Where’s My hat?                              

(pretty close)

 

When people ask me if I’m an Idaho native, I tell them, "No, I came to this state with my pants on."

What they’re really asking, politely, is How did someone like you get to host and guide Outdoor Idaho, the intermountain West’s longest running and most awarded outdoor show? And what’s been the formula for success for almost four decades?

I sometimes ask myself that, too.

So, where to begin.

Traveling with my family in a green American-made station wagon, with a duckling won at a school fair in the far back seat, I arrived in Boise in 1960 with my mom and dad and two brothers. I was ten and fresh off a 5^th grade U.S. geography test where my only mistake was the misspelling of Idaho’s capital city. In hindsight, it seems like an omen. For this young North Dakota transplant, that misspelling was more humiliating than not being a native Idahoan. 

 

I guess my story is not so different from all the others who have poured into the state, except maybe for the duck part. Like most Midwesterners, I knew next to nothing about this strangely configured state. And what I did know turned out to be wrong. Idaho is not the “Tick Fever State,” as one bumper sticker proclaimed. Idaho's crazy border with Montana was not the result of drunken surveyors, and “Idaho” is not an Indian word for “Gem of the Mountains.”

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What hooked me is what has hooked so many others: the Sawtooths. I still remember coming around the bend on Highway 21 near Stanley for the first time. Suddenly my world got a whole lot bigger.

The hook was set in my early teens, during a fifty-mile hike sponsored by the city of Boise, with men and pack horses, and a dozen kids I didn’t know.  After that, personal trips with high school buddies to lakes like Alice and Imogene, Toxaway and Edith pretty much ended any connection I might have had with the state of my birth.

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Growing up Catholic, I studied the Bible, but there was another bible that fascinated me even more. “Mountain Lakes of Idaho,” published by the state’s Fish & Game Department, featured 20 pages of lakes found in various mountain ranges, complete with trails and descriptions about fishing, with easy-to-understand words like “excellent,” “good,” and “poor.”

I still have that 1965 dog-eared pamphlet, and I pull it out when I want to reminisce about how sweet life was back then. My folks would drop us off somewhere along that menacing expanse of towering Sawtooth peaks. After promising to meet them later in the week, we would begin our trek into the “promised land.”  

 

But the Sawtooths had an official name that made it even sweeter. The Idaho Primitive Area had no roads, no motorized vehicles, no permanent buildings. But it did have lots of hiking and camping and mountains of natural beauty. We didn’t realize it at the time, but a decade later that Primitive Area would become the Sawtooth Wilderness, and part of the newly created Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

We took our fishing seriously in the Primitive Area, and made sure we always carried butter and salt, along with oatmeal, rice, dried fruit, and chocolate bars. Our ace in the hole was a small container of worms, sure to impress the large fish our bible promised us. I suspect the prophet Isaiah would have approved of our slavish devotion to God’s creation.

No wonder it took me years to stop seeing Idaho as merely a series of lakes and mountains, with the Sawtooth Mountains the fairest of them all. Idaho was the perfect place for this “mountain man.” Deserts and canyonlands would just have to wait til I was ready.

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Few may know this, but Outdoor Idaho got its start in 1983 as a co-production of the state’s Fish & Game Department and Idaho Public Television. There really wasn’t a blueprint for such a collaborative effort as that, but it did make sense.

Idaho Fish & Game was proud of their cutting-edge projects, and they wanted a TV show that highlighted their efforts, if only to show hunters and anglers what their annual fees were supporting. Each half hour program would feature a handful of “hook and bullet” stories that their constituency could appreciate. Hunter Orange, Salmon Numbers over Lower Granite Dam, and Chukar Survival Rates were high on the list.

 

Idaho Public Television was a scrappy PBS statewide network. Some of its most popular programs were "Nature" and National Geographic specials, so a program devoted to Idaho had a good likelihood of success. Besides, the $25,000 that IdahoPTV received from F&G would help cover travel and some production expenses, and the station would cover everything else, including video staff, camera and editing equipment.

