Blog
Diamond Tooth Mary
Diamond Tooth Mary
Mary Smith McClain is torn between what she loves and what she feels is right. For most of her life she was known as Diamond Tooth Mary, a dazzling blues singer who performed on star studded bills with Duke Ellington and Nate King Cole. She turned her back on the blues and joined the Baptist church. Her pastor said the music was evil. And she believed him. When Mary turned 82, her husband died. Money got tight. Old blues singers don’t have pensions. She accepted an offer to sing in New York City for the first time in 42 years.
Cultural Center of the Country
New York spends more money on the arts than other city in the country, but a lot of those dollars come from outsiders. If you subtract all that out of town money, the place that spends the most per person for culture is Bassett, Nebraska.
Lost Graves
I found myself in a forest filled with forgotten lives. Their final resting places were marked, not with names, but numbered stakes, unnoticed, until Bud Merritt stumbled upon them. He found the first of six lost graveyards at what was once the largest mental hospital in America: Milledgeville, Georgia.
The Oldest Doctor Whoever Lived
Dr. Leila Denmark opened her practice in 1928. She was Atlanta’s first female pediatrician and was still doctoring babies at age 90. Dr. Denmark healed children until her retirement at 104. That retirement lasted a decade. She lived to be 114, the oldest doctor in...
A Selfless Man
A surveyor from Valentine, Nebraska, was charting the land of the Rio Grande. He stopped for lunch and took a nap. When he awoke, poor people had gathered to eat his scraps. That bothered Frank Ferree. It bothered him so much he sold all his land to buy food and medicine for the poor. He kept nothing for himself. For 40 years Frank Ferree fed thousands on both sides of the Rio Grande. Five Presidents of Mexico have given him gold medals. He melted them down and bought beans.
Homesteading Class
There’s a mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the locals call “Misery Heights.” The last cowboys left there in the 1930s. It was too remote to raise horses, too cold to grow crops. Just right to teach something about life. Jack Snoble teaches a course in homesteading. Class size, one student.
VOLUNTEER CAFE SAVES TOWN
There are a lot of little towns in farm country fighting for their lives. In Havana, North Dakota, the sun hasn’t set. When the town’s cafe went under, all 158 people in town volunteered to cook. It became something of a competition. They made $51,000, enough to open a new grocery store, build sidewalks and put an archery range. Now they dream of a jacuzzi.
See Yourself as Others See You
H. Lee Waters didn’t set out to preserve history. He was simply looking for a way to survive. People couldn’t afford his portraits during the Great Depression, so he picked up a film camera, taught himself to you use it and persuaded theater owners to show the films for free, as an added attraction at the movies. If more folks the usual showed up, he’d take a small percentage.
For six years, H. Lee never missed a show, until one night his wife called him and said she was going to the hospital and bring their first baby into the world. By the time he got there, that baby had already arrived. He decided to stay home instead of traveling. He returned to the portrait studio. At 87, he was still clicking away at life — and getting the best of it.
Forget Me Not
Forget Me Not
Steven White tried for decades to save a small island for someone he’d never met. Waves were slowly whittling it away. He told me the tale as we chopped through the water in a tiny boat on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
“Holland Island once held sixty houses,” Stephan pointed out as we approached what had once been a neighborhood that stretched two miles down the shore. “It was a bustling community that had sixty-eight kids in school until rising tides forced them to abandon the building. My home is all that remains above water.”
Working alone, he hauled hundred pound stones across Chesapeake Bay to shore up the place.
Planting Poems
Planting Poems
In 1915, Robert Frost brought his wife and four children to a small farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a terrible farmer. He used to milk the cows at midnight, so he could sleep late. Townsfolk figured he’d be on their welfare rolls by Christmas. Then, they read something he wrote. It inspired them to do something very special for poets.
Diamond Tooth Mary
Diamond Tooth Mary
Mary Smith McClain is torn between what she loves and what she feels is right. For most of her life she was known as Diamond Tooth Mary, a dazzling blues singer who performed on star studded bills with Duke Ellington and Nate King Cole. She turned her back on the blues and joined the Baptist church. Her pastor said the music was evil. And she believed him. When Mary turned 82, her husband died. Money got tight. Old blues singers don’t have pensions. She accepted an offer to sing in New York City for the first time in 42 years.
