tech medicine, death was a member of the family, something families nearly always chose to have happen at home. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans die in hospitals, surrounded by strangers. Often alone in webs of wires and tubes. Hospice care gives the terminally ill a chance to live a near normal life, until they die. A quarter of million Americans at the end of their lives have checked themselves out of hospitals and into hospice programs. In 1974 there was one hospice in America. Twenty years later there were 2,000. Mostly staffed by volunteers. That keeps costs low. On average, about $80 a day. Nearly 10 times cheaper than some hospital stays. Add in Medicaire and Medicaid, the out of pocket cost — $16 bucks a day. Nine out of ten hospice programs are in people’s homes. For those whose final choice is to go gently, they will not be forced to do otherwise.
Animal Beauty Aids for People
Animal grooming products have become some of the hottest beauty aids for people. A lot of folks who’d never been inside a feed store began using them. 90 % use horse products for themselves. That pushed sales for “Main and Tail” from $500,000 to $30 million. Farm mothers have quietly used these protein lotions for years. They are about half as expensive as what comparable products cost in the beauty shop.
Desoto Hour
Most of the time Georgia Tech’s Rambling Wreck radio sounds like a three car pile up. Even among college stations, its programming is considered extreme. But stuck between “Concussion Theater” and a show called “Tongue Bath” is the station’s longest running program — Fred Runde’s Desoto Hour — the show with the most listeners. The 77-year-old disc jockey is not a Georgia Tech student. Nor a teacher. Never was. He’s been spinning Big Band magic here since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Fred wandered through the door looking for something to do in retirement. Students swooned for his oasis of sound. Runde believes that noise is merely music someone doesn’t want to hear.
Rosewood
There are few traces of Rosewood. Graves hidden in the weeds of time. A fist full of photographs. Fading, like the memory of what happened in the north Florida woods. The tragedy began after a White woman, Fanny Taylor, said she was beaten by a Black man, a story she may have made up to cover a fight with her White lover. The attacker was never found. But a mob raged through Rosewood for 8 days. The sheriff did not stop them. The governor did not send help. The burnings. The beatings. The looting continued for a week. A least 8 people lost their lives. Rosewood had been a prosperous place. The families owned a turpentine plant and cut much of the Cyprus for school pencils in this country. No one was prosecuted. Ever. Fear kept Black families from returning, even to sell their land. Rosewood’s survivors became an address list of long forgotten names. Their story nearly died with them. But now, justice — a long last.
Wrong Man
Darryl Hunt was arrested, charged, and convicted of a 1984 North Carolina murder he didn’t commit. Although DNA results proved his innocence in 1994, it took another 10 years of legal appeals to exonerate him. He was just 19.
Empty Mansions Update
The fate of Hugette Clark, the 104 year old woman, whose father was once the second richest man in America. She was worth half a billion dollars. Had no heirs. And hadn’t been seen in public for more than half a century.
Empty Mansions
This was one of the first stories that aired about the mysterious Huguette Clark, a 104 year old woman, whose father was once the second richest man in America. She was worth half a billion dollars. Had no heirs. And hadn’t been seen in public for more than half a century.
The Evolution of the American Story
The Evolution of the American Story
Bob Dotson spent four decades as a reporter at NBC. For most of that time, he hosted a segment on The Today Show called The American Story, which created intimate portraits of Americans who wouldn’t normally make the news. In this live episode of StoryTech, Bob Dotson talks about changes in technology, from wireless microphones to home video to iPhones, changed the way he told The American Story.
Candy Heart Update
Bud Kohlbrenner was enjoying an active retirement. Just 54, he traveled widely and lived well after selling a candy company in St. Louis for a sweet profit. But one day, he got a call from a couple of long time employees who needed help. Bud did something unthinkable. He opened a new candy company, hired back all of his staff and set about teaching them how to run the business. His plan? Give it to them.
IT DIDN’T TURN OUT AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT.
Candy Heart
There comes a time when we try to figure out who we want to be. Bud Kolbrener’s recipe for life came wrapped in chocolate. He made millions creating candy. Sold his St. Louis company for a sweet profit. Took early retirement at 54. Bud looked forward to a life of travel, but he got a call from a couple of long-time employees—Debbie and Marley Otto.
WHAT BUD DID NEXT IS MIND BOGGLING.
Black Land
Philip Barker was cutting wood, when a tree top snapped and fell on him. Broke his neck in three places. $70-thousand later, he could work again. But he was bankrupt. Barker already owed half a million dollars. He had bought the family farm a dozen years before. Lost half his cattle herd two years later to disease. Took two more jobs to help pay off the mortgage. Half the Black farmers in North Carolina went out of business during the 1980’s. “In the White community, you can fail a couple of years and still get enough credit to keep going,” Barker points out. “But in the Black community, don’t fail one year or else your credit is ruined, not just for you. Your family too.” His three jobs don’t leave him time to go where deals are made in a small town. Bankers only see him hat in hand. “I don’t have the opportunity to go to the golf course and play golf with my banker on Saturdays. White folks have his ear. I don’t.”
Mississippi Moving
The Mississippi is a moving grocery store. Just one tow boat pushes 160-thousand acres of grain into the world. So, the river has to be controlled.
From Slavery to Friendship
A rare American story that began in slavery and blossomed into friendship. There is nothing sentimental about slavery, but this is a story unique in our history. In 1834 a white family bought a black family. At the end of the Civil War something special happened that set them together against the grain of the time.
