Bob Dotson
AMERICA’S STORYTELLER
Love my stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things? I’m donating Autographed Copies of this New York Times Best Seller to help maintain the American Story Video Archive at Syracuse University. All proceeds go to the archive.
Bob Dotson
America survives and thrives because of all those names we don’t know, seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. I found them while crisscrossing the country, four million miles, practically non-stop, for half a century, searching for stories hiding in history’s shadow.
Telling tales on television is a bit like writing on smoke:
That’s why I saved these stories of us.
AMERICAN STORIES VIDEOS
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Stories Hiding in History’s Shadow
The Last Living
Heart Donor
Childhood should be a season of dreams, but some children awake each morning from an American nightmare. Clara Hale saved hundreds of them.
Success, Not Bought. Earned
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.
Orphan Train
“No one succeeds alone,” the old man with a faraway look told me. He pointed to a picture taken when he was a boy.
“I was a lonesome little fellow,” clutching a suitcase, waiting for a train.
America thrives on rugged individualism, but look more closely and you’ll see other hands that guide our success.
Want proof? Click on this story from so long ago, Tom Brokaw and I had color in our hair.
“The shortest distance between two people is a good story. Once you know someone’s story, you begin to see not just how you differ, but what you have in common.”
–Bob Dotson
NEW BOOK!!
THIRD EDITION
Make it Memorable, Writing and Packaging Visual News with Style
In Make It Memorable, former NBC News correspondent Bob Dotson and New York Times visual investigations producer Drew Jordan present a unique and engaging hands-on approach to the craft of visual storytelling. The third edition offers new insight for the digital age and a step-by-step explanation of how to find and create all kinds of visual stories under tight deadlines. In addition to new scripts annotated with behind-the-scenes insights and structural comments, the book includes links to online videos of all the story examples.
Recently Featured Stories
Saving Soles and Souls
Most people only witnessed the tragic events of 9/11. It was my fate to live it. I moved to New York City at the beginning of the century to work full time for the TODAY Show. A year later, I was standing outside a little chapel that survived the hell that leveled skyscrapers of concrete and steel.
Terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center. A dozen modern buildings toppled all around, but St. Paul’s — pieced together with brick and timber — stood without so much as a broken window.
The Rev. Daniel Matthews, rector of the parish of Trinity Church, walked with me through the church’s graveyard, which was covered in ash. The dust of the dead had settled in the chapel cemetery.
Matthews stopped to dust off a headstone. “You know what everyone in the neighborhood is calling St. Paul’s, don’t you? The Little Chapel That Stood.” He looked up and smiled.
“The most astounding thing for me was not the soot and the dust, but the paper,” he continued. “There must have been 10 million pieces. Everybody’s desk wound up flying out the window.”
Old School Football
When Stan Smagala was born, some football teams still wore leather helmets. At 43 he finally made the team. At the time, he became the oldest college football player in the country. To be able to play, Stan set aside his successful insurance business and became a full time student at Moraine Valley Community. The campus malt shop had changed a bit in 23 years, but not Stan. He was convinced he could still play football. He practiced with his son until he could run 40 yards in 4.6 seconds. Stan made the team, but he broke his ribs, jammed two fingers and sprained his ankle. Football isn’t his only passion. He likes to stay up until 4 in the morning, playing base in a band. Stan showed up for this first game four hours later.
Missing Mom on 9/11
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.”
9/11 Story that Inspired “Come from Away”
Americans open their hearts and wallets all the time, but rarely do we hear about what the world gives to us and that seems just as important. On the eve of 9/11 there were some villages in Newfoundland, Canada, where unemployment hovered as high as fifty percent, but that remote island in the North Atlantic—Canada’s poorest province—set a mark for charity, worthy of the history books. I was one of the first to tell their story, traveling to Newfoundland as winter set in. Later, it became a hit Broadway musical.
LET’S MEET THE REAL PEOPLE WHO HELPED US IN THAT DARK HOUR.
Road to Nowhere
You ever wonder why cowboys seldom sing songs about a bus? Buses fill the lonesome spaces the stage coach left behind. Yet, there are no tales of Bus drivers derring-do. No teary eyed nostalgia. Bus drivers may not have settled the west, but they sure move it around.
Choices in the Autumn of Life
The autumn of life brings choices. Decisions. Emil Kech was 73. Age was beginning to nag him like a bad cold. An arthritic ankle threatened to lock Keck out of the forest he loves. Emil and his wife Penny were the only workers in the U.S. Forest Service who lived full time in the wilderness.
A Coach for Those Who Will Never be Stars
There’s a group of kids from a tough neighborhood who stand out from the rest. They wear ties and are clean shaven — all because of an unassuming teacher named Bob Salisbury. Each day, he teaches six special education classes. After school he coaches basketball. Works hardest with those who will never be stars.
Lawyer Sawyer
Josh Powell was born in Kentucky hill country and raised on a farm. He worked his way through law school in Atlanta, landed a job with one of the city’s best known law firms and then gave it all up to run a one-man sawmill.
Dust Bowl Survivors
The Great Depression did not begin with the Stock Market Crash. It began with dust. Dust that swept from a hundred million acres. Texas to Montana. Day after day for 10 years. It fell on the Great Plains like a coffee colored snow. Killing cattle and covering crops. 12 million tons of dust fell on Chicago. 4 pounds for every person in the city. The rest soared on toward the Atlantic. Ships 300 miles east of Philadelphia had dust on their decks. Most farm families moved to California, but some stayed. And survived.
An Artist Who Paints with Nature
Jimmy Lee Suddeth drew his first picture in the dirt. It washed he away with the evening rains. He never had time for formal training. Never went to town for art supplies. He made his own from nature. Now his paintings, made entirely of natural material, hang in art galleries and fetch big bucks.
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