 

The marriage of these two state agencies wasn’t exactly a perfect match. One had Big Bird, the other had a hunting season on big birds. But the show began to find its audience, something that’s especially difficult when there's only one airing a month. The twice-weekly airings would come much later.

 

The two individuals who did most of the work in those early years were writer Royce Williams from F&G and producer/director/videographer/editor Peter Morrill from IdahoPTV. Royce was an eloquent wordsmith, and Peter's shooting and editing brought out the best in Royce's pearls of wisdom.

The host was Doug Copsey, one of the people who helped establish the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. He was equally at home on stage or on a mountain trail. But the first couple of seasons could have been called Indoor Idaho. Doug hosted the show behind a desk in the station’s TV studio, introducing location-produced segments and occasional in-studio interviews.

 

The very first show, in 1983, featured segments on kokanee salmon near Anderson Ranch Dam, dealing with a problem grizzly bear, a road closure that benefited elk habitat, antelope near Arco, and a studio discussion with raptor expert Morley Nelson. It was a magazine program, with segments that didn't necessarily relate to one another. That's something that would change in later years. 

During the third season, Doug left his hosting duties, and Outdoor Idaho took the occasion to move completely out of the studio. It was still a co-production. It just needed a host.

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But why me? Why was I chosen?  It wasn’t because of my excellent outdoor skills, although I had built a log cabin outside Idaho City in the 1970's.  A freak blowdown near the ghost town of Graham had flattened several acres of lodgepole pine, just waiting for someone with an old beat-up truck with terrible brakes, and an unreliable McCulloch chainsaw to haul them away.

 

But back to their choice of Host. I’m pretty sure they chose me because the price was right. I was already on staff, working for the daily public affairs IdahoPTV show, “Idaho Reports.” That meant they wouldn’t have to pay me any extra. Theoretically, I was "free." The price was right. And it helped that I didn’t require much makeup back then and had a halfway pleasant voice, or so I was told. The loser in this deal was "Idaho Reports." That show lost a producing person for a few days a month, and much more in later years.

 

 

And I wore a hat. Granted, it was a black Greek fisherman’s cap, picked up when I was bumming around Europe one winter in the 1970's, but it was a hat, nonetheless.  I had convinced myself that all real outdoorsmen wore hats. For my first hosting duties, I wore the Greek cap. Looking back on that decision, it was a rooky mistake. So was wearing cowboy boots to walk up a sand dune at Bruneau Dunes State Park. 

Royce and Peter decided it was time for an “intervention.” No Greek fisherman’s hat for Outdoor Idaho, and cowboy boots only when appropriate. Did we ever consider a "wardrobe" person? Of course not. This is Public TV. People expected us to look a bit odd. 

 

A new host was also the perfect time to throw off any semblance of the show’s indoor trappings. Instead of a studio, Royce, Peter, and I would head out to exotic places, like Priest Lake,  Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, and the St. Joe River.

To save money, we would drive in the morning, shoot in mid-day, and drive home at night, thus saving on hotels and food whenever possible. When we would enter a show in an Awards contest, they always wanted to know our budget. When we told them, invariably they'd say 'Get real!' We'd tell them, this is as Real as it gets.

 

To give the show that “outdoor” feel, I would talk to the camera along the banks of the Salmon River or in front of an impressive mountain or lake. The words came from Royce. We called them “stand-ups.” A typical show usually had four or five stand-ups, each about 30 seconds in length and sometimes re-written an hour before delivery. They acted as bridges between the various segments. Sometimes the topics had little relationship to each other, like back-yard bird feeding followed by fly tying. But there was just enough connection that a dexterous writer like Royce could exploit and keep the show flowing. I was always impressed.

 

But even when the standups were a bit of a stretch, we figured it was no different from what host Marlin Perkins was probably  doing for Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom,” the leader in national outdoor shows at the time. “While Jim attempts to attach the tracking device to the enraged lion, I’m safe in the chopper. You can be safe, too, with Mutual of Omaha.”                    