Bonds of Love
Jeff Wright is one of those teachers students never forget. More show than tell. Exploding with fun. His science classes at Louisville Male Highschool in Kentucky are filled with odd experiments. Surprisingly, it is a lecture without props that leaves a lasting impression. The talk is about Wright’s son Adam. Born with a rare combination of genes that only about 450 people in the world have. It is a lesson on the meaning of life.
Looks Good on Paper
Looks Good on Paper
Miami has a program that requires taxpayers to pay for art in public places. It is a good idea on paper. But some say, that’s where it should have stayed.
Samaritan Fling
John Fling delivers auto parts for a car dealer, but he also makes stops where the sum seems reluctant to shine.
Caught in the Middle
Jim Tchaikovsky goes to work under a sun that has no heat. He is out at dawn with the windchill at 30 below, to check on cows about to calve. Jim and his wife Karen are the 5th generation on this land. They may lose it all.
Dog with Big Dreams
The odds on favorite to win the title of world animal Frisbee champion in 1979 was a tiny dog name Toke. Just 14 inches at the shoulders. The smallest world contender ever. But he could jump four times his height.
HOW’D HE DO?
Recent Posts
- One family Saves Another
Come on. Take a walk with me. I want you to meet Jim and Marty Dwyer and their five boys. The Dwyers always wanted a baby girl but figured it wasn’t going to happen after those five boys. So they agreed to raise someone else’s. But she wasn’t a baby. And she brought her brother. And those two brought four more.
- Wanted: Alligator Wrestler
Used to be only Seminoles wrestled alligators. The tribe lived in the Florida swamps. Gators were their major source of food and profit. But today, the 26 hundred members make big money running gambling casinos, enough for kids to afford college and dreams beyond the swamp. None of them wants to learn this dangerous, ancient skill. Chief James Billy tried to keep the tradition alive. It cost him. Big time.
- Boys of Winter
One afternoon in St. Petersburg, Florida, I stopped to watch Fred Broadwell waiting for a pitch, crouching over the strike zone, leaning into the wind, seemingly suspended. The ball floated toward the plate. He chopped it toward the shortstop and shuffled off toward first base on stiff legs. It was a big day for Fred. A couple of years ago he was sidelined with pneumonia. Now he was back at 95.
DID HE SCORE?
- Four Corners
There was a time in America where neighbors were considered part of your wealth. In Four Corners, Louisiana, they still are. Hardly a family here makes $10,000 a year. But together, they had rebuilt eleven homes. They linked up with trade people who taught them how.
- Singalong Sound of Music
The Sound of Music movie was re-released with a twist. The audience showed up in costumes and was encouraged to sing along. I did. Want to see?
- Yellowstone National Park in Winter
150th celebration Yellowstone National Park. It does not give up winter easily. The geysers cough and crackle and keep their warmth inside. Old Faithful is the first to break its glass jail. Splashing in the sun like a ghost train in the Rockies. Warm rivers are the only winter fire. Snow the only blanket. Animals who survive are as stubborn as the land itself. Bison have passed through the ice and the pain, standing dark and still, trembling in the wind. Trumpeter swans preen and float. The plain begin to look beautiful. Swirling through snow on currents of ice, they spin free. The Aspens are crystal. The pines are glass. An iridescent bone yard, waiting for the world to thaw.
- Black Pioneers
Black history in Oklahoma is unique. Some were cowboys. Some were Indians. And all of them were pioneers. Charles Davis knew them well. Most of them he buried.
- Until It’s Not Here No More
150 years ago, the plains Indians of Oklahoma were refugees of war. The tattered remains of once proud tribes who had become foreigners in their own land. Practically overnight, they were faced with a new language, new religion and a new way of life. In the struggle to survive some of the old ways were forgotten. But Katie Osage remembers. "I was born in a tent and raised in a tent. Yeah, I still live in a tent." For nearly a century, she has lived in two worlds. And she has survived.
- Babies Behind Bars
Pete Weststein used to live in a place of blue distances, tending his dairy herd. It is now a valley of prisons. Four of them, nudging aside the cows and the quiet. His wife Frieda is raising her family next to those prisons. She wondered, what became of the babies that were born inside.
- Singing Sullivans
On Betty Sullivan’s 75th birthday, her kids got together to sing for their mom in a place polished with dreams and hard work. Carnegie Hall. She was set to perform again at Carnegie Hall on her 90th birthday. Coronavirus canceled the celebration.
Jim and Betty Sullivan just wanted their eight kids to learn music. They began to teach them in an old home, now covered in weeds. Son Tim sang country songs. His sister, Heather, wrote themes for television shows. Her sister, Stacy, had a recording career, and big sister, K.T., was a world-class cabaret singer.
She sang them a song with her favorite line.
“You have never left my mind long enough to leave me …”
- No Phones
Silverton, Washington has a hang up about being in touch. Out here, rivers sparkle like winter stars. And the air smells like it was just made. Denny Boyd grew up in asphalt meadows dreaming of such a place. So 15 years ago, he left city life to open a store in the mountains of western Washington. He neglected to notice the small print in his dream. Silverton, Washington was one of the last towns in America where you cannot make a phone call.
- A Normal Life
Seth Chwast cannot hold a conversation or a complex thought. At two he was diagnosed with Autism. His mother was determined to give him a normal life.
A counselor suggested that Seth consider mopping floors for a career. Instead, his mom enrolled him in one last therapy class at the Cleveland, Ohio, Museum of Art.
THE BOY WHO COULD BARELY SPEAK BECAME A WORLD CLASS ARTIST.
- Painting his Soul
His eyes were turned to beauty only he could see, a gallery of gods. Native American spirits, watching over Christ.