Cultural Center of the Country
New York spends more money on the arts than other city in the country, but a lot of those dollars come from outsiders. If you subtract all that out of town money, the place that spends the most per person for culture is Bassett, Nebraska.
Lost Graves
I found myself in a forest filled with forgotten lives. Their final resting places were marked, not with names, but numbered stakes, unnoticed, until Bud Merritt stumbled upon them. He found the first of six lost graveyards at what was once the largest mental hospital in America: Milledgeville, Georgia.
The Oldest Doctor Whoever Lived
Dr. Leila Denmark opened her practice in 1928. She was Atlanta’s first female pediatrician and was still doctoring babies at age 90. Dr. Denmark healed children until her retirement at 104. That retirement lasted a decade. She lived to be 114, the oldest doctor in...
A Selfless Man
A surveyor from Valentine, Nebraska, was charting the land of the Rio Grande. He stopped for lunch and took a nap. When he awoke, poor people had gathered to eat his scraps. That bothered Frank Ferree. It bothered him so much he sold all his land to buy food and medicine for the poor. He kept nothing for himself. For 40 years Frank Ferree fed thousands on both sides of the Rio Grande. Five Presidents of Mexico have given him gold medals. He melted them down and bought beans.
Homesteading Class
There’s a mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the locals call “Misery Heights.” The last cowboys left there in the 1930s. It was too remote to raise horses, too cold to grow crops. Just right to teach something about life. Jack Snoble teaches a course in homesteading. Class size, one student.
VOLUNTEER CAFE SAVES TOWN
There are a lot of little towns in farm country fighting for their lives. In Havana, North Dakota, the sun hasn’t set. When the town’s cafe went under, all 158 people in town volunteered to cook. It became something of a competition. They made $51,000, enough to open a new grocery store, build sidewalks and put an archery range. Now they dream of a jacuzzi.
See Yourself as Others See You
H. Lee Waters didn’t set out to preserve history. He was simply looking for a way to survive. People couldn’t afford his portraits during the Great Depression, so he picked up a film camera, taught himself to you use it and persuaded theater owners to show the films for free, as an added attraction at the movies. If more folks the usual showed up, he’d take a small percentage.
For six years, H. Lee never missed a show, until one night his wife called him and said she was going to the hospital and bring their first baby into the world. By the time he got there, that baby had already arrived. He decided to stay home instead of traveling. He returned to the portrait studio. At 87, he was still clicking away at life — and getting the best of it.
Forget Me Not
Forget Me Not
Steven White tried for decades to save a small island for someone he’d never met. Waves were slowly whittling it away. He told me the tale as we chopped through the water in a tiny boat on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
“Holland Island once held sixty houses,” Stephan pointed out as we approached what had once been a neighborhood that stretched two miles down the shore. “It was a bustling community that had sixty-eight kids in school until rising tides forced them to abandon the building. My home is all that remains above water.”
Working alone, he hauled hundred pound stones across Chesapeake Bay to shore up the place.
Planting Poems
Planting Poems
In 1915, Robert Frost brought his wife and four children to a small farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a terrible farmer. He used to milk the cows at midnight, so he could sleep late. Townsfolk figured he’d be on their welfare rolls by Christmas. Then, they read something he wrote. It inspired them to do something very special for poets.
Recent Posts
- Finding Hope
Every generation faces terrible challenges. Wars, depressions, holocausts. Polio, Aids, pandemics. We cannot predict what will come, but it is well to remember people who play a bad hand well, over and over again. They are why America not only survives, but thrives. Let me share with you one of my TODAY Show reports that was so much more than a weather story.
- Doctor Will Come to You
I remember when milk and doctors came to your house. Fred Richardson still does — in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago. He is a brave man with a big heart. Dr. Richardson returned to his old neighborhood to open a one-man practice. Scary? No. His neighbors keep him safe.
- 40 Acres and a Mule
The Federal government gave some starving folks 40 acres and a mule during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It saved them. I found them 50 years later.