Since the standup was the part of the show where I was on-air, I took those moments seriously. Sometimes it was the 6^th or 7th “take” before my walking and talking measured up to everyone’s expectations. We then looked to the cameraman to see if he was happy with his zooms and pans. Sometimes one standup could take half an hour before everyone was satisfied.

I was beginning to see there was nothing easy about going outside to produce an outdoor show.

 

And then there were the unexpected things. I had recently purchased contac lenses and was still getting used to them. As we hiked to Jump Creek Falls in the Owyhees for my first standup, I was lost in thought trying to memorize my lines and didn't realize I had been brushing against foliage along the trail. It didn’t affect the standup that day, but by the next morning, my face had swollen, and I couldn’t open one of my eyes. I didn’t realize just how much the poison ivy had altered the contour of my face until one of my friends approached me and asked if I was Bruce’s brother.

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By the sixth season, the folks at F&G had decided that the agency’s hunting and fishing community preferred their money be spent on stories about hunting and fishing.  By then Peter and Royce had moved on to other assignments, and I had taken up many of the writing and producing duties for the show.

Apparently, my choice of topics was not helping to keep the co-production alive. The folks at Fish & Game were not as interested as I was about rock climbing at the City of Rocks, hiking to high mountain lakes with llamas, searching for morel mushrooms, hang gliding, and rafting the Bruneau River with the first kayakers to make that journey.  But they were stories that we were convinced our viewers wanted to see.

 

The good news was that the show was expanding its viewership. The bad news was that Outdoor Idaho was no longer a co-production.

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That led, literally, to the $25,000 question: Would Idaho Public Television step up to the plate, take on the entire responsibility for funding the program, and give Outdoor Idaho a chance to prosper?  Or would the station follow the path of least resistance and do what most public TV stations in the country did when something was too pricey for the bottom line... just drop the program and move on. 

 

I remember a brief conversation I had with station manager Jerry Garber. He asked me pointblank, “Can the station realistically pull off an outdoor series by itself?” I say it was a brief discussion because I uttered something like ‘Hell, yes, we can. And you won’t regret it!” Later I came close to eating those words.

But back to that ‘free’ part.

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I got into television not because I took a communication course in college. I got into TV because I was watching “Idaho Reports”  one cold Friday evening in February in my unfinished log cabin outside Idaho City, where visquine substituted for windows.  At the time, “Idaho Reports” was a daily program that covered the antics of the Idaho Legislature. The show’s set was located on the top floor of the Capitol building, making it easier to nab lawmakers for the live 6:30 pm daily program. 

 

One of the reporters, Jean McNeil, was talking about some legislative issue, and suddenly she just disappeared. "Automation" had kicked in, and a BBC program started airing. Whatever the reason, It was 7 pm on a dark winter evening outside Idaho City when I decided I could handle the job. 

 

I began my letter writing campaign the next week, touting my many qualifications. Now, I was just brash enough to think I could do almost anything I set my mind to.  After all, I was teaching 8^th grade in Idaho City; writing and editing the Idaho World, the state’s oldest newspaper; keeping the Boise Basin library operating; and tending bar at O’Leary’s Saloon, while also finishing my log cabin. Doing all this still kept me below the poverty line, so I was pretty sure I could survive at a public television station.

I wrote several letters with nary a response, not even a note asking for a pledge. I realized this was not going to be an easy sell.

After a sufficient amount of time had passed and no reply letter appeared, I drove down from Idaho City to pester the PBS staff in person. But I never got past the receptionist, a diminutive woman with a no-nonsense attitude.

 

I realized what I must do. If I really wanted to work in TV, I needed to get serious and volunteer for three months during the summer. That did break the ice jam, and the receptionist finally walked me down a long hall to a little room on the Boise State University campus, where the “Idaho Reports” staff was working. I got to meet Marc Johnson, Gary Richardson, and Jean McNeil, the woman who had mysteriously disappeared that one cold winter evening.

