Piecing a story together is often a roller coaster ride- You climb aboard, size up the track ahead, take a deep breath and hold on.
It was like that this week, putting together a piece for Chronicle on Sen. Malcolm Wallop, who passed away in September… It started Monday morning when another story for Friday’s show went off the rails… One of our key interviews went elk hunting instead… and this wasn’t just any show but the Premier episode for Season 3 of Chronicle. We wanted it to be the best we could make it.
A Farewell tribute to Senator Wallop was in order, so Ruby and Geoff put their heads together that morning to come up with a last minute fix for Friday’s show.
This is the kind of producing that makes the job exciting…and nerve-wracking. A story presents itself and we all bend to the task and get it done, individual strengths come into play. Geoff somehow had a script already humming around in his head from years of crossing paths with Sen. Wallop – at one point as press secretary to his Democrat opponent!
But Geoff was on his way out of town for a couple of days of Enormously Important schmoozing and hair-flipping and beard-stroking with Enormously Important wildlife filmmakers in Jackson, so the story was dropped in my lap as he roared out of town…
Somehow the constellation of elements needed to describe Senator Wallop’s life would have to materialize at the station over the next couple of days. We had only the words in the script – now we had to turn it into television – which meant visuals.
First, we dug up a few Wyoming PBS early day clips of a young Sen. Wallop from basement archives that I believe only Bob Connelly, who has been at the station from its earliest days, could navigate…
I then called a couple dedicated archivists and a few of Wallop’s family, friends and colleagues.
It’s never easy to strike a conversation with someone you’ve never met, let alone talk them out of their most cherished belongings, but the Senator’s widow, Isabel Wallop, graciously answered my plea and delivered some family photos into the hands of a stranger. Once you start to understand a person’s story, you want to know more, see more, hear more. So you dig and dig, until you can barely keep track of the many things that have passed through your hands and before your eyes… What eluded me still were some television ads created by Wallop’s 1976 Senate campaign – his first, with a young staff known as the “Children’s Crusade. They included a legendary ad that showed a cowboy going into the wilds with a toilet strapped to his packhorse – a comical take on federal regulations in the workplace.
I had called every archivist, every campaigner, every news outlet, every friend and family member; I had dug through drawers, boxes and cabinets, because station staff vaguely remembered seeing a copy of the ad years ago. It seems I was one among many disheartened followers in search of those early videos… They had achieved iconic status among students and scholars of the art of messaging. Link after link referring to samples of these ads proved to be broken dead ends…
I finally heard back from Senator Wallop’s first campaign manager, John Jenkins: he sadly informed me that he once had the whole collection of campaign ads, but they were stolen out of the back of his truck years ago… He imagined the thief likely tossed them in a dumpster…
Then a long shot paid off: Leslie Waggener at the American Heritage Center found a DVD version of the ads; a Disc was on the way.
Then, the very next day, an ironic twist: as we were going to edit I was rounding up images in my computer and attaching one to an email when the utility in it’s mysterious way defaulted to a folder I have no recollection to ever looking in, and there was the Wallop Campaign movie file.
We’d had it all along…