- Mother’s Day Dad
The Alonso’s lost their mother during the 9/11 attack in 2001. Janet went to work at the World Trade Center that morning and never returned. Robert was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and a baby boy with Down syndrome.
“If I was to tell you I did this by myself, I’d be a liar; I’d be a flat-out liar,” Robert said. “I got my mom, my aunt, my pop to help.”
But he never returned to work at the pizza place he owned in Stony Point, New York. His family substituted for him. “I owe it to my children to be around,” Robert explained. “If I buried my grief in work, my kids would lose both their parents.”
How’d they turn out?
- Above the Whispers and Stares
Not all my stories were done in America. I found Doug Mealing in Australia. One side of his face grew faster than the other. He was born with Elephant Man’s Disease. Mealing worked far above the whispers and stares repairing the old Sydney Harbor bridge, but could not climb above his problems, until a woman’s love earned him a job on the number one soap opera in Australia.
- Immigrant Surgeon
One of the finest brain surgeons in the world began his journey very differently from most doctors. The hands that pluck out brain tumors once picked vegetables for $22 a day. Alfredo Quinones was a migrant worker living in an old camper top in the middle of California field.
HOW DID A GUY LIKE THAT BECOME A DOCTOR?
- School of the Air
Long before Covid-19 made virtual classrooms a necessity, students in Australia’s vast Outback were learning via two-way radio. The Warwick family built an extraordinary life in that dessert on not much more than hope. Their ranch sits on some of the driest country on earth. In order to make a modest living they farmed one hundred and twenty five square miles. Their kids’ closest friends lived six hundred miles away. The children dressed up on Halloween and described their costumes to their teacher over a short-wave radio. They experienced the first chapter of modern communication.
/
- Piano Boxer
A second grade girl gave me a lesson in equal rights long before the women’s movement — equal rights, equal lefts — punched my lights out. Imagine if she’d had some training. Doyle Weaver, a piano teacher, teaches arpeggios by day, punches by night. Weaver is the founder and coach of the oldest girl’s boxing team in America.
- Helping Artists Survive
The beauty of this rare land masks how difficult life can be out here. The Painted Dessert is chiseled by wind. The sun leaves creek beds peeling. In this barren place, Loren Phillips seems compelled to enhance life to add a beauty of his own.
- Bus Boy Referee
What's my all-time favorite story? The next one. A storyteller never stops searching. At the core of this lifelong quest lies a simple truth - the shortest distance between two people - no matter how different - is a good story. Once you know a person's story, you begin to see how much we are alike and that helps you appreciate what each of us brings to the mix of America. That's not always obvious at first. I was shooting a story in Las Vegas, Nevada, when I stumbled across a better one. That city’s only commerce is hope. Instant winners. Methodical losers. It is also home to the anonymous thousands who feed those dreams. And, have dreams of their own. Back home in the Philippines, Carlos Padilla is something of a legend. He has refereed 23 World Championship fights, but in between, he takes orders, as a bus boy.
- Old Man on the Mountain
Niels Nielsen volunteered to sling from a slender thread of steel half a mile high to repair a Great Stone Face in New Hampshire. His father once worked on the Statue of Liberty. Niel liked to think he carried a torch, too. Folks gathered below to watch and wonder: Is that the face of an old man on the mountain? It is seen from only one direction. Without people, it is merely a pile of rocks. Perhaps that is why the Old Man is so special. Real men struggled to keep him from disappearing. They failed. The Face collapsed on May 3, 2003. You can still see it here.
- Who’s the Savage?
You remember Sitting Bull who helped defeat General Custer at the Little Big Horn? He was a Great War Chief of the Lakota Sioux Indian tribe. He was also a man who cared deeply about children.
On his trip to New York City with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Sitting Bull was moved by the orphans he saw on the streets. He spent his pay buying them food which he handed out in a back alley. Ron His Horse is Thunder told me that story. He is Sitting Bull’s Great-Great-Great grandson. Ron let me ponder what he had said. Finally, he looked up and asked, "Who's the savage?”
- College by 12
One mother told me her Home Schooling curriculum includes Honors laundry and AP vacuuming. And then — there’s the Harding family who sent 6 kids kids to college by age 12. That’s right. 12. The Harding’s offer tired parents some tips.