They welcomed me as one welcomes someone you’re convinced doesn’t belong there, but they were cordial enough and even allowed me to sit at a desk. A few weeks earlier, the reporter who sat there had left for San Francisco. Talk about serendipity. But I knew I had three months to learn my new craft and to make myself indispensable. Even I realized volunteering would only get me so far.

 

My task was to learn the TV lingo and to come up with story ideas for the daily half hour ‘Idaho Reports’ show, hosted by Marc Johnson. I still remember the pride I felt seeing my name in the credits for the first time, under “Production Assistance.”

The staff no doubt questioned some of my first stories, on Idaho wineries, Idaho gambling, drunk driving on Highway 21, horse racing at Les Bois Park. But with each half hour show under my belt, I was feeling better about my lifestyle choices.

I was on my way, and I knew my 8^th grade students in Idaho City were wrong to laugh when I told them I would not be coming back the following year, that I was going into Television. 

 

When the time came three months later to depart my self-inflicted volunteer tenure, I said my Goodbyes to everyone and began heading out the door, heart in hand. I was literally walking down the sidewalk when Operations Director Bob Pyle called me back and informed me that they had just found some extra money. No guarantees, but they thought they could pay me for the next month or two. I was delighted they were willing to take a chance on me. But by then everyone knew I was a cheap date.

 

I remember having to fill out lots of generic State forms. One form asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” It was an innocuous question when I look back at it, but I had reached my limit with forms.  Why couldn’t it just be a handshake, like it was in Idaho City? Convinced that no one would even read my answers, I decided to test my theory.

“I get my ideas from Voices. I hear Voices.” And sure enough, no one said a word about my answer. No one had even read it.  Of course, I suppose it’s possible that someone did read my answer and figured, “Poor boy, he probably does hear voices. He seems the type.”

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I’ll be the first to admit that my resume was downright sad. I had attended high school at Mt. Angel Seminary, where I studied to be a Catholic priest and where I had developed a knack for writing.

How did I get there? It turned out that the Benedictine nun who taught 7^th grade at Sacred Heart School in Boise got the assignment the next year to teach 8^th grade. It was a bit strange, but we just figured they were running out of nuns.

What that meant is that she had two years to instill in me a belief that I was someone special, that I had what she called a “Vocation,” and that the next obvious step was the Seminary, located outside the little town of Mt. Angel, Oregon. To this day some of us still speak of Sister Mary Barracuda.

 

At Mt Angel Seminary my high school teachers were Benedictine monks. Everyone on that hilltop wore long black robes, including me.  Life was incredibly structured. You knew where you’d be every hour of the day. The first bell rang at 6:00 a.m.; the second bell ten minutes later. You better have your bed made and be heading to study hall by 6:25. Then a walk to the monastery crypt for religious services at 7 a.m. A half-hour later, the 150 of us headed to the breakfast hall located in a nearby brick building.

We each were assigned a weekly stint waiting table, and you were considered a good waiter if you could round up extra Wheat Chex for your assigned tables. The rubbery pancakes made by the seldom-seen nuns were a special treat, and an exceptional waiters was the one who could track down uneaten pancakes and deliver them to the six hungry teenagers at your table. After breakfast we cherished the half-hour of "free time" before the first class at 9:00 a.m.

My freshman class was the largest ever: 65 students. It was the era of Pope John the 23^rd, and there was a feeling that “change” was on the horizon for the Catholic Church. The size of our class seemed to prove it.

 

However, one of the things that changed almost daily in my world was the number of students in our class. Sometimes a student would leave between evening study hall and breakfast, with nary a good-bye. Apparently, having a “vocation” in a monastery of monks, with no girls on campus and no mom and dad nearby was not what some teenagers had signed up for. By senior year in high school, our original class had dwindled to about 25 kids.

