Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 233: Tom Brokaw: From South Dakota to the World

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Ep. 233: Tom Brokaw: From South Dakota to the World · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bog bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast, you
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: where you stand with on X. We're gonna start out
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: with an announcement about Doss Boat, like the actual boat
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: dos Boat V one you could call it. And I
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: don't mean the show dos Bolt mean the physical vessel,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: the boat. Um. We are auctioning off Doss Bowl and
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: other cool items in order to to close the final
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: gap for our Land Access Initiative project. Ch kel Now
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: explained Land Access Initiative right. So we took all the
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: profits from Ronnella who tell us campaign merchandise that everybody bought,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you, And now we're taking your hard earned money
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and our hard earned money. We're we're giving it two
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: the High Peaks Alliance outside of Kingsfield, Maine for a
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: property that will provide more hunting and fishing for America.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: It's an access project like you name the thing. Yeah,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: It's called Shilo Pond and Shilo pond is uh you
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: know around here we'd call it a lake um. And
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: uh it's there's an old logging road that you walk
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: down for about five minutes to get to the lakes.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: So right now it's put access only um. And it's
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: thirty three ft deep, which is really bizarre, not that
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: big of a of a pond that's deeper than the
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: lake I grew up on. Yeah, it's wild sixty are
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: lake and uh, yeah it's a beautiful little spot. And
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: uh it has been um publicly accessible for generations, but
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: on private land. And now that private land is for sale.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Oh and the you know, the folks around Kingsfield uh
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: and particularly this fellow Brent West of the High Peaks
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Alliance have really really gotten after trying to secure this
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: piece of property. Uh. And no longer have it be private,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: so it'll be a piece of public ground perpetuity, available
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: in perpetuity, with hunting and fishing being part of the
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: access or part of the management plan for the property
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: and perpetuity as well. Yeah, Cal has been Um. We
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: were soliciting suggestions for a land access initiative project and
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Cal waited through quite a few submissions and actually went
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: out and flew out firsthand to investigate yes, and and
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: had waited around, smelled around, poked around, met people, visited
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the place, went to the like, checked it out, dip
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: my toes in the water, did an investigative trip, came
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: back thumbs up. This is what we're doing. We got
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: a little chunk of change to go. So we're like,
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: how are we gonna raise this money. We're gonna raise
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: this money by selling auctioning off Doss boat. So go
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: watch go on YouTube on the meat Eater channel on YouTube,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: and you watched the whole damn Doss Boat show. It's
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: a YouTube series that boat. So he started out bought
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a boat on Craigslist site unseen, an old aluminum center
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: console fishing boat, and then did massive modifications to said
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: the boat. Reinforced the entire thing, beefed up the trailer.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Put a brand spicking new Honda that got a thirty
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: or forty on it. Put a Honda forty so this
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: is like a low hours, brand new Honda forty four
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: stroke on the back of this thing. It has a
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: genuine original Ed Anderson painting that's about how long six
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: ft a six ft long Ed Anderson original painting on
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the boat. It is rigged out and it's just like
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: entirely rigged out. Just get into the electronics package. Uh
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: so we should know it as a sixteen ft v
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: hole ilumicraft from is just the whole. The Honda four
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: stroke outboard engine features all sorts of awesome stuff that
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: I probably don't need to go into. But it is
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: a highly sought after UM premium outboard motor uh from Honda.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Plus it's got a mental to old Treks removable bow
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: mounted trolling motor with eighty pounds of thrust, which is
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: probably equivalent to the outboard engine I own UM built
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: in sonar capability and I pilot link GPS with autopilot
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and spot lock, which, um, if you aren't familiar, that
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: means you can actually go out and fish by yourself,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: no friends necessary, highly accessorized. Yes, um, we got a
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: casting platform that I built. We have a self stabilizing
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: removable charcoal grill added by Chef Jesse Griffith's um jt
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: vans and did some fishing on there. This this is
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: a boat full of character and at this point it
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: is an absolute fishing machine too. Yeah, so we did
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: all the work. We put the thing together and all
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: the money, all the money goes to public access. It
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: goes to a specific public access project that you can
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: go like cal did, you can go sniff it and
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: dip your toes into it. If you just tag it,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be a waste of time to go out
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: there and make some annoying cowt cow moose calls. Check
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: that spot out. UM. We gotta call our things to
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: to cover us on our on our expenses. Here I
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: have I am auctioning off I've donated to the Land