- Vietnam Wall Washers
Michael Najarian found his name chiseled on a list of war dead. His was one of more than 58 thousand names on the Wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Najarian served in Vietnam, but was still very much alive.
"I just sort of sank on the ground," he said, shaking his head. "I couldn't believe it."
You may not either.
- Best Lessons Learned Outside the Classroom
Sometime the best college lessons are learned outside the classroom. A young man with Down Syndrome taught a fraternity what no professor ever could. Todd Martz respected everybody the same. Black. White. Red. Yellow. Short. Fat. Ugly. Beautiful. The fraternity brothers were so taken with Todd’s approach to life, they did something extraordinary.
- Who Invented the Wild West?
Lewis Whirlwind Horse was the last living member of a traveling troupe of cowboys and Indians who invented the way we imagine the Old West must have been. “We were playing at the old Madison Square Garden in New York City, which is neither square nor a garden,” Whirlwind Horse said. “Buffalo Bill directed us to ride our horses around a circled ‘wagon train’ so we could show off our riding skills. My role in the act was to grab a pioneer woman and take her into a tepee set up at the other end of the arena. She was supposed to scream until Buffalo Bill came and rescued her, but we Indians were doing the screeching. You see, we played gin rummy while we were waiting for Bill to come shoot us, and she sat in on the game. She was the best card player in the show. Beat us every time. We were supposed to be killing her, but her card playing was killing us!”
- America’s Largest Do It Yourself
Three little boys live in a magical place riddled with secret tunnels: a 35,000-square-foot building their parents are restoring, mostly by themselves.
That's right: a home one-third the size of Downton Abbey — without the downstairs help.
- Cold Case
TV would have us believe that "high-tech" catches criminals, but only about a third of the cases get solved with DNA evidence. The rest rely on people whose minds never retire.
BILL PETERS SOLVED THE MYSTERY TO A LIFE LONG ROMANCE.
- Old West Humor
The west of legend has so captured our imagination that the real west is often overlooked. For nearly 30 years cowboy cartoonist Ace Reid gave voice to people we thought we know, but never asked. His cartoon series “Cowpokes” was read in Gobblers Knob, Utah and Fishtail, Montana, hundreds of small towns where cowboys still challenge a hardscrabble land.
- Pole Ferry
Growing up, I spent my summers in farm country — Kansas — with a grandfather who loved to tell stories. Perhaps that’s why I got into the storytelling business.
My grandfather told me that when he was 18, he was what used to be called “all hat and no cattle,” a kid with little money and no property.
“One of my biggest thrills,” he said, “was loading my buggy and best girl on a river ferry. That was like a ride at Disneyland. The ferryman would push us across with a pole and an encyclopedic knowledge of the currents. Quite an adventure in 1903!”
Grandpa would have loved Ashley Pillar, one of the last of those old-time river ferrymen.
- Little Dead School House
The road out of town is the only way the road seems to go. So few families remained in McLeod, North Dakota, Jan Herbranson ran out of kids at the old one-room school. Normally, that would spell the end of a place like McLeod. The school closed in 1986. But in this village of 50, four babies born. When they grew up, children returned to her little dead school house and so did Jan Herbranson.
- Castle Tooth
Each evening Dr. Mort Copenhaven drove 900 feet up the side of Camelback Mountain to his own castle. It took him 13 years to chisel his home out of a cliff. He did all the work. Mort had no formal training, but he was a dentist. Figured that building a castle on the side of a mountain wouldn’t be much different than planting a false tooth.
- Kids Soap Opera
If you want to know what's happening at Henderson school, you don't join the Yearbook staff. You watch a Soap Opera at lunch time. Each Friday, the kids in the cafeteria share a second carton of milk with "The Growing Years." A show they write and produce themselves about their own problems.
- Marathon Mom
Vivian White is no taller than an August cornstalk, but -- at age fifty-one -- she was determined to run 6,500 miles. That was the distance from her home in Illinois to her son's front-line Army post in Iraq.
"Every mile that I jog,” she said, “brings him that much closer to being home, at least in my mind.”