The classes themselves were rigorous and fairly classic. My favorites were English and Speech and Debate. I’m sure I landed in the 99^th percentile in punctuation,  thanks to Father Ignatius of the Order of the Benedictines. My debate partner and I always did well in the Speech and Debate tournaments held at various high schools around Portland, Oregon. I also won First Place in “After Dinner Speaking” for the entire state of Oregon. My speech consisted of making fun of my seminary training.

 

I figured all this gave me a leg up in the writing category. But in Television, the melding of words and interviews with video involved a whole different set of skills.

However, I had another ace up my sleeve. After graduating from the University of Oregon, I spent a few weeks in a tent outside the mountain town of Idaho City, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Town That Refused to Die.” I wandered into O’Leary’s Saloon one day, and the bartender just happened to be an architecture student from the U of O. We got to talking, and that’s when he informed me that he was heading back to school in a few days. He said that Pat O’Leary would be looking for a new bartender. He introduced me to Mr. O’Leary, we shook hands, and I was hired. Pat told me I’d pick up the necessary skills soon enough.

 

But not quite soon enough. A ‘ditch’ was the primary drink of many of the ‘locals.’ It’s a simple drink of bourbon and water. Thinking that the City Marshall deserved better, I ran a lemon slice around the lip of his glass and dropped in a red cherry. One of the locals, Jerry Lansing, was sitting next to the Marshall at the bar. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Reichert, you’re not going to last 2 weeks.”

That’s when I knew Idaho City was where I belonged.

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It was as a bartender at O’Leary’s Saloon where I came to appreciate the authenticity of people not exactly equipped to deal with the increasingly urban nature of Idaho. One of my favorite characters was Hank Bertram, an old placer miner living near Little Muddy Creek outside of Placerville. Hank would come into the bar once a week with his small vial of gold, happy to show it to anyone who seemed interested.  I once asked him what he did before mining. “I used to be a religious fanatic,” he said, “but there’s no future in it.”

 

Earl Bream was another miner whom I favored. He looked mean, but was really a gentle soul, unfortunately with a face only a mother could love. The bald head and a black patch over one eye meant no one messed with Earl.

 One Sunday afternoon, my folks walked into O’Leary’s Saloon, no doubt to see how I was wasting my college education. They were babysitting their young grandson, Wes. I thought it was a sweet gesture when the old miner came over to say Hi. As Earl bent down eye level with five-year-old Wes, the old miner growled, “I’ve got an eye out for you.” My nephew did what most anyone would do in that situation. He burst into tears. To this day, Wes has stayed out of Idaho City bars.

 

O’Leary’s Saloon could be a rowdy place, especially on weekends when it seemed half of Boise drove the 40 miles up to Idaho City. Back then, you could walk from bar to bar with a drink in your hand. It was definitely a Wild West town.  On one particularly busy evening someone threw a chair through the large leaded stained-glass window that my friend Kenn Smith and I had built for Pat O'Leary. The window spelled out the word Saloon in Irish colors, which you could read if you were inside the tavern. Tourists coming up from Boise no doubt wondered what a noolaS was. We didn’t care. They were flat landers, and we were catering to the locals.

 

To those who questioned my qualifications to be a writer/producer at Idaho Public Television, I informed them that I knew a lot about structure, and I also knew how to handle myself when things got rowdy. But let’s face it, by then everyone knew my main selling point was that I was cheap.
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A hat is never just a hat. It says something about you. Maybe it says you haven’t come to terms with not having hair. Maybe it’s an adult security blanket. Those who wear hats don’t really need a reason. But here’s one for you.

 

One of the “duties as assigned” at IdahoPTV was to travel around the state with our Development team, the ones who raise money for the station. We would speak to large groups of supporters who were hoping to be entertained with clips of upcoming shows and a few tall tales from the Outdoor Idaho host. They wanted to know that their $50 donation was being put to good use.