“Some of my Zuni people won’t go along with this,” Alex Seowtewa told me, but he painted his vision on the walls of a church for more than half a century. This old mission in the heart of the pueblo was not in the heart of most Zuni’s. It reminded them of a time when Coronado came calling, looking for gold. And paid with death. The priests who ordered the Zuni’s to build the mission were found dead, buried beneath its floor.
“I was told not to look at the color of skin by my grandfather,” Seowtewa said. He dipped his brush into his own soul and painted what seemed best. For Alex, religion is a search, not certainty. He spent his life capturing clouds and sunsets to hang on a church wall.
He reached into the world and found its vagrant beauty.
- If America Had a King
When George Washington took the oath of office, the presidency was a uniquely American institution. Back then, kings ruled most of the world. They believed they were divinely chosen. Of course, the first presidential inauguration changed all that. But what if the popular general had decided to become king? Who would be our king today?
- Baseball Tryouts
Jeff Hall’s buddy asked him, “Are you going?’ 290 guys, most of them from the Philadelphia area, were driving 19 hours non-stop to tryout for their beloved Phillies in Florida. Hall had pitched for dozens of minor league teams for 8 years, until a sore arm sidelined him. “Now, I’m in the real world.” Driving a forklift. The longest job he’d ever held. 17 months. Hall didn’t have the money for the trips to Clearwater, so his neighbors donated a thousand dollars to give him one last shot before his 30th birthday.
- Never Park in Space Reserved for Umpires
John McSherry ran a school like no others. He taught how to be UN-loved. His students were would-be big league umpires. McSherry, a National League umpire, worked his class like a drill sergeant. Get by John McSherry, the rest of the world seems like a smile.
- Eyewitness to Terror
When my wife Linda and I returned from our honeymoon, I went to cover my first Olympics. It was in Munich, Germany. 1972. 50 years ago today.
I soon became an eye witness to terror.
A group calling themselves “Black September” abducted the Israeli wrestling team. After a tense standoff, the terrorists flew away from the Olympic village in a helicopter. They demanded a plane to take them out of Germany.
The woman who owned the house where I was living and working spoke English, so I asked her on air: “Where do think the helicopter is going?” I was standing next to Mrs. Auspitz at her kitchen window. We were watching the terrorist's helicopter lift off from the Olympic village, carrying the Israeli athletes into the night.
The world press was saying it was headed to Riem, the international airport near Munich at that time. But Mrs. Auspitz said, “That’s the other way. They’re headed toward a small airport called Fürstenfeldbruck.”
I was reporting on NBC radio from her kitchen window: "Well folks, other reporters may be quoting official sources, saying the terrorists are taking their hostages to the Munich airport where a plane will be waiting, but Mrs. Auspitz lives here." She was right. The helicopter landed at the German Air Base. Later that night, German Chancellor Willy Brandt went on television to announce that the terrorists had been killed in an ambush: The Israeli wrestling team was safe. We went to bed enjoying that storybook ending.
But a few hours later, Mrs. Auspitz woke me and pointed out the window toward the Autobahn, which ran near her house. There was a long line of hearses. Each contained the body of an Israeli Olympic wrestler. They had not been saved. They all died. I left Germany with the conviction that terrorism could touch my life at any time. It did. Twenty-nine years later. I was standing outside a church one block from Ground Zero on that terrible day terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, in New York City.
- Beer Cans Heat home
Now you can enjoy heating your home. An inventor in Woodsdale, Ohio, gets all the warmth he needs from empty beer cans. Add a garbage pail and a copper coil buried in compost. You get heat. Wisdom doesn't always wear a suit.
- Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Three
A PBS interview with the team that won a National EMMY for what was — at the time — an untold story: African American history in the old west. Their 1973 documentary, "Through the Looking Glass Darkly,” had higher ratings than any of the network shows the nights it aired. A high definition restoration of the original program was paired with this interview on the 30th anniversary. Bob Dotson, produced, wrote and narrated. Photojournalist Oliver Murray was also an associate producer, as was George Wesley.
- Country Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras comes with fancy masked balls and big parades. Thousands spent on costumes and parties. But for a Cajun in Mamou, the celebration costs only $7.50. For that, you get a beer, hard boiled eggs, sausage and the answer to the age old question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?
- Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part Two
Listen to Logan Jackson's story: "Dan Porter was an old Civil War veteran. I was a little boy. At the time we met, they were enforcing the Jim Crow law, which said black men could not vote. ‘Man told Dan Porter, says, ‘Don’t you go in there and try to vote.’ Says, ‘You can’t read.’ “Porter says, ‘That don’t make no difference. I’m one of the men who made General Lee surrender!’” Logan stared into the faces around him, ‘You don’t know who General Lee was, do you? He was a general in the Civil War. Yeah, an old soldier.’ Well, Dan, he voted.”
How a diverse group of Americans succeeded in living together is a fascinating tale that has made an extraordinary difference for the millions who came after them. Of course they had racial problems, and still do, but the way they worked them out holds lessons for our own time.
- Shadows Play On This Stage
Only shadows play in the Tabor Opera house. But for Evelyn Furman, it is an attic filled with memories. They survive because of her single minded devotion to the old theater in Leadville, Colorado. She saved it from the wrecking ball until younger generations fell in love with it too. Evelyn didn’t just preserve the brick and the mortar, she saved its stories.
- Through the Looking Glass Darkly, Part One
One of the most diverse places in America is not where you might expect. Oklahoma once had 28 towns settled by former slaves, scattered throughout 37 Indian Nations. For nearly a century it was primarily a land of the Red and the Black, a checkerboard of Indians and ex-slaves who very nearly got their own state until thousands of immigrants from around the world joined them seeking free land -- land they got in a single day.