Vivian logged more than a thousand of those miles in the first 6 months after Brian went to war. She had 5,500 to go. Friends quickly realized that she would need help covering that distance.
- Tea and Sugar Train
This train travels the longest stretch of railroad track on earth without a turn — 299 miles. There’s a bank car, theater car, grocery store car, a car filled with doctor’s offices, one that has a chapel. Sixty train cars. A mile long. Most do not have a passage way between them, so people who work in one seldom see those who work in another. The “Tea and Sugar” meanders more than a thousand miles across South Australia, stopping whenever someone waves it down. Its arrival in remote places is the social event of the week. All the families linger for hours buying impulsively, trying to extend the moment when there is laughter and community.
- Skunk Train
A redwood forest 140 miles North of San Francisco is a place so bountiful and full of peace, "Nothing around here is ever killed. It always dies of old age and cholesterol," Juanita Dahl grins. She lives miles from the nearest highway, but not alone. Each morning, a one car train rattles up from Fort Bragg on the California coast to snatch the mail and take Jaunita to the grocery store.
- Grease Car
A little band of inventors are refitting cars to run on left over grease from French fries. Next time you stop for fast food, you can fill up. Twice.
- Laughter Saves a City
Juan Delgadillo looked like a Shriner who had lost his parade. He cruised by my car window on a hot, dusty day west of the Grand Canyon driving an ancient convertible painted the colors of a dripping ice cream cone. It was a griddle hot morning in July, but a decorated Christmas tree stood tall in his back seat. At the top a sign read: “Follow me to Dead Chicken sandwiches.”
- Betting on a Town’s Future
Paid your taxes? Dreaming of a better way to fund government? Maybe more lotteries? Back in 1986, governments were beginning to experiment with gambling to raise money. The mayor of McClusky, North Dakota mayor bet on his town's future. He left it to chance. Friday nights down at Elms cafe, you could find him dealing blackjack. The money he won went to charity. All of it. In four years, this village of 650 people had raised $57-thousand dollars. Gambling. Players figure they couldn’t lose. If they did, their money helped paint the town's pool or buy a new ambulance. It had been a blessing for some, a curse for others.
- Giving Back on Block Island
Fred Benson was the most successful person I ever met. He lived on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. Fred was police chief, fire chief and the state Driver’s license examiner. He was also head of the rescue squad, baseball coach, teacher, builder and President of the Chamber of Commerce. Five times. Then — he won the Rhode Island state lottery. Five hundred thousand dollars. He threw the biggest birthday party anyone could remember. Invited all the children on the island and announced he’d pay the college tuition of any child who wanted to go. Fred always thought of his community first. In the Seventies there was a housing shortage on Block Island. So, at 54, Fred went to college and got a degree. He taught high school shop. The island’s four builders got their start with Fred. He never married. Never had children. But, for 82 years, he dedicated himself to the people of Block island. Fred Benson had found a safe harbor and then showed others the way.
- Love in the Kitchen
A caring heart is as good a measure as any, when you try to evaluate success. World-class Chef Scott Peacock once told me, "It's always the most important ingredient.”
He was lifting a cake out of the oven. Turned and dropped it on the kitchen table next to an elderly woman.
"Tell me if it's ready?"
Edna Lewis didn’t poke it or taste it. She cocked her head and lowered her ear to the dish.
“It’s fading away,” it’s fading away
There was a reason she was in the cookbook hall of fame. She cooked
by ear.
- A Hunk of Learning Love
Some of us are lucky enough to have had a great teacher. A cheerleader who changed our lives. Frank Cooper told his students something that stuck — Keep Your Promise. He said that dressed as Elvis.
- Photos of the Overlooked
When Joe Clark left home, he carried with him pictures of friends and neighbors who would set a course for his life. Joe went to work for the great news magazines, Time and Life and Newsweek, capturing the faces of common people. Seasons, like sign posts, mark the time. In the fall of his 76th year, Joe Clark decided to come back to Cumberland Gap for a harvest of memory.
- I Wouldn’t Choose Sight Follow up
27 years after my first story, artist Michael Naranjo, who lost his sight in the Vietnam War, has become a world renowned sculptor, despite his total blindness. The Native American sees more clearly than most.
