School of the Air

by bob.dotson | May 7, 2024 | Blog, Hiding in History's Shadow | 0 comments

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.

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Forget Me NotMarch 25, 2024
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"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.”
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Love in the KitchenMarch 24, 2024
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https://youtu.be/nP0WKXxo0ng
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“Well, our seats were kinda high up,” he said with a slow grin.
“How high?”
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https://youtu.be/3nTEcdPKVg0
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https://youtu.be/DcYJyOoqk44
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https://youtu.be/UA7EXn1RTTU
Four CornersMarch 15, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/RC_tCIRMmTw
Angels on My RoofMarch 14, 2024
Rachel Johnson races the garbage men each morning. She makes a living on what they come to throw away.
America survives and thrives because of all those names we don’t know, seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. They don’t run for president or go on talk shows, but without them, the best of America would not exist.
https://youtu.be/UzG4_KQn3h0
So Cold, Spit BouncesMarch 13, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/PRvvNAYFORg
Dancing into MemoryMarch 12, 2024
In Radio City Music Hall, the years do not flow back into the past. They gather invisibly around you. Each Christmas the Rockettes dance into our memories. Doris Carie was a Rockette at 17, the youngest girl in the line. They lived in the theater from 8 in the morning until 11 at night. After a year, she was sore all over. She went home to Georgia, but she never forgot the lessons.
https://youtu.be/XgjsccdzYnw
TV’s BirthplaceMarch 11, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/_q9MHQg_eNw
Teen CinemaMarch 10, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/tPkL0kFf6mc?t=1
Lost City of Cecil B. DemilleMarch 9, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/J2hMCChTIo0
Prison BarberMarch 8, 2024
Bob Stanfill spent his first night in jail at age 9. For two decades he was in and out so often, he expected to die beneath prison towers. Until one day, he married into a remarkable family. They helped Bob open his own barbershop. Surrounded him with customers. And kept him out of prison for 30 years. Now he’s back. By choice.
FAMILY UNLOCKED HIS LIFE. NOW HE HOLDS THE KEY FOR OTHERS.
https://youtu.be/oN0mY-4N0tk
Singing SullivansMarch 7, 2024
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 …”
https://youtu.be/1nsCVHRXmEQ
One family Saves Another March 6, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/IsgVVnDZfGI
Wanted: Alligator Wrestler March 5, 2024
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.
Driving BlindMarch 4, 2024
Dee Follett has not seen a flower for half a century. She does not hear the bees. For her, summer is just another season of imagination. Dee is both blind and deaf, but each year she tries something no one else would dream. We found her driving a car.
https://youtu.be/aS-yAl8NlIc
Blind MusherMarch 3, 2024
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-iQFBXdIWU
The REAL Johnny AppleseedMarch 2, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/aV0eCAOD0k8
Yellowstone National Park in WinterMarch 1, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/0KOQhXn-oDs
Legless WrestlerFebruary 29, 2024
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.”
https://youtu.be/JuRXkxRvGk0?t=4
Singer Saves a TownFebruary 28, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/aY2d39k3ZtY
Babies Behind BarsFebruary 27, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/tI4D1g7mh04
NBA All-Star’s Greatest Opponent. HimselfFebruary 26, 2024
Chicago Bulls Hall of Famer Bob Love ended up bussing tables in a Seattle restaurant because he suffered from a life time of stuttering.
https://youtu.be/HBIOy6Uy1sc
No PhonesFebruary 25, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/Mgp4o3hLrjk
A Normal LifeFebruary 24, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/Y97zuBqiWS8
Painting his SoulFebruary 23, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/5asqYq0DbOA
If America Had a KingFebruary 22, 2024
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?
https://youtu.be/b5tmR0pc9Dw?t=7
Baseball TryoutsFebruary 21, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/8BBf-ItVZPE
Changing Racial HistoryFebruary 20, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/xqaguGXAHjg
Never Park in Space Reserved for UmpiresFebruary 19, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/cR4tw_E3OjE
Beer Cans Heat homeFebruary 18, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/GR2aIMcPMwI
Boys of WinterFebruary 17, 2024
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?
https://youtu.be/8wpHxGCe0nc
Shadows Play On This StageFebruary 16, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/xS1_6fjnhy0
Until It’s Not Here No MoreFebruary 15, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/3Adr3VNI06A?t=25
Who Makes Those Crazy Valentines?February 14, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/UWaDmJFrQEg
Country Mardi GrasFebruary 13, 2024
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?
https://youtu.be/T_Z0CKvwgJk
Smoking PensFebruary 12, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/DQlYZVI6L-4
Book of LoveFebruary 11, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/xxTLjzJm4KI?t=12
Small Town Singers with Big City VoicesFebruary 10, 2024
We tend to think of classical music as big city music. Oh, there may be a snatch or two out in the country, but most often classical music is something big city folks bus to the boondocks on warm summer nights. That's the image. In Brattleboro, Vermont, it is wrong. Some of the finest classical singers in America live in this village.
https://youtu.be/7Vn4IFGSN48
Small Town FootballFebruary 10, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/MsXg86uG37g
Human JukeboxFebruary 9, 2024
Have we ever said “Happy New” with such a sense of relief? Been a tough year. We all know what is, what ought to be. Few remain who remember what was. I recall a 1988 New Year celebration. It was a couple of beers before closing and the boys down at Brandy's bar were lost on Memory Lane. John Sanderson was a bit fuzzy. He forgot the title of his favorite song. No problem today. Just ask Siri. Back then, Siri hadn’t been born yet. He had to rely on a human jukebox to help him find it.
https://youtu.be/m9BJYDV8YyU
A Coach for Those Who Will Never be StarsFebruary 8, 2024
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.
https://youtu.be/VtSorBcQjec

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