- Odyssey of Words
Professor Doug Brinkley was worried that his students had never seen skyscrapers made of ice. Never known a silent world. Never traveled much at all. Not even in books. He loaded 27 students into a bus and drove from Hofstra University in New York to Denali National Park, Alaska. Along the way, the library came alive.
- Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?
People buy more than 1-BILLION Valentines each year. Ever wonder who writes all those cards? What kind of mind comes up with "Be My Tootsie Wootsie or I'll Break Your Armsy Warmsy?" Well, I did. Went to the center of all this creativity, to the cupids of Kansas City.
- Smoking Pens
A third of all the paperback books sold in America are romance novels. One company has published a billion books in ten years. Enough to give a copy to every man, woman and child in China. The author of those books, Laura London, was voted “the most sensuous writer.” She is a man. His real name is Tom Curtis, a cross country trucker.
- Book of Love
Now here’s something that Valentine cards just can’t convey — the depth of your love. In this age of social media, where anyone can be a star, here’s a consolation prize, Romance novels that let you and the one you love — or would like to love — be the main characters.
- Maiden in Shining Armor
There hasn't been much swordplay in the south since the Yankees left. Few southern women ever fought their way onto an Olympic fencing team, until now. Atlanta's own Nee Lee struggled for 12 years, training with no sponsors and little money. One thought, "I want to be a maiden in shining armor.”
- Olympic Memory
At the beginning of this century, Rulon Gardner won a gold medal virtually no one else in the world thought he could, beating Aleksandr Karelin, a Russian wrestler so good, opponents had not scored a single point against him in 10 years. Karelin started his amazing run when Gardner was a junior in high school. Back then, Rulon didn’t make the Varsity team. He and a brother wrestled for the final spot. Rulon let him win. His brother was a senior. That would have been his last chance to compete.
- Coach Abe Lemons for the Laugh
My first job for NBC News was at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That’s where I met legendary basketball coach Abe Lemons. He was president of the College Coaches Association that year, but told me he couldn’t get tickets to any Olympic basketball games. Instead, he scored a seat to the finals of the hammer throw.
I asked Abe: How was it?
“Well, our seats were kinda high up,” he said with a slow grin.
“How high?”
“When one of those hammer guys wound up and tossed, the fellows around me all yelled down, ‘How’d he do?’ And the fans down below would turn, cup their ears, and say: ‘Huh?’”
- Small Town Football
A friend of mine played football for a school so small, the players changed uniforms at half time and came back as the band. There were so few girls, they borrowed cheerleaders from another town. It made for some close relationships. My pal married a cheerleader. She also played flute in the band. She also moved the yard markers. That’s the way it is with small town football — a family affair.
- The OTHER Moscow Olympics
Efforts to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow did not go well. No alternative site was picked. In the midst of all this, here came Moscow, Kansas, with what it hoped was the answer. The 250 people in town started passing out bumper stickers. They wanted to keep the games in Moscow, if not Russia, then Kansas. At Moscow International airport, they expected big crowds, if they could find a plane that seats more than one. “We have a man who works at the post office,” said Doug Bell. “He knows all about air mail. And then there’s the guy who cleans the sewer tanks here. He knows all about rapid transit.”
- Olympic Athlete’s wife
My first job for NBC News was the Munich Olympics in 1972. Before the games began, I was sent out with a silent film camera to shoot minute-30 feature stories. Each one had to be shot — in a few minutes — on a single roll of film. Just 3 minutes of video. No natural sound. No interview.
- Changing Racial History
Macon county, Tennessee, is so lovely folks like to say, “If you stay long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you’ll never leave.” Not everyone was given that chance. Black people used to be run out of the county. Some were hung from a tree on the courthouse square. Fred Thomas’ friends thought he was crazy when he opened a medical clinic in Macon county. “If I had listened to what people said,” Dr. Thomas pointed out, “I would have been a plumber.” Fred Thomas ignored the county’s racial history. He began to forge his own.
- The Trouble We All Live With
A 6-year-old girl became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. Ruby Bridges always said her mother was the hero of the moment. She put her family and her husband’s job in jeopardy to open schools for all.
- Doctor Finds Poor Friends
Jack McConnell stopped to pick up a man who was walking down a dirt road without an umbrella on a drizzly day.
“Where you headed?” McConnell called out the window.
“To look for a job,” the man answered. “Any one I can get.”
“What’s your name?”
“James.”
“You married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids and my wife is pregnant with our third.”
“What do you do for medical care?” McConnell wondered. He was a retired doctor.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” James said. “No one else is going to help us.”
His answer would change thousands of lives across the country.
- Grand Central Station’s Hidden Secrets
A secret room. A walled up tomb. A priceless jewel. No, not on the set of the next Indiana Jones movie. They lay hidden in America’s busiest railroad station. Train travel still thrives in New York City. Grand Central Terminal sees as many trains today as it did in the golden age of steam and steel. Picture the population of Atlanta and Buffalo pouring out of trains and subways. Seven hundred thousand travelers every day. Ten thousand pause to grab a meal, a thousand stop to ask directions. Some lose more than their way. In one month, train crews sent Grand Central's Lost and Found three hundred cell phones, one hundred and fifty eyeglasses and an engagement ring.
- Music from the Edge of Nowhere
Gordon Wright was the conductor of the Arctic Chamber orchestra, a group he formed to take classical music to the remote villages of Alaska. His musicians have performed in places so cold, the violinists play wearing gloves.
- Hands Free Hero
Marty Revellette lived his life with a single mindedness that blocked out everything but challenge. He was a man with no arms, but he pulled a women from her burning car. She survived. This story tells not only “how,” but “why.” The country owes its success to those who are willing to try regardless of disability, people who risk their lives for country, family, even strangers.