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Access Project um, and it's up for sale now. A
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: weather we Mark five left handed Mark five six five caliber.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Accompanying this rifle is a year amount of a cous
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: deer that I shot with the rifle. So you get
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: the gun and the skull and antlers of a deer
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: I shot with it. And this rifle has been on
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: this This rifle has also been on episodes of the
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: me Eater TV show, which if you're ever gonna get
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: a second hand rifle, if you think about it, it
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: should always come with proof. That thing works a lot
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: of places to send you a little target, you know,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: with some holes in it to show this comes with
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the damn did dead, dear, so you can get that
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: at auction. What else we got, kyl y He's got
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: stuff you throw in. Yanni's literally pulling things off of
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: his back, including his backpack, all the things that brought
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: him good luck from the two thousand nineteen season. UM.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: I am donating a incredibly awesome, powerful, clean, quiet steal
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: ms a two twenty electric chainsaw that is my personal
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: chance on and it's fantastic low hours, low hours UM
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: truck chainsaw. And I'm even gonna write a personalized inscription
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: to who ever buys this thing. The folks at Steel
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: are throwing in an entire personal protection equipment packet with
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: chaps and gloves and eye pro and helmet uh and
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: a few other goodies in there for you. I am
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: going to pass along some excellent knowledge in the form
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: of an entirely synthetic fish, which is just a fantastic
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: book on wildlife management UH centered around the rainbow Troute
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: and the history of the rainbows. You'll sign this book
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: over to the purchaser. Yes, yes, the UM, but it
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: will be a good thing to get your conservation library
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: started and off of my own back. Is my very
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: first and most well worn back country hunters and Anglers,
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Public land Owner t shirt that has uh has been
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: through all the trials and tribulations of the restarted, the
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: sage Brush Rebellion, and being all sorts of pro public lands.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: So uh, we photographed all this stuff. When the photograph
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: you sure I feel like when you go online to
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: see all the auction items, including the big like there's
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: a great spread on doss boat, like you can really
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: dig in, but they should put the little stink lines
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: and everything coming off the Uh. So you can go
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: to go to the meat eater dot com and up
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: in the banner somewhere around there thereabouts you will find
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: our Land Access Initiative auction which we're using to close
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the gap, to finish up the gap and finish off
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: the project of more better hunting and fishing for America.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Go and do this, yeah, and bid, make a bid.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: We were just gonna do the boat, and they were
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: like how many The only one dude can buy a boat.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: One person can buy a boat. So we added all
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: this other stuff going there and get bidden. We gotta
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: get we gotta finish this thing up. There's a deadline.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: There's a deadline coming up where this sale is gonna
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: go through and we need to get in there and
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: get it taken care of. So the auction is only
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: open for it week. We got a closer out. Selfishly,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: you're gonna get amazing gear that all your friends are
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: gonna be very jealous of because it already comes with
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: a bunch of good luck stories. Um. But not selfishly,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: you're gonna be also getting like the warm, fuzzy feeling
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: of making a difference by securing public ground in perpetuity
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: in a spot that has zero public ground. Yeah. And
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: to guarantee that this is cal can't say this, but
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: for me to guarantee that this is not motivated personally,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: I have taken a personal pledge avow to not personally
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: hunt or to not personally hunt or fish this property.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: I've already fished it, but that's called due diligence. I
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: might go and watch someone do it. I might go
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: and say how they're doing it wrong or whatever. I
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: would eat fish from it, but I will not personally
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: hunt or fish this property. This is not lining my
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: own pockets with sweet spots on the other side of
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the continent. Yeah, and we don't want to stop here either.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: So this, this is Uh, a great start. It's a
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: great spot. There's many of these high value small parcels
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: around and we want to know about them. So yeah,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: and you know what you could do we talk about
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: the other day. A reasonable move would be to buy
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: doss Boat, take the engine and all the electronics, get
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: a torch, cut out the painting, hang that on the
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: wall of your bar, and then just be like, if
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: you boys can keep the rest, well, you know you
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: probably want the whole thing, but that in and of
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: itself would be of extraordinary value, extraordinary value. You're you're
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: coming out ahead. So yeah, we want a boatload of
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: cash for Doss Boat. So don't you know, get all
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: penny pincher on it and look up what everything costs,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: and then stop bidding once it gets there. Um, this