- I Wouldn’t Choose Sight
Native American sculptor Michael Naranjo lost his sight during the Vietnam war. He created a 17 foot sculpture by touch.
- Saving the First Draft of History
Newspapers are the first draft of history, so it makes sense that a museum stepped up to save its small town newspaper and the story of their lives. The Silverton, Colorado, Standard & the Miner is now a National Historic site.
- Glass Harp
When the Renaissance Players perform in Miami, Jay Brown tunes up with a turkey baster, and in just a few minutes people hear him play Mozart on 47 brandy snifters filled with water. It’s no gimmick. Jay Brown’s instrument was once more popular than the piano.
- A New Kind of Suburb
Beverly Bickle moved to the suburbs so she could have more time with her family. Trouble is, more than half of us were already there. Suburban roads were so clogged before the pandemic, most of us spent 8 weeks a year, just to commute to work. 13 trips a day are about average for suburban living. Nothing is nearby. But a small group of suburban planners were trying to change all that.
- Payback Painter
Bussey, Iowa may make you homesick for a place you’ve probably never been. Just 422 people lived there the day I dropped by. But this small town has made a big difference in Todd Spaur’s life. He was in a terrible accident two decades ago when his car flipped off a bridge and lay hidden in heavy underbrush for 16 hours. He could not call for help or call out because he’d broken his back, neck and most of the bones in his face. Doctors said he would never walk.
“I could wiggle one toe,” Todd says.
The town offered to look after Todd while he proved the doctors wrong. He decided to take art classes with some of the money townspeople donated to help him design a new life. The man who struggled to stand for 18 years, now dangles from a cherry picker two stories tall. He’s painting a picture of all those people who pitched in when he needed them most.
Life has taken Todd Spaur to such a dark place, perhaps it is easier for him to see beauty. The fellow with 9 steel plates in his body and a fractured hip vertebrae, has been painting this gift on the side of downtown wall for 10 painful months. In Todd’s mural you see America that was and in this place still is.
Its not just a painting. Its everybody’s story.
- Summit Town
Folks in Polk, Nebraska prefer to get their news the old fashioned way — in a newspaper, the Polk Progress. Its editor Norris Alfred is the only Democrat in the county. Why do people buy his newspaper? “I play poker with a lot of them. And I lose.” Norris loves slow news days. Gives him time to put things into perspective, something he’s done so well for 70 years.
Norris Alfred. In search of great truths. Or a minor truth. Or two.
- Diamond Tooth Mary
Mary Smith McClain is torn between what she loves and what she feels is right. For most of her life she was known as Diamond Tooth Mary, a dazzling blues singer who performed on star studded bills with Duke Ellington and Nate King Cole. She turned her back on the blues and joined the Baptist church. Her pastor said the music was evil. And she believed him. When Mary turned 82, her husband died. Money got tight. Old blues singers don’t have pensions. She accepted an offer to sing in New York City for the first time in 42 years.
- Cultural Center of the Country
New York spends more money on the arts than other city in the country, but a lot of those dollars come from outsiders. If you subtract all that out of town money, the place that spends the most per person for culture is Bassett, Nebraska.
“Huh?” Yep.
- Lost Graves
I found myself in a forest filled with forgotten lives. Their final resting places were marked, not with names, but numbered stakes, unnoticed, until Bud Merritt stumbled upon them. He found the first of six lost graveyards at what was once the largest mental hospital in America: Milledgeville, Georgia.
- The Oldest Doctor Whoever Lived
Dr. Leila Denmark opened her practice in 1928. She was Atlanta’s first female pediatrician and was still doctoring babies at age 90. Dr. Denmark healed children until her retirement at 104. That retirement lasted a decade. She lived to be 114, the oldest doctor in the world.
- A Selfless Man
A surveyor from Valentine, Nebraska, was charting the land of the Rio Grande. He stopped for lunch and took a nap. When he awoke, poor people had gathered to eat his scraps. That bothered Frank Ferree. It bothered him so much he sold all his land to buy food and medicine for the poor. He kept nothing for himself. For 40 years Frank Ferree fed thousands on both sides of the Rio Grande. Five Presidents of Mexico have given him gold medals. He melted them down and bought beans.