- Professor Longhair
Henry Byrd lived on a side of New Orleans most folks never see, the forgotten side of morning. Byrd never left the city. Never followed his fame. But most modern Rock stars can trace their heritage to his pounding piano style. They call him Professor Longhair.
- All of America is their backyard
Dan and Susie Kellogg sold their home in Colorado. Bought an RV. And set out traveling into the unknown. They decided to live full time in a mobile home with enough kids to field a football team. 12.
- One Hole, Par 70
Laughter echoes down Pillar Mountain. Two duffers in Kodiak, Alaska, are ice picking their way up the snow-covered cliffs. Carrying golf clubs. The course is practically straight up, fourteen hundred feet, from the valley floor to the green. Pebble Beach, it ain’t. But it is a golf tournament. One hole, par 70. That’s right. One hole, par 70.
- Life in a Jar
The keys to history’s treasures are often discovered in unexpected places. One of them turned up in a tiny Kansas town, unlocking a story half a world away. This week let’s celebrate the 100th anniversary of a woman who saved 2,500 children. In 1940 the Nazis walled off a neighborhood near Irena Sendler’s home in Warsaw, Poland. Pressed almost half a million people into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park – with not enough food to keep them alive. Five thousand were dying each month. Sendler, a public health service nurse, devised a daring plan to save the children.
- Blind Kayaker
Lonnie Bedwell never let a handicap, handicap him. The man is lights out blind. Lives far from fast water, but Bedwell was the first blind person to kayak the Grand Canyon. He navigated the rapids listening closely, as friends called out the way.
WHAT INSPIRED HIS QUEST? THE FRIEND WHO SHOT HIM.
- Arctic Explorer
Will Steiger searches for land that hasn’t felt footsteps, the coldest parts of our earth, where the north wind bullies and temperatures cower—to seventy below. In this vast wilderness near the North and South Poles he seems oddly out of place—plodding carefully through the massive ice, alone. Will Steger explored the unknown—one step at a time—for more than forty years. Some ice fields are now so thin, his sled dogs fall through. But science alone won’t fix this. Will thinks people coming together and working for the common good might. We may get blisters on our hands, and calluses on our dreams, but the ally he seeks is the part in all of us that knows what is right. Many preach about saving the planet. Will just puts his boots on and goes.
- Orphan Train
Five little boys rattled across America in the fall of 1922. They were part of a remarkable odyssey. One hundred thousand such children were plucked from the streets of New York City and sent west, to a new life. Most were the sons and daughters of immigrants, found starving and alone. The Children’s Aid Society swept them up and shipped them to villages all across the country. At each stop their arrival was advertised. Kids trouped off the train, lined up, and couples simply picked the one they wanted. The brothers had very different experiences, but survived — with the help of each other.
- Rejecting Stardom
Many people in Goose Creek, South Carolina, were speechless when Braeden Kershner turned his back on celebrity. It seemed somehow un-American. Don’t we all want to be somebody special? Don’t we try to become our dreams? It’s not that Braeden didn’t try. For months they watched him conducting music in front of a mirror with his eyes shut tightly, so he could see his dream. Conducting the Boston Pops. He did, after learning every instrument in the orchestra.
That night could have made Braeden Kershner a star. Few step out of the spotlight after they’ve had a flash of fame. Instead, he joined the Marines, just before 9/11.
- Pops Dream
Braeden Kirchner likes to conduct music with his eyes closed, so he can see his dream. The boy from Goose Creek, South Carolina, wanted to conduct the Boston Pops. Never mind that Braeden was just 18. To prepare for a career in conducting, he learned to play every instrument in the orchestra. He finally got his chance.
- Photo Wagon
John Coffer turned his back on modern times to wander America in a wagon pulled by oxen, stopping only to take portraits with his antique camera. Coffer traveled at two and a half miles an hour for five years. 25 states. 10-thousand miles. He crisscrossed America so slowly, everywhere he went, folks joked he was a temporary resident. Coffer captured old fashioned images of modern America.
- Refugee Wins Nobel Prize
I'd like you to meet Mario Capecchi. He's the son of a single mom, a poet, who thought she could defeat the Nazis with her pen. She didn’t, but he became one of the scientists who saved us.
- Singer Saves a Town
I was sitting in a small cafe. At the other end of the counter was a man who looked like Lincoln. He was big and rawboned and about 80. His voice pierced and rattled like an old bugle. I couldn't help overhearing. He was holding forth about a fellow named Paul Sykes, who arrived in Oklahoma with 600 former slaves from Alabama the year before one of those big land runs that offered up free homesteads out west.
- Photographer for Life
Milton Rogovin grew old watching his neighborhood grow up, sharing the yearbook of their lives. He was still photographing them at age 100, surrounded by friends who were now taking his picture -- the "forgotten ones," who did not forget him.
- Birth of the Ice cream Cone
A lot of what we love today —ice cream cones, hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter, iced tea, the club sandwich, cotton candy — were all introduced in a single summer in 1904. Americans also got their first glimpse of the Olympic games and the Democrats managed to shoehorn in a National Convention. All three events in one city at the same time. Never happened again.
- The Rescued Save the Rescuers
Roby Albouy spent most of his adult life in the Colorado mountains. But he carries faces from France framed in his mind, the fellows he passed on to freedom during World War Two. They were the downed crew of an America bomber. He was a fighter with the French Resistance. They never knew each other's names. After we did a story on Albouy, the crew and their French saviors found each other again. They had all lived long enough to joke about things that once were breaking their hearts. Without each other, they may not have grown old at all.