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: is a good deal, even at full value, because you're
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: making a heck of a contribution for un told generations
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: of folks who want to go outside. Yeah, the good
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: people of Maine, which are de facto good people the
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: United States of America depend on you. Now. Unto our
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: interview with Tom Brokaw. All right, everyone, we're on Tom
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Brokaw's back porch along a beautiful stretch of Creek in Montana,
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: and Mr Brokaw came to us by way of Tom mcgwain,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: a past guest, and I believe you also used to
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: spend time mountain climbing with Ivan Snard, who's been on
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: this show. How did you How did you become to
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: be friends with McQueen? Well, I've known a by the time,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: because generationally we're about the same. And then it was
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: a period of time when he was living in uh
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: keep his skein in other areas where he was notorious
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: and he they loved him at Esquire magazine because they
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: could write an article about him every week and it
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: was his now brother in law, Jimmy was there and
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: a lot of other characters, and uh so I was
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: from a distance, very intrigued by them, and we had
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of common interest. But as I told him, Waiter,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: I didn't want to get involved with you because I
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: would not have survived the way you guys were living.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: It just wouldn't have worked for me. Uh. I mean,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: he was writing this early stuff, you know, and uh
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: he was my generation frankly, so that's how I first
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: knew of him. And then when we came out here,
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: which is a step back. I got interested in Montana
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: because they came out to do a speech in northern
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Montana and Marth and I were doing a lot of
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: backpacking at the time in California and Colorado and so on,
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: and we asked to be set up with a backpack
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: trip and we went across Scape Guilt Wilderness early June,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: and there was a trust tough time, but we were
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: really taken with Montana. So I was looking around for
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: some place that we're either going to do the East
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: coast to become sailors, that we were going to be
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: coming to the west and become fly pershment and the
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: horse people. And we decided to come here. And I
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: went down to the West Boulder where we had a
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: prospect of a place that we're going to buy, and
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: I was invited over by Tom to just have a
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: cup of coffee. I've never met him before, and uh,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: it was love at first sight, as we both say, uh,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: you know, we really had a lot of shared values
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: and interests and and kind of a quirky sense of humor,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: and it's, uh, it's a real brotherhood. When I was
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: reading about how you grew up and very much in
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: small town South Dakota and around. You know, I guess
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: pretty what would now be deemed conservative values and like
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: work ethics. But then later in life you kind of
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: fell in with sort of these uh like some of
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: the Libertines, you know, some fast living people. Did you ever,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: did you often feel there to be like, uh, difficult
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: transition for you to jump from these very very rural
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: America to these kind of fast living you know, well
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: by show biz. Yeah, I wouldn't quite call it fast Lily.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: I always wanted bright lights, big city when I was
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: growing up. Yeah, I was always looking over the horizon.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: I wasn't I was. You know, all my friends and
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: my family especially said I was pretty precocious about what
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: was going on in the world, and I wanted to
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: be a part of it. Uh So that was my destination.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: And then what happened was I got to be a
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: part of it in a pretty elevated way. But when
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: I circled back to South Dakota, most from a geographical
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: and from a cultural point of view, I didn't want
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: to let go of that. I wanted to I knew
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: that shape who I am, and I wanted to retain
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: that as part of who I am. You know, we
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: brought Spencer new Hearth, who stayed next to me here
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: for two reasons. So you guys can do the um
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: South Dakota conversation, which I'd like you to have where
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: you go like, oh, I'm from there, and then too
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: because so if you can imagine if you had Spencer's voice,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: how your career would have been even better. Well, people
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: often say to me, hey, how did you get involved
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: in the business be where did that voice come from?
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: And I said, they had a specialist serious one year
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: and I was able to get the voice. That's how
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: it worked out. But I was a talkative kid early,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: and I had an enormous curiosity. There's a famous story
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: in our family were living on a army base during
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: World War Two and I was three or I think
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: three years old when it has happened. My mother had
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: to go into the post office. She's stay here, Tommy,
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm going with you and she said I
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: I said, no, I gotta go with She's why do
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: you have to Why do you want to go with me?