- Homesteading Class
There’s a mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the locals call “Misery Heights.” The last cowboys left there in the 1930s. It was too remote to raise horses, too cold to grow crops. Just right to teach something about life. Jack Snoble teaches a course in homesteading. Class size, one student.
- VOLUNTEER CAFE SAVES TOWN
There are a lot of little towns in farm country fighting for their lives. In Havana, North Dakota, the sun hasn't set. When the town's cafe went under, all 158 people in town volunteered to cook. It became something of a competition. They made $51,000, enough to open a new grocery store, build sidewalks and put an archery range. Now they dream of a jacuzzi.
- See Yourself as Others See You
H. Lee Waters didn’t set out to preserve history. He was simply looking for a way to survive. People couldn’t afford his portraits during the Great Depression, so he picked up a film camera, taught himself to you use it and persuaded theater owners to show the films for free, as an added attraction at the movies. If more folks the usual showed up, he’d take a small percentage.
For six years, H. Lee never missed a show, until one night his wife called him and said she was going to the hospital and bring their first baby into the world. By the time he got there, that baby had already arrived. He decided to stay home instead of traveling. He returned to the portrait studio. At 87, he was still clicking away at life — and getting the best of it.
- Forget Me Not
Steven White tried for decades to save a small island for someone he’d never met. Waves were slowly whittling it away. He told me the tale as we chopped through the water in a tiny boat on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
"Holland Island once held sixty houses,” Stephan pointed out as we approached what had once been a neighborhood that stretched two miles down the shore. “It was a bustling community that had sixty-eight kids in school until rising tides forced them to abandon the building. My home is all that remains above water.”
Working alone, he hauled hundred pound stones across Chesapeake Bay to shore up the place.
- Planting Poems
In 1915, Robert Frost brought his wife and four children to a small farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a terrible farmer. He used to milk the cows at midnight, so he could sleep late. Townsfolk figured he’d be on their welfare rolls by Christmas. Then, they read something he wrote. It inspired them to do something very special for poets.
- Home Plate Wedding
Some folks do not see limits, only opportunities. Ed Lucas decided he wanted to broadcast baseball games, after watching the first nationally televised playoff. He ran outside to celebrate his decision. The twelve year old fired a fastball to a boyfriend with a bat.
“The ball came back and boom, hit me right between the eyes.” Destroyed his retinas. Left him totally blind.
- 1929 or Bust
Aren’t we all dreaming of breaking out? Seeing something besides the place where we live? Sometimes in life you have to get lost -- to find yourself. Roy and Anna Williams set out from their home in Florence, Kentucky, to circle the west in a car that ran on dreams.
- Amish Coach
Amish Country. Most of the kids on this tiny high school basketball team are shorter than their coach, but at the turn of the century, they won 49 or their first 53 games. A record unmatched in the entire county.
- 70 Year Old Middle Schooler
John Suta bought tarnished french horn for $75 bucks. His retirement pay left little for lessons, so he found another way to learn how to play it. He showed up at Roosevelt Middle School in Eugene, Oregon, and asked to join the beginning band.
Okay, the kids thought it was funny, then they heard the seventy-four year old’s first sweet note.
- Native American Medicine
Some say Rocky Stallings knows more about early Native American life than anyone in the country. He listened to the elders. Listened and learned. Where most folks see weeds, Rocky was taught to find medicine. On a hill near his home in San Antonio, Texas, he has found 197 different kinds.
- Helping Buddy Walk Again
The black muscle car roared up. Growling, throbbing. A tiny silver skull wired to the brake lights blinked with red eyes, the same color as the cross - painted on the car's roof. Two words decorated its side: "Bone Mobile." Anyone looking for wonder among the world's ordinary stuff would, as they say in old movies, "follow that car.”
- Silent Dreams
Janelle Barencott has never heard the bounce of a ball, the swish of a net. But on this day, she got to play against the best of the best, players dreaming of jobs in the National Women's Basketball Association. Janelle’s dreams are silent.