- A Chance to Grow Old
Every veteran carries faces framed in their minds, comrades who did not return from war. Roby Albouy and I were walking through the Aspen meadows out in Colorado one summer when he pulled a yellowing snapshot from his pocket and showed me the ones he can’t forget.
- Nickname Telephone book
If you go looking for folks in Cajun country, it helps to have a nickname handy. In Beaux Bridge, Louisiana, the phone book lists people by the names they are actually known. Nicknames. Too many residents have the same last names. There are 78 Broussard's. 45 Tibedeaux's. And 46 different Champagne's. 2 of them have the same first name. Nicknames here are a necessity.
- Mama Hale
Childhood should be a season of dreams, but some children awoke each morning from an American nightmare: They are born addicted to drugs. Clara Hale saved hundreds of them. One morning she found a baby by her door. Mrs. Hale took him in. Word got around. Soon her tiny apartment was jammed with cribs.
- Old Believers
Behind America's success story are untold tales of endurance. The people who succeed in this country come from sturdy stock, the ones who have always carried on when the going got tough. Their ancestors thought America’s streets would be paved with gold. What they found, instead, was opportunity to build, discover, create, achieve, survive, and grow.
For many that chance started in wilderness. They carved out lives, planted dreams and worked hard. In wilderness, time does not drift back into the past. It renews itself. People, too, or so I had heard. That’s why I went searching for a place few ever find. A moose munched his lunch by the side of a bubbling stream as my four-wheel drive waddled across the creek and continued up a mountain a few hundred miles southeast of Anchorage. At the top was a remote Alaskan village where the rhythm of life still resembled that in 1650.
- The Ring that Saved a Life
Motts Tonelli enlisted in the New Mexico National Guard to play with an Army basketball team. The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he traded his ball for a gun. Tonelli was captured in the Philippines in the opening days of World War Two. Forced to walk 70 miles to a prisoner of war camp. Along the way, a Japanese soldier gave Motts an extraordinary gift.
- Farm to Fame
Chuck Taylor waved at a hawk strafing the wheat field in front of him. “There is beauty everywhere. I just want to express what I am feeling.”
He pushed up his feed company cap and began to sing louder than his farm tractor engine. Chuck’s voice boomed over that Colorado field, keeping time to the rhythm of his motor. The tractor turned into the setting sun, revealing a big man, close to three hundred pounds, haloed in the cab. Chuck Taylor was wondering why that sun wasn’t a spotlight.
TURNS OUT, IT WAS.
- Family Music
The Knight family, Laura and John and six kids, manage to survive, no thrive, on $4-thousand dollars a year. That’s something to sing about. On their farm, music is all around them.
- Puppy Rescuer
Ready for a happy puppy story? Sure you are. George Mahle takes pups on a 4,200-mile odyssey to loving arms.
https://www.today.com/news/puppy-rescuer-takes-dogs-4-200-mile-odyssey-loving-arms-2D79517768
- Dog Tags
Stacey Hansen, a fire fighter in San Jose, California, found an old dog tag while vacationing in Vietnam. It belonged to Marine Corporal Steven Zucroff who died during the War - the day after Mother's day -- his 21st year. She brought Steven's dog tag home. His brother Brad lived just an hour away, They met in a park overlooking the Pacific near Stacey's fire station. Brad carried an old box with his brother's things.
"You've seen his name," he said, as the two walked across the bluff and sat on a bench, "Now you should see the person.”
He lifted the lid and pulled out a picture. It was not the image of a weary warrior Stacey expected.
- Worst Weather in America
Who gets the roughest weather in America? The place looks looks gentle. Like a smiling stranger with an offer of candy. But, more than a hundred people have died there. Winter can come in any month. One day in three, hurricane force winds slap the landscape. Since 1932, a small band of scientists has struggled into this arctic laundromat to be tumbled around in search of the worst weather in the world.
- Truck Driver Surgeon
Wisdom is found in unexpected places. Tools for some of the first microsurgeries were invented in a garage. An out of work truck driver tinkered and perfected them until they changed our world.
- America’s Main Street
Everything immortal must first pass away. For nearly 60 years, Route 66 was THE way west — America’s Main Street — before highways looped outside little towns and fenced folks off from homemade America. Route 66 was for most a Yellow brick road, a journey important for what we would find.
- Animal Hospital
Peter Holworth is a foster parent to hundreds of sick little seals that wash up on his shore. Some are near death from starvation when he finds them. Peter nurses these babies back to health.
- Teens Overcome Racism
Teenagers in this summer camp have lost something, the wishful, youthful belief that prejudice would never find them. It is easier to see racism in others. Here teenagers find it in themselves. They had learned to rely on one another in these woods. Now they were being torn apart. Camp “Any Town” teaches how to battle discrimination. Councilors point out that prejudice behaviors are learned. If they catch it in a 15 year old, they have a better chance of doing something. Those teens have have a lot time to live and will effect more lives.
- Teen Cinema
There are places where the past is not past. It keeps circling back around. Many towns in America are like that. Petaluma, California, continually celebrates a magical time when kids showed up to shoot a low budget movie called "American Graffiti." It launched some big name careers and boosted an unknown director, George Lucas, into an orbit that would lead to his epic -- Star Wars. History in Petaluma is never far, far way. Sadly, this town -- so tied to movie history -- lost its last picture show. Kids could have just hopped into a car. Their moms would have driven them to the movies in another town.
"Oh, no!" Madison Webb looked stricken. "You're not supposed to go with your parents!”
So, the teens created a business plan that would reopen their theater.