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: I said, I've never seen the floor in there, So
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: I have always thought that was the foundation of who
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: I am. I wanted to see what was going on
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: on the other side of some place. You know, I
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: got kind of carried away. You know. I've been a
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Catmando and all over the world, China during the Revolutions, Russia,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the far far Eastern part of Russia, all over Africa,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: all over South America. Uh And it's always been rewarding.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: And I always felt this is who I am. I'm
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a bigger Tom broke cow fan than I think most
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: twenty eight year olds because I grew up thirty miles
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: from where you went to high school. I went to
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: the same college as you. Uh So, like, I love
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: the Tom Broke off story, but I'm especially interested in
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the army base of Igloo that you spent a few
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: years on. That is like one of the strangest places
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: that you could probably grow up in, like a developed country.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Tell us about Iglou, Like how it came to be,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: how you ended up there, Like, well, that community was like, well,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: my dad had a very very difficult childhood, but he
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: was introduced to a caterpillar when he was about nineteen,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: and it turns out manner and machine were meant for
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: each other. He became a highly demand heavy equipment operator
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: and that's when America was getting ready for the war.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: He was in Kansas building airports across Kansas for the
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: long distance bomber runs. Uh there was a little uh
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: small arms factory that was being developed in New Brighton, Minnesota.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: He was part of that. But then as a war
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: became more and more evident that it was going to happen,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: he wanted to get a place to park us the family,
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: my mother and uh me and I had a another
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: brother on the way, and he heard about Iglo, South Dakota,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: and so we drove through the night. I'll never forget it.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: I had my face pasted to the windows because the
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Black Hills were not very popular in that day. And
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: we mountain lion running alongside of us. For a while
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: there were dearer and you know, and everything everywhere. And
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: then the sun came up on this God forbid in
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: South Dakota called Agloo and it was all sage brush, rattlesnakes,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: uh no water to speak of except slews. And my
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: dad said, we're going home, and she said, no, we
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: gotta stay. And it turned out to be a fabulous
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: experience for all of us. They have a little tiny houses.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: I think the house that my parents put us in
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: was not much larger than the room in which you
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: now sit, and everybody there were five of us by
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: the end, it was about two hundred eighty square feet.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: And my dad made the base go. I mean, everything
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: that needed to be fixed, he could fix it. Everything
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: that needed to be improved, he could improve it. So
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: his draft came up and he wanted to be a CB,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: so he went to Denver. And by the time we
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: got to Denver, the base commander and Engloo said send
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: him back. We can't operate it without him. So we
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: were there for the duration. There was an enormous uh
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: presence of uniform American Army people who were part of
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: the Ordinance Division of the Army. Then there were the
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: civilians like us, and then on the edge of town
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: there were Italian prisoners of war, about two hundred of them,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: and they wore these orange outfits. They were in a
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: lightly guarded why where were they going to go? And
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: captured in the European theater and flown to South Dakota
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: and they and that happened, you know, that happened out
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: here as well. I was I was in where was
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: I here? In Montana? One day oh, and I was
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: in buildings and I saw a guy with a very
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: sophisticated little Italian Uh. No, it was in Missoula, and
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: he had a very sophisticated little Italian food store. And
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: I said, where did you come from? He said, I've
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: been here for I said, came during the war, right,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: And he said, how did you pick that out? I said,
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: because I lived in a place where there were other
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Italian You were a prisoner of war And he said
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: I wasn't. I decided to stay. That's kind of lost
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: in history anyhow, the story about these Italian prisons of war,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: which is you can now tell because the statue of
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: limitations is run out, turns out they were also to
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: put a politely servicing some of the war widows. You know,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: they were at night visiting. Well yeah, and there were
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: some children that were born. Uh And it's never been
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: tracked down, but it's that's part of people now write
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: about that. So there, there we were in this town.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: I can still tell you the name Joe was a
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: police chief who lived across the street, Promise. He was
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: a former rodeo writer. And then down the street were
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: the Silver Nails, And I remember seeing the silver Mills
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: son going off to war in his navy uniform, and
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: it was very exciting to be a part of that.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: And out on the prairie, the igloos it sounded what's
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: called igloo because they created these igloo like things out
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: of the earth. And that's where they stored AMMO and
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: other high high performing of detonation stuff shipped up from
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: the Denver Rocky Mountain uh storage area because they knew
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: the Germans knew about that, and they wanted to get
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: someplace else. So there were bombs going off and stuff
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: going off all the time, and it was a lot
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: of fun to live there. Yeah, it was selected, believe
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: because of the ruralness of it, right, like there's nothing
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: else around. I got. It's the most I've been back.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: And you know, it still was as remote as they come.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Rattlesnakes and sagebrush pretty much. And uh, but we stayed
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: and there was a community of culture, you know, it
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: all pulled together, all pay good attention to what was
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: going on. I had a very uh, saucy, sassy aunt
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: who was my mother's sister. She was kind of like