- Budding Larry Bird
March Madness gives us a chance to watch the superstars of tomorrow. Before Larry Bird became a basketball legend, he was a shy student. I covered one of his first games. Hop in my Way Back Machine for a bit of March Madness from 1979. You’ll be watching the only undefeated major college basketball team in the country back then — the Sycamores of Terra Haute, Indiana.
- Midnight Basketball
My grandfather’s basketball coach was James Naismith, the man who invented the sport. In those days the Founding Father had not yet punched a hole in the bottom of the peach basket that was used instead of a net. “Coach,” grandpa said, “this game would be a whole lot faster if we didn’t have to climb a ladder to pull out the ball!” Few people alive have ever heard Naismith’s voice. Here’s a rare recording: https://goo.gl/s8yVK1
Basketball has always been more than a game. It brings together groups that may have no other common ground.
- Teen Drifter Becomes Basketball Star
Jennifer Annable was five months pregnant when she moved to Seattle with fifty-bucks in her pocket. She worked long hours, struggling to become a teacher. Eventually, she ran a school for children with special needs. Melvin Jones was one of them. He was 16, drifting on the streets of Seattle. She made up a room for him. She had already opened her home to five kids. Why would a divorced, single mom take on such a challenge?
- Lost City of Cecil B. Demille
Oscar night. Time for little known Hollywood history. Amateur archeologists have uncovered a lost Egyptian city. Not on the Nile. Beneath the sands of coastal California. It was buried by that Pharaoh of films, Hollywood Director Cecil B. DeMille.
- What She Cannot Live Without
Doris Travis’s talent brought her to Broadway twice. The first time she was 14. Doris did something no other 14-year-old had ever done. She danced her way into one of the most popular shows in New York City. It took her more than twenty seven million minutes to get back. She was 93.
- A True Fairy Tale Wedding
Deborah Huddleston fell in love with Glenn Gammage. They were married out on the prairie, dreaming dreams, as if they were new. He speaks 5 languages and has circled the world with the U.S. Navy. She has seldom left Texas. They fell in love and decided to marry, never having met.
- The Bus Will Find You
Detroit was once the envy of the world, one of its richest cities, built on automobiles and broad shoulders. In this century, it went bankrupt. But bankruptcy didn’t mean a lack of good ideas. They are still there, in the shadows. One sprang from Andy Didorosi: He discovered a way to make bus rides a little less stressful.
- TV’s Birthplace
Television did not begin in New York or Los Angeles. It was the brainchild of a fourteen-year-old farm boy, the vision of a fellow with a funny name: Philo T. Farnsworth. Philo was plowing a field on the family farm near Rigby, Idaho, day dreaming about sending pictures through the sky, when he noticed the sun glinting off the parallel lines he had made in the dirt. In a single, blazing moment of inspiration, it occurred to him that a picture could be broken down into lines, too, beamed into space and then put back together on a television set.
- Clown Clergy
The new methodist minister in Sparta, Georgia, was a guy with a red nose. No, not from drinking or sunburn. Folks thought they were hiring the Reverend Bill Matthews. What they got was Bags the clown.
- The REAL Johnny Appleseed
Paul Rokich grew up in the old American Smelter camp in Tooerle, Utah. Copper lay under the Oquirrh Mountains. To get it, workers nearly killed the soil. The Oquirrh's were so polluted, experts told Rokich they could not be saved. One moonlit night, he flipped over the copper company's fence, alone in the darkened desert with a knapsack and two trees. Let’s let Paul tell the tale.
- Legless Wrestler
The more of America I see, the more I find people who are ruled by courage, love, endurance and are driven to work hard no matter what may befall them. They are often overlooked and under reported. Nick Ackerman was the first disabled athlete picked as NCAA outstanding college player in the country, even though he was competing with no legs. He beat all the able bodied wrestlers. “I always thought I was the normal one," Nick grinned. "I used to break the legs off my G.I. Joe Action figures, to make 'em cool like me.”
- So Cold, Spit Bounces
There is still a little frontier in all of us. Something that urges us out beyond the limits of our settled lives. Diana Moroney shrugs off the world she lives in to find her heart in another. She races a team of sled dogs 11-hundred miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, sliding through a snowy wilderness so big, it would cover everything from Maine to the tip of Florida.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
Schedule an Event
bob.dotson@icloud.com