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
Robo Legs
We all remember what happened when two lights blinked bright in Boston’s old North Church. Paul Revere rode away and the American Revolution began, but 25 years before that fateful night, John Childs jumped from the same belfry three times, holding a big umbrella with wings, thus surviving one of the world’s first parachute jumps.
Nearly three centuries later, Army Ranger Monty Reed wasn’t so fortunate. He broke his back when a parachute failed to open. After decades of rehabilitation, he made an amazing recovery and then created something for those who cannot walk.
Put Me In Coach
Lance Hershberger coached high school baseball in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In his spare time, he looked for little kids who’s abilities do not measure up to their love of the game. One year Lance watched four baseball teams tie for the Fort Wayne high school championship. Nearly every player was one he had coached.
Who Created Baseball?
See this guy. Abner Doubleday. Say his name. What comes to mind? Inventor of baseball. Right? Every year, nearly 300,000 people pass through the Baseball Hall of Fame in upstate New York, built to honor this Civil War Hero. Thank Al Spalding for that. He manufactured Sporting equipment and saw dollars draining away when an English employee, Henry Chadwick, pointed out that baseball came from Great Britain. Kids there called it Rounders. Spalding argued the game was one hundred percent American. Chadwick explained that Rounders is played with a bat and ball, a pitcher and a batter who runs counter clockwise around the bases. Case closed. Not quite.
Cops n’ Cons
Time to play a football classic. No, not the Cotton Bowl. One you may not have seen. In 1977, a few Tulsa police officers saw a Burt Reynold’s movie called “The Longest Yard,” in which a jailed football player organizes a prison team to play a team of guards.
The officers were inspired to stage their own game between police and convicts. The result is Tulsa’s annual Cops-Cons Football Game to benefit Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.
Officer Ron Mayfield, a running back, said the game can have its tense moments. “We meet a lot of guys that we personally have put in jail. It makes for an interesting game, but at the end it’s like old friends” who have learned to laugh together. I was the play by play announcer back then. The memory still makes me smile.
The Cons have two big advantages: Time to practice together – two hours a day, five nights a week – and a high percentage of returning starters. Unless a player is paroled or gets into trouble, he has a lifetime contract.
Surviving an Earthquake
Betty Kelly still cannot cross a bridge without flinching. Even now. 33 years later. On this day in 1989, Betty and her husband were driving high over San Francisco Bay, just as an 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.
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.
The Last Train Robber
I found Joe Newton on a dark night out on a dirt road, down wind from the raccoons, behind the bloodhounds. Newton was one of the most successful and least known train robbers in American history. Least known and now the last.
Slower is Better
The only journalism course Norris Alfred ever took, he failed. In 1980, he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. This is what he wrote:
“The concept of progress has a firm hold. We are on the march from Worse to Better. From Cruelty to Compassion. With our bought vote, we cast a hope that the next leader will take us where we should go, confidently heading the parade of progress in an armored limousine.”
How the Jukebox Got its Name
Rock n Roll was born behind the glass windows of a jukebox. An evening’s pleasure for a pocket full of change. Eventually, Rock ’n Roll got its name on one of those glass boxes. Or so we thought, until we met the man behind that famous signature. Rock-ola is David Rockola. He’d been serving up hits for half a century. At 90, he was still making jukeboxes.
Hermit Engineer
At 34 Paul Lutus wanted to get a way from it all, while taking it all with him. He built a cabin in the wilderness with no running water, no telephone — just a cat for company. A cat and a computer. Lutus wanted to see if he could work as well in the woods as he did in the city. He worked better. The computer programmer was a consultant for NASA before he went into the wilderness. He helped get the Viking Space probe to Mars. In his tiny shack, miles from the nearest road, Lutus created a new lighting system that is now part of the space shuttle.
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