Where’s My Hat?
Draft 4.6
April 19, 2026

 

We had Big Bird. They had a hunting season on big birds.
Still, on paper, it made a certain sense.

Few people remember this now, but Outdoor Idaho began in 1983 as a co-production between the Idaho Fish & Game Department and Idaho Public Television.

Fish & Game had stories to tell—good ones. They were proud of their work and wanted hunters and anglers to see where their license fees were going. They already had a glossy, four-color magazine. Why not a television show?

The format was simple: a monthly half-hour built around “hook and bullet” stories—hunter orange, salmon counts at Lower Granite Dam, chukar survival rates, and the occasional interview with the director. Solid, useful, constituency-driven content.

Idaho Public Television brought the other half: a scrappy statewide PBS network with an audience that already showed up for Nature and National Geographic. An Idaho-based outdoor show had potential. And the $25,000 from Fish & Game didn’t hurt—it covered travel and part of production. The station absorbed the rest: staff, cameras, editing.

It was practical, if not romantic. And it worked—until it didn’t.

In those early years, two people made it hum: Royce Williams, the writer from Fish & Game, and Peter Morrill from IdahoPTV, who seemed to do everything else. Royce could turn a phrase; Peter could make it sing. A young Ric Ochoa and an even younger Jeff Tuck, still in high school, increasingly handled shooting and editing.

The host was Doug Copsey, co-founder of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival—equally at home onstage and outdoors. Though at first, the show leaned more “indoor.” Doug introduced segments from behind a studio desk, stitching together unrelated field pieces with interviews.

The first episode covered kokanee salmon, a problem grizzly, elk habitat, antelope near Arco, and a studio conversation with raptor expert Morley Nelson. It was classic magazine format: interesting, but loosely connected.

That would change.

By the third season, Doug stepped away, and the show followed him—outside. The desk disappeared. The studio vanished. If it was going to be called Outdoor Idaho, it needed to earn the name.

What it needed next was a host. That turned out to be me.

                         ********************************************8

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
—George Orwell

I thought about that line often.

I hadn’t come to Idaho as a ready-made outdoorsman or storyteller. But over time, through circumstance and a bit of luck, my image fused with the place. People began asking if I was a native.

Why me? Why was I chosen? Not because I was the most qualified. Sure, I liked to fish and usually had elk or venison in the freezer. I’d built a log cabin outside Idaho City in the 1970s, hauling ponderosa and lodgepole from a blowdown near Graham and Trinity Mountain with a borrowed truck that barely braked and a McCulloch chainsaw that barely cut.

But that wasn’t it.

I got the job because I was already on staff. Management didn’t have to write another check. I was free. It’s amazing what doors open when you’re free.

I made my case the best I could. I had learned structure and headlines in high school.  I could hold my own when things got rowdy in a bar. I didn’t need much makeup and had a decent if nasally voice.

But let’s be honest: my main selling point was my price tag.

And I wore a hat.

At first, it was a black Greek fisherman’s cap I’d picked up drifting through Europe and later Mexico and South America. I’d convinced myself real outdoorsmen wore hats on television.

So I wore it proudly. Rookie mistake. Same with the cowboy boots I climbed Bruneau Dunes in.

After a couple of episodes, Royce and Peter staged a quiet intervention. The cap had to go. The boots would be… situational. There was no wardrobe department. This was public television. Looking a little off was part of the charm of public television.

With a new host came a new approach. We left the studio behind and went looking for the heart of Idaho. We figured we could find it in places like Priest Lake, Henry’s Fork, Silver City, the St. Joe, the White Clouds.

The budget had other ideas. This was shoestring television. We drove in the morning, shot all day, and headed home that night. It saved money but cost us the best light—those soft hours at dawn and dusk that make everything look better than it is.

To give the show an “outdoor” feel, I’d walk and talk along rivers or in front of mountains. In the early days, Royce wrote the lines. We called them “stand-ups”: short bridges between segments, often rewritten minutes before filming depending on where we landed.

A typical show had four or five of them. Sometimes the connections were… creative. Backyard bird feeding into fly tying, for example. But Royce could usually find a thread.

Even when it was a stretch, we told ourselves it was no different from Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom. “While Jim wrestles the enraged lion, I’ll remain safely in the helicopter. You, too, can be safe with Mutual of Omaha.”

Stand-ups were my moment on camera, and I took them seriously. Six or seven takes weren’t unusual. Then we’d check with the cameraman. Thirty seconds of television could take half an hour. Longer if animals were involved.

I was learning that going outside to make an outdoor show was anything but easy, especially with equipment that chose to fail 100 miles from the station, usually on top of a mountain.