I'm not sure how serious he was, but one day Governor Phil Batt saw me in the State Capitol, came up to me and said, "Reichert, you got the best damned job in the State." I thanked him and told him I agreed. If that meant I had to rub shoulders with people I didn't know as I followed our Development team across the state, I was going to beat back my innate shyness and make myself available. It was the least I could do for my good fortune.  

 

We were in Lewiston one evening, and when it was my turn to speak, I decided not to wear my hat on stage. It seemed inappropriate.  As I was describing our latest Outdoor Idaho show, on the River of No Return, someone in the back of the auditorium yelled out, “Put your hat back on!” The audience applauded. As I told my colleagues later, they only have to tell me once. Apparently, my hat had become my Thing.

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It was the 1970’s when I arrived in Idaho City, and it was obvious that the town was on the cultural cusp. Loggers and miners on one side, and long-haired kids moving into town on the other. As any good bartender would do, I tried to position myself somewhere in the middle, serving drinks to the locals, while working with a group of artsy friends who hung out at the town’s other major bar, the Miners’ Exchange Saloon. O'Leary's had '"Big John" and Miners Exchange had some of Boise's best bands, like "Famous Potatoes." I never knew if it was a stroke or a heart attack that sent Big John crashing to the floor; I wasn't working that evening. I just know it was the end of Big John's musical career.

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In high school I had read the play “Our Town.” I had even dreamed of acting in it one day. The play won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The poster for the first production in 1938 described the play as "the record of a tiny New Hampshire village as created by the lives of its most humble inhabitants."

One of the things I had noticed early on about Idaho City was that the town had its share of humble inhabitants... and many of them were real “characters."  What if we could wrangle some of them together, for a few winter weeks of memorizing lines and getting to know each other? Could we create our own "Our Town," and would anyone care?

 

After discussing it with friends Ed Lonsdale and Barbara McClain, both of whom had some theater background, I ordered copies of the play from Samuel French, Inc. In January about 15 of us began gathering at my cabin to read scripts. By then I had built stained glass windows to replace the visquine. 

It was a potluck setting with refreshments, and everyone agreed that it was a great way to fight cabin fever. No one figured we’d actually perform the play, and certainly not in front of an audience. We were just going to read scripts to get us through the winter. 

But as the cold set in and the snow piled up, and winter blues began casting a pall over our little town, the group started to warm to the idea of an April 1^st performance. We figured the date -- April Fool's Day -- seemed appropriate.

 

“Bruce was always our bandleader for fun things,” commented co-director Barbara. “When he decided that we should do ‘Our Town,’ we were all 'in.' I think Bruce felt it was a mirror of our small community. He set about lining up the Masonic Hall for the rehearsals and the performance.”

Eventually we moved all the rehearsals to the perennially cold and drafty Masonic Hall, and the rehearsals were conducted in down coats. That gave us a chance to build a stage. 

 

“So we built the stage by stacking tables on top of each other,” remembers Barbara. “We also had no backstage, so we crowded into the halls leading to the two bathrooms and jostled our way to the front for our entrances."

 

We borrowed seed money from the Boise Basin Public Library, promising to pay it back from the $10 tickets we would collect at the door.

Our little library became the ‘bank’ for other Basin enterprises as well, like our annual Arts & Crafts Festival, conceived by Patty Jo Breiding and me one spring day in front of the Boise Basin Merc on Main Street. That Festival lasted more than 20 years before it became too big a burden for anyone to handle. 

The Basin library also fronted the creation of Idaho City University (ICU), where academics trailed far behind the fine art of having fun. Friend Jake Hoffman had heard that Ketchum, Idaho, had its own university, and he thought the Ghost Town that Refused to Die could use an academic touch.

Jake and I took on the duties of Administrative Assistants to the President. It didn't seem to matter that no one knew who the President was. For our inaugural event we chose Diamond Lil's Saloon on Main Street. It was a real gamble. We weren't sure anyone would even show up for the Saturday evening festivities. 