- A New Life
Working folks have always been the great voyagers of America. There were always new businesses, new jobs, new frontiers just over the next hill. But something fundamentally is changing in the American economy. Old skills don’t always fit new jobs. The American instinct to move on when times get tough can no longer solve the problem.
We caught up with Jim and Deborah Carey and their daughter Chastity once again. The bankrupt farmers still had not harvested a dream. Jim had won and lost six jobs in a year. Six jobs. In three different states. And he had a new baby. All was not bleak. Two things were about to happen that would change their lives for the better.
- Born to Farm
Boom times in the past have doubled the cost of farmland in
this country, a price that few can afford to pay. Southeastern Massachusetts has lost more farmland in the last 30 years than it did in the previous 300. Folks in Wesport bucked that trend. Taxed themselves a bundle to buy one of the last farms. Put it into a land trust that can only be sold to farmers. 18 year bought it at a bargain price.
For the rest of the story, hiding in history’s shadow. The video runs 4:03.
- Living Ghost Town
During this dark time, it is well to remember the families in this country who help others end nightmares and find dreams. It is the very core of our American story because most of us also have ancestors who risked everything for a better life. The communities they built prospered because people took care of one another. Some still do.
- Ballet Dancer
Elliot Feld would hide his dance slippers in a brief case, so his neighbors would think he had an ordinary job. He would become one of America’s finest ballet choreographers, but ballet is still out of the question for most of the kids in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Too expensive. He did not recruit from the specialized schools for the performing arts. He traveled to the public classrooms to look for ordinary 8 year olds with potential.
- Post Pawley’s Island school closes
Beloved teacher Ruby Forsyth had died. The classroom where she taught for half a century was now quiet. The school she started for Black children was about to close. Her former students share their memories of what she taught them.
- Veteran’s Legacy
Jeff Steiner is building a sanctuary. He is planting trees on a hundred acres he bought after returning from the Vietnam war. Half a year after high school graduation he was evacuating wounded G.I.'s. A shell exploded in his face. After his discharge, he became an alcoholic. Got divorced. Attempted suicide. Then, he decided to do something positive. Plant one tree for each of the 60-thousand fellow soldiers killed or missing in Vietnam. He had planted 30-thousand, when I met him.
- Beats a 260 mile School Bus Ride
Crane High is the only locally tax supported public boarding school in America. It was built in a part of Oregon you seldom see in the travel brochures. Out here, people remember bone grey better than rainbows. Southeastern Oregon has a desert so vast, Jerry Deffenbaugh must drive 260 miles round trip to watch his son play high school basketball. Some weeks he does that 3 times. The school draws just 50 students from a district the size of Massachusetts.
AND YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A LONG COMMUTE.
- Kid Billionaire
Jared Issacman became a billionaire before he could drive. He as so young, he hired his dad to wine and dine clients. His mom worked for him too. Issacman used some of his money to pilot Elon Musk's all-civilian mission to the edge of the universe. Purchased purchased all four seats. Kept one for himself. Donated the other three to charity. He made his billions by figuring out a way for businesses to process credit cards more quickly. It all began in his basement. He was just 16. This was the first story ever done on the kid who defies the odds.
- A Picture that Touched America
For families who lived in the 1930’s Dust Bowl, “depression” was not an abstract economic term. Their farms were buried in burned out soil, and with nowhere to turn, they moved on. Florence Thompson was 27 years old when the depression started. She had five children and was pregnant with another — and her husband had died. Did she ever lose hope? “Nope, if I’d a lost hope, we never would have made it”
- Town Denial (Susan Smith Murders)
Susan Smith murdered her two little boys. Strapped them into their car seats. Stepped out and pushed them into a lake. She told police she was carjacked. A black man drove away with her sons still inside. For nine days, Smith made dramatic pleas on national television for their safe return. After an intensive investigation and nationwide search, she finally confessed to drowning her two sons. Was sentenced to life in prison without a chance of parole until she was past childbearing age. I covered that sad saga for 9 months.
- Blind Musher
Some races in life begin far from the starting line. That's why Rachael Scdoris and her dad drove 25-hundred miles, to the top of the globe, in the dead of winter, to help her chase a dream she cannot see.
- Hiding for Half a Century
When Private D.B. Benson decided to hide out from World War Two, he was able to disappear completely for 36 years. Benson slipped into the Kiamichi Wilderness in 1943, after a sergeant told him to go home because he could not read. He thought he was being discharged. When friends told him he was Absent Without Leave, he went into hiding. He stayed nearly half a century because he thought he would be court marshaled and shot. Benson came out after the Air Force agreed not to prosecute.
- Still Got Life to Go – BOB DOTSON’S FIRST NATIONAL EMMY NOMINATION, 1971
Four out of five felonies are committed by repeaters, those who have been through our corrections system. Out of every 10 persons imprisoned for serious crime, four will return to that way of life again. Our failure to rehabilitate is costing us 20 billion dollars in crime each year, but more importantly, our failure is etched in the endless suffering resulting from crime. Tackling the rehabilitation problem must begin with the young adult offenders.
Bob Dotson spent a year with corrections officers and convicts, in Oklahoma, exploring the failure of the Corrections system for this half hour documentary special. He found more than problems. He found solutions.
- Smoke and Steel
Some holiday gifts for you this week. Today, one my first films. It WAS shot on film. An investigative documentary about high rise fires. We not only uncovers problems, but offer a solution, a theme my stories would follow throughout my career. Stick around for the commentary at the end of this half hour program.
- Biggest Test of Her Life
Michael Carter is leaving his Fayetteville, North Carolina, school in search of a new kidney, while his teacher, Jane Smith, prepares for the biggest test of her life.