And then there were the self-inflicted problems, and they came quickly.

I had just started wearing contact lenses. On a hike to Jump Creek Falls for my very first stand-up, I brushed against foliage and rubbed my eyes without thinking. The next morning, my face was so swollen one eye wouldn’t open. A friend saw me and asked if I was Bruce’s brother.

Poison ivy.

                              *******************************************

As the seasons passed, the partnership with Fish & Game began to fray. Royce and Peter moved on. Sue Nass and I took over production of the program. The department wanted more hunting and fishing. That’s what their audience expected.

But the show was drifting—because I was steering it there. We began doing stories on rock climbing, llama packing, morel hunting after wildfires, hang gliding, kayaking the Bruneau. Those were the stories I believed PBS wanted. As the audience grew, that became the problem. It wasn’t just hunters and anglers anymore. The program was trying to serve two masters.

Soon, Outdoor Idaho was no longer a co-production. Which raised the $25,000 question: could Idaho Public Television carry it alone, or would it disappear like so many local PBS shows?

Station manager Jerry Garber asked me bluntly, “Can we pull this off by ourselves?”

“Hell yes,” I said. It was a brave answer. I nearly had to eat it.

                                     *****************************************

It’s true, my meandering path into television was not a typical one, yet at the time it all made sense to me, sitting in my unfinished log cabin with plastic sheeting for windows, on that frigid February evening back in 1981.

Idaho Reports was a daily program that covered the antics of the Idaho Legislature, and I had just watched it glitch off the air.  One of the reporters, Jean McNeil, was talking about some legislative issue, and suddenly she just disappeared. "Automation" had apparently kicked in.

Whatever the reason, it was 7 pm on a cold, dark winter evening, alone in my log cabin outside Idaho City, when I decided I could handle the job. 

So I started writing letters.

Now, I was 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, continuously operating newspaper; keeping the Boise Basin public library operating; and tending bar at O’Leary’s Saloon. All the while, I was building my log cabin. Doing all this still kept me below the poverty line, so I was pretty sure I could survive at a public TV station.

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

After a sufficient amount of time had passed and no reply letter appeared, I drove my truck 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. I needed to volunteer for three months during the summer break from teaching 8^th grade students in Idaho City. That decision seemed to free 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 finally got to meet Marc Johnson, Gary Richardson, Ric Ochoa, and Jean McNeil, the woman who had mysteriously disappeared from the TV screen that cold winter evening.

They welcomed me as one welcomes someone you’re convinced doesn’t belong there. However, they were cordial and even allowed me to sit at a desk that had been vacated two weeks earlier by a reporter who had left for San Francisco. Talk about serendipity. But I knew I had three months to make myself indispensable. Even I realized volunteering could 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. I still remember the pride I felt seeing my name in the credits for the first time, under “Production Assistance.” I’m sure I was the only one who noticed, but that was all right.

The staff no doubt questioned my first stories: on the fledgling southwest Idaho wineries, Idaho gambling, drunk driving on Highway 21, horseracing at Les Bois Park near Boise. But with each half-hour show under my belt, I was learning what worked and what didn’t work in the world of public television.

I was feeling better about my lifestyle choices, and I knew my grade school students in Idaho City were wrong to laugh when I told them I was going into television and would not be coming back the following year.

 

When the time came three months later to depart my 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. They had found some extra money and thought they could pay me for the next month or two. I was delighted they were willing to take a chance on me. By then everyone knew I was a sincere, cheap employee.

 But before I was an official employee, I had to fill out the forms and pass a test. I remember lots of generic state employment paperword. One form asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” It was an innocuous question when I look back on 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 silly answer. No one had even read it. I suppose the only thing more distressing is that they had read it and figured it made perfect sense. But by then, I had my foot in the door.

                                          ********************************

 

A hat is never just a hat. It says something—about style, insecurity, identity. Or maybe nothing at all.

But it mattered more than I realized.

At fundraising events around the state, we’d show clips and tell stories to audiences who wanted to know their ten-dollar donations were well spent. I wasn’t naturally comfortable in those settings, but I showed up.

One night in Lewiston, I stepped onstage without my Outdoor Idaho baseball cap. Halfway through my talk, someone yelled from the back, “Where’s your hat? Put it back on!”

The crowd applauded. Message received. Apparently, the hat had become part of the show, part of me.

I can’t say I was disappointed.

                                        *********************************

    

It can be scary, but it happens a lot, to a lot of people. 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 come to rely on you with more responsibilities.

One day there comes a chance to run the 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 also come to define you.

It’s one thing, as host, to memorize someone else’s words. But now you’re the one to write those words. Now your task is to create, with colleagues, the entire program, to find the experts, to conduct the interviews and to work everything into a coherent script that people want to watch. Luckily, your colleagues know more than you about television.