I had gotten to know author Dick d'Easum through my association with the little Library. Dick had written books on Idaho history, including "Sawtooth Tales" and "Fragments of Villainy." We figured he'd be the perfect speaker for the inauguration of ICU.

That evening, as folks started pouring into the tavern, the concern turned to whether the old wooden dance floor would hold.

The dress code for the occasion was Idaho City black tie, and it was fascinating to see loggers in borrowed tuxedos and caulk boots and women in sequined dresses with beautiful hats. Dick d'Easum wore a dark suit and tie with a 1930's gangster hat. He spoke glowingly of ICU to the hundred people crammed into the bar. He declared ICU worthy of being part of Idaho's university system, even superior to some of the current colleges and universities, because ICU made no pretense about itself and took no money from the public coffers.

Mr. d’Easum particularly appreciated that Idaho City University had gone to the trouble of creating an official seal, complete with a Latin phrase. Ours was "Semper Ubi Sub Ubi." Roughly translated, Always Wear Underwear. We also had another Latin phrase for good measure: In Hoc Plenti.

Dick d'Easum, who had written about tall tales and explored the world of villains, understood his role that evening, and he played his part perfectly. He showered praise on the concept of a university that emphasized the value of good friends and good times. As Administrative Assistants to the ICU President, Jake and I bestowed on Dick d'Easum the title of Dean of the ICU Department of Arts & Sciences.

By the time Spring Prom rolled around, most of the townsfolk were on the faculty of ICU and excited to dance to the music of the High Street Band. Some of us even purchased, for $25, a beautifully mimeographed diploma, with our name written in calligraphy, proving that we were an official graduate from Idaho City University. Some of us still have our diplomas hanging on the bathroom wall.

Idaho City University even sold sweatshirts, with the proceeds going to the Boise Basin Public Library.

But I digress. 
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By the weekend of April 1^st, with our lines memorized and directors feeling good about our chances, we opened the play to a full house.  Our town was coming to life in “Our Town.”  

The oldest standing Masonic Temple in the northwest provided the right touch. The 1865 wooden structure came with all the amenities, like a pot-bellied wood stove, old fashioned gas lights, wooden benches, and frogs croaking in the nearby pond. As authentic as the play itself.

 

Everyone who wanted a role had gotten one. Mine was Doc Gibbs, one of the main characters in the 3-act play.  Boise attorney Byron Johnson also played a role. This soon-to-be Idaho Supreme Court Justice didn’t have any lines, but his job was an important one. During intermission between the second and third acts, Byron headed down to the town’s bars to retrieve Randy. Randy was the town drunk in the third Act. He didn’t have a speaking part, but no one ever questioned his authenticity.

 My girlfriend Jenny Laper played Emily. She was a Leo and had no difficulty handling the lead role. The play’s high point comes in that third act, when young Emily dies and goes to the afterlife.  Not used to being dead, Emily is anxious to return to her old life. The other dead spirits warn her, but she insists.

Soon, however, she realizes that the living are too caught up in self-centeredness and trivial matters, and her excitement turns to disillusionment. She hurries back to her body’s resting place, with the realization that our time on earth is an irreplaceable gift, one to be relished every moment. 

 

And through her tears Emily utters some poignant lines: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” To which the stage manager replies, “No. The saints and poets, maybe, they do some.”

The play really is a tear-jerker. As I looked out over the audience through the peep hole in the curtain, I could see loggers and miners and young folks seated next to each other, many of them sobbing. 

“It was a spectacular endeavor,” said co-director Barbara. “Everyone in town attended and raved. Of course, some may have been unduly influenced by the heavily spiked punch provided for free by Mayor John Brogan and his good friend Bud McDonald. And the cast party afterwards, what I do remember is that it lasted for several days."

 

The next week’s major headline in the Idaho World proclaimed the play a success. Perhaps it was a bit self-serving, but as editor of the newspaper, I thought it entirely appropriate. We had experienced something that few rural towns will ever have the good fortune to experience.