- Face of God
Deborah Evans looks to God for help. She says, He told her to look a little closer to home. She believes a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina. is the closet she’s come to the face of God.
- A Life Lesson
Keith Lyle is a nice kid from a nice part of town. He has had a terrible struggle with drugs. Now, he has an even bigger problem.
- $2 Doc’s “Big” Pay Raise
An update to the story about Dr. Russell Dohner. 27 years later, he had raised his fee for a visit from $2 to $5. He looked after his neighbors for 55 years, charging them about what we pay for a fancy cup of coffee. Most of his nurses had been with him nearly as long as his furniture. They were paid well because Doc worked around the clock. He would go anywhere, at any time, to help those in need, often arriving before emergency crews.
- Delivering News on Foot
We can all learn what's going on with a touch of a thumb, but there was a time when people in Mountain Home, Arkansas, waited for Nellie Mitchell to deliver the news. She handed them their morning newspaper, 7 days a week, rain or shine. Never called in sick. Never took a vacation or a day off. At 86 she was still on her morning route, walking 5 miles a day, when trudged along with her. A gracious reminder of how life used to be.
- A Living Statue of Liberty
Each evening the scruffy tabby cats listen for a single voice, the distant squeak of a rusty cart. Mary Burns, making her rounds, For more than a quarter of a century, she has fed the lost cats of Miami Beach. 8 Hours a day. Every day. Restaurants along her way give food. Veterinarians help her tend the sick. Mary has been a voyager all her life. She came from Yugoslavia. She simply took the Statue of Liberty at its word.
- Geezer Rock
This story is something of a mystery. It begins on a quiet street in Rochester, New York. You won't believe where it ends. Something strange is happening over at Dave Hickey's house. He bought a set of drums and disappeared with his brother Bruce and their pals. Together, they helped each other find the notes that had been missing from their lives. They practiced 18 hours. Weekend after weekend. For six months. Back in the 1960's they had a garage band called the Invictas that had one hit song.
- Coal Miner’s Daughter
Brenda Brock went looking for a job in a coal mine. She showed up hungry and broke on a mine foreman’s doorstep. All she had was a sleeping bag. Her work below was a trade off for her life above. Brenda had seen the ugliness that her mom and dad had escaped. “And yet, you get here and lose your heart.”
- Bedrock America
Of all the folks who went west looking for gold, one family went further, dug deeper and stayed longer. They settled in the Marble mountains of Northern California, in a region so difficult to reach, they still don’t have electricity. Each day Chet McBroom did what his father did. Pick down 6 tons of ore. If he’s lucky, he’ll find a few flecks of gold. “If I had to do it over again, you know what I’d change?” Chet asked. “Nothing.”
- He Was Our Santa
Pepe Gallego never learned how to read or write. He worried that might cost him his job at a sawmill, but owner, Bill Gregory, set up a small classroom to teach him.
"My whole life was get up, go to work, come home, lay down, watch TV and sleep," he said. "Twenty three years just slipped away."
It was all the more frustrating because it was a web of his own weaving.
Bill Gregory changed Pepe’s life.
“He was my Santa Claus,” Pepe said, “a Santa offering dreams.”
- Charles Banks Wilson
For years artist Charles Banks Wilson crisscrossed the West stopping in small town pool halls and churches seeking faces that make each Indian tribe unique. Native Americans can look as different from one another as a Turk from a Swede, but that is changing.
- Santa Creek
Dee Newberry teaches kids in a two room school house in a vast wilderness. A billion ounces of silver were pulled from a nearby valley. Discovered after Noah Kellogg tossed one of those silver rocks at a mule that ran away. The town that bear his name once put up a sign that said, "Discovered by a jackass. Inhabited by his descendants.”
- Junk Food Critic
Most food critics get the benefit of dining in some fine restaurants. Not George Tumor. He reviews food that most of us eat. George sports a 280 pound resume to prove his dedication to the work.
- 102 Year Old files for Social Security
Joe Carter had just turned 102, but he didn’t stand for much fuss. There was work to be done. Carter was a farmer. He still puttered about on an old A Model John Deere tractor, the one he bought in 1954, the year before farmers were brought under Social Security. As a group, people on Social Security are healthier, less frail and living longer than ever before. The year Joe Carter got married, all the Americans over 85 would have fit on his small farm. Their number has been doubling every 20 years. Twice as fast as the rest of the population. By the time today’s Baby Boomers reach that age, there could be 16-million Americans over 85.
- The Sidelines of Life
David Edwards stood on the sidelines of life until Patricia Fulton asked him to dance. His mind is not quick. She doesn't care. Being less than perfect is the fragile thread that binds all of Fulton's dance partners. Patricia Fulton pulls them from the sidelines of life and helps the soar.
David Edwards stood on the sidelines of life until Patricia Fulton asked him to dance. His mind is not quick. She doesn't care. Being less than perfect is the fragile thread that binds all of Fulton's dance partners. Patricia Fulton pulls them from the sidelines of life and helps the soar.
https://youtu.be/xBfpjquQLNA
- Social Security Anniversary, Part One
They jam the southbound lanes. 12-thousand people a month. Retired Americans. Looking for paradise. Today’s elderly are pioneers. The first generation with enough health and enough wealth to choose where they will spend their last years. Most who move come to Florida. It is unique among states. One person in five is retired. The biggest source of personal income is Social Security.
- Bogging
Grownups have finally found out that mud can be fun. On Sunday afternoons in Coon Mizell’s cornfield, anyone with a pickup truck worth its pull is pitted against slime in the local Boggin’ hole. The winner is the driver who goes the farthest before getting stuck.
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