But there are still questions to be asked. Will there be three segments or five, or maybe 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?

Do you use your narrative voice to weave things together or just let the interviews tell the story? Do you start strong or save your best stuff for last?  

Preferably, each show needs to be up to date, as well as “evergreen.” In other words, write it so that it not only applies to today, but so it can also air a year down the road. It’s not always easy, but no TV producer wants a program that can only air once. Of course, who would have guessed that some Outdoor Idaho shows would still be airing 30 years later?  So learn to be careful what you write.

Try to interview the best and the brightest. An Outdoor Idaho show takes its lead from the ones being interviewed. The show is written After the interviews. That’s why it’s critical to interview people with differing points of view. Our 2021 “Salmon Reckoning” program is a perfect example of conflicting opinions. Not only was our objective to educate viewers about salmon. It was also to show why salmon recovery is widely regarded as the most complex, intractable problem facing the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve certainly been accused of favoring older people to interview. Some of my friends have even suggested I have “daddy” issues. Of course, I deny it. I tell them I simply go where the wisdom is.

Oh, and each program must end precisely at 26:46, so that those who are building the promotional material in the next room know exactly how long they have. No one wants seven or eight seconds of dead air space between shows.

 

Most of all, learn to respect the marriage of images and words. There’s a balance, and that’s where the real magic lies. If the words overpower the visuals, you’ve lost. Or if your sentence didn’t exactly match up with the image the editor planned to use, prepare to change the wording. 

I learned to lean on the people around me—talented videographers and editors who quietly saved the show more than once. Sauni Symonds, Pat Metzler, Jay Krajic, John Crancer, Jeff Tucker, Alberto Moreno—these are some of the names that come immediately to mind.

I also received a piece of advice in those early years from Peter Morrill, who had worked his way up from videographer to producer to general manager.  When it’s all becoming overwhelming, he told me, break things down into small pieces. That way the tasks won’t seem so overwhelming.

And something I discovered as I took on the mantle: learn how to relax. Once you finish a program—sometimes only hours before air-time—it’s time to take a break. Maybe grab a beer or treat yourself to a nice meal or climb a mountain. Because the next show already has an air-date, and it's sneaking up on you. Plan to tackle that one on Monday.

                                                    **************************

 

After the amicable divorce with Fish & Game, Outdoor Idaho immediately ended the magazine-style approach. Instead of multiple segments, Outdoor Idaho decided to go big. The first three programs without F&G—"Pend Oreille Country,” “The High Desert,” “The Henry’s Fork”—cemented a documentary-style approach that has lasted to the present day. It played to our PBS strengths, and I believe it gave the series a broader sweep that most viewers seem to appreciate.

That first production on our own,“Pend Oreille Country,” focused entirely on life around Idaho’s largest, deepest lake. To prove there was no bitterness after our split with Fish & Game—and to make sure we could still rely upon them to find the wildlife—we interviewed F&G Commissioner Dick Hanson. He was a local who lived along the lake and truly understood the region's complex sporting culture. To save money, the Hanson’s let us stay at their home while we worked on the program.

Being the sole producer also had one more advantage: it allowed us to experiment. Seeking a touch of cinematic grandeur, I hauled my Coronado 15 sailboat from Idaho City to the lake for the "stand-up" segments.

I envisioned how it would play out: me at the helm, smiling confidently as the hull sliced through the whitecaps. I would turn to the camera, delivering my lines with effortless authority before gazing into the horizon.

I still think it could have worked, except for one of the sudden squalls that Idaho’s largest lake is famous for. The wind slammed into us, pounding the boat sideways. The jib snapped across like a hammer. I nearly went overboard.

Apparently, we’d stayed out longer than we should have while I memorized my lines and captained the boat. I was guilty, but I still think the idea had merit. The effort wasn’t all in vain, however. We got some decent material for the Christmas party.

And for the record, I didn’t lose my hat.

                                              *******************************

 

An astute observer might 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 worried the show was getting too political with stories on timber and grazing and mining and pollution. “Birds, bass fishing, and beautiful places is where Outdoor Idaho needs to camp out,” he told me.

He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t entirely right, either. Idaho isn’t simple. Its landscapes aren’t. Its issues certainly aren’t. I believed there was a way to tell those deeper stories—about land, water, policy, and people—without losing the audience.

And I was determined to find it. Because by then the show had become, at least for me, a way of explaining Idaho to itself.

And, who knows, maybe Outdoor Idaho could even play a role in connecting a state confounded by its tortuous geology and great distances.

                                                                  -30-