Besides, the state's largest newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, had given the play a positive review. Even a reporter from another town could feel the strong bonds at the core of this small but big-hearted community.

 

Afterwards, the mayor bestowed upon me and the others the key to Idaho City, a twenty-inch wooden key that opened nothing. It’s still on my mantle, further proof that “Our Town,” my town, was a rousing success on so many levels.

                                                                            ------------------------------------------

It can be scary, but it happens every day. You begin waiting tables. Then one day you manage the others who are waiting tables. Your tasks grow larger, and as you learn the ropes, people learn to trust you with more duties.

One day there comes a point when you have a chance to run the entire operation. And you ask yourself, is this something I really want to do? You're pretty sure it will consume your life. Chances are, it will define you, also.

 

It’s one thing, as Host, to memorize someone else’s words. But now you will be the one to write those words. Now your task is to create the entire program, to find the experts, to conduct the interviews and work them into the script.

Will there be three segments or five, or maybe just one long segment? Will each segment follow Freytag’s Pyramid, a dramatic structure that storytellers have used for centuries: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution?

And how will the segments line up with each other? Do you start “strong” or save your best stuff for the end?  Do you use your narrative voice to weave things together or just let the interviews you conducted tell the story?

The show has to end exactly at 26:46 minutes to allow “interstitial” material to play before starting the next program exactly on the hour or half hour.

And each show needs to be somewhat “evergreen.”  No one wants a program that can only airs once or twice. So be careful what you write. Some Outdoor Idaho shows have been known to re-air for 30 years. Oh, and make the show timely and relevant, too, so that viewers will want to watch. 

I didn’t even mention the most important thing. This is television, and it’s a marriage of images and words. That’s where the real magic lies. Don't let the words trip over the images.

 

And, then, once you finish a program -- sometimes only hours before air-time -- take a break. Maybe grab a beer or treat yourself to a nice meal. Because the next show has an air-date, and it's already sneaking up on you.

Luckily for me, I worked with videographers and editors who were better than me and kept the show from failing miserably. Sauni Symonds, Pat Metzler, Jay Krajic, Jeff Tucker, Peter Morrill come immediately to mind.

I also received a great piece of advice in those early years. When things are overwhelming you, take a moment and break them down into components. That way the tasks won’t seem so daunting.

                                                                  ------------------------------------

 

After the amicable divorce between Fish & Game and IdahoPTV, an astute observer might notice that the main difference in Outdoor Idaho was one of organization. Is the show about many different topics, as in the past, or does each show have one single, overarching theme?

 

We wasted no time answering that question. Our first show out of the gate without Fish & Game we called “Pend Oreille Country.” Every segment featured some aspect of life around Idaho’s largest and deepest lake, including hunting and fishing. And to prove that there were no hard feelings, we interviewed Idaho Fish & Game Commissioner Dick Hanson. He and his wife lived along the big lake, and so it made some sense. Besides, we didn’t want to lose our access to Idaho’s difficult-to-find wildlife.

 

The diversity of those first programs was impressive: “The High Desert,” “Winter Solitude,” “Under Idaho,” “Idaho Horses,” “The Big Game State,” “Vanishing Idaho,” “A State Without a National Park,” “Empire of the Snake,” “Searching for the Soul of the Forest Service.” 

An astute observer might also notice that Outdoor Idaho had begun what some viewed as a perilous slide into dangerous territory. “Stay in your own lane,” said a friend who was worried that the show was getting too political. “Birds, bass fishing, and beautiful places is where Outdoor Idaho needs to camp out.”

 

I agreed with him but only up to a point. Believing Idahoans to be sharp, involved, resourceful, and pragmatic, I was convinced there was a way to frame public policy issues that most Idahoans would appreciate. And I was determined to find that pathway.

Outdoor Idaho's mission had broadened considerably.  My hope was that the show could travel around the state, helping explain Idaho to Idahoans. And, who knows, maybe even play a role in connecting a state confounded by its tortuous geology.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                -30-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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