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: she was like my big sister. She was very young,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: but she flew Piper Cubs and every guy in town
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: wanted to date her, you know. So it was there
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: was a lot going on. And then they typically they
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: builtard an infrastructure, you know. They had a high school
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: gym with a good basketball team. They had a movie theater,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: we had a parade grounds, a good shopping area. Uh
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: and people were secured there. So it was one of
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: those amazing kind of developments in World War Two that
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: were lost to history after a while. Yeah, and the
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: whole thing was gone like by the sixties, right, Like
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: a population peak of Bigglue is probably like six or
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: eighteen hundred people and then by like sixty three zero. Yeah,
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: it's not what you would call destination, right, pretty tough stuff.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: I've shot antelope within eyesight of the egloos, so it's
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: it's that kind of country. Yeah, it was. And who
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: we used to see antal of a lot of my dad.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: I remember it was not a hunter, but he had
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: all these uh wonderful weapons from a Swedish homesteader would
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: raise it at a thirty thirty which I still have,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: a Winchester two which I still have, and a little
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: tiny uh saddle twenty two. Anyhow, somebody persuade him go
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: out and shoot a deer. I think he shot the
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: oldest deer in the history of that kind. It was
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: the toughest. We had one meal and that was it,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: you know, really, my parents though, well we got meat supply. No, no, no,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: you know, at one time that's it. And now that
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: area is you probably know, it's like very popular for
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: doomsday preppers. Those eight hundred ig lose, these big concrete
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: structures built into the earth. All kinds of people that
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: are are planning for armageddon. You can buy those, you
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: can them. Yeah, and some people have actually hit bottom
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: for that reason. They think armageddons coming. I've got a
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: place to hide out. It would be a good spot,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: I think though. Now my tip to my tip to
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: armageddon preppers would be to not set up next to
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: armageddon preppers like that would be who would be most
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: suspicious of them? Well, there's there's because they because they
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: have a tendency to jump the guns. Sure, you know,
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: I would want a good prepping spot would be where
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: there's no preppers. Yeah, I feel well. The other the
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: characterization of the place was the high school nickname. The
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: team nickname were the Rattlers, So that's how you know
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: they were I mean, everybody you know knew what they
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: were up against. And we were there for well, we
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: didn't leave until forty seven. Then we moved to the
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: center part of the state to another very very barren
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: area where they were building poor randall. Damn nothing had
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: been done when we arrived. It was just the Rowing
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: Hills in the Missouri River part of the yank Tony
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: super Reservation. So that also was exciting for me because
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I loved exploration, and I became very involved in the
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: geology of the area. And the people moved in from
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: all over the country, a lot of them coming right
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: out of the war, a lot of them from very
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: poor circumstances, and they were able to get good jobs.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: I have later been in touch with friends of mine
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: and and I said, so, when you that picked out,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: what was the most surprising? They said, we had indoor plumbing,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: then heaven door plumbing. Before when you said that your
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: dad had a rough upbringing or a rough childhood in
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: what way? Just poverty or more complicated than that? Poverty,
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: more complicated the family. There were ten children in the family.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: They had this big hotel, railroading hotel, which is not.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: It was just a sweatshop and he was the last
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: of the group. He had a learning disability, had a
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: little difficulty reading, and nobody would kind of deal with
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: that at all. So in the third grade he dropped
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: out and he went to work for a Swedish homesteader
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: who was living in the hotel, who was a jack
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: of all trades. Uh you know. He had a team
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: of horses and he would drill wells and he would
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: houses and that kind of thing. And my dad, at
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: age nine, eight nine and ten, was working for him.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Did go up in the morning. They dropped my dad
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: head first don a well to retrieve the leathers that
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: have been lost down there in that well, or to
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: clear it out in some fashion. One he told the
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: story of it. Finally out the well set up, he
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: got up, changed his clothes, and a little tiny pig
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: ran down out of the well. They dropped him around
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: again head first to grab the pig and bring it out.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's the kind of life that he had.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: He dropped out in third grade. He dropped out. He
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: didn't go to the didn't finish third grade. Now did
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: he ever go So he never went back. Oh no,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: we went back all the time because he turned out
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: to be a success story. I mean he stunned everybody.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Everybody had rejected everything that happened in town, whether he
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: was around or not, he got blamed for and he
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: was aware of that. And when he was about twelve
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: or thirteen, he bought a team of sorrel horses and
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: he decorated him. And he was a genius at making
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: things happen. So he flinded gardens and mode lawns and
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: removed so and delivered coal and did all that when
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: he was a teenager, and his big goal was to
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: make something of himself. He never ever had a play date.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: He never he never had a day in which he
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: could just on Sundays when everybody's playing baseball, he was working.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: And his friends, who all admired him because he was
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: so strong and capable, said to me later, we just
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: couldn't get your dad to be one of us, you
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: know when it came to the weekend, because he had
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: a job to do. True for the rest of his life.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: You know, I was a high school jockey, rarely showed
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: up in the games. I didn't mind that because he
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: was home putting in a new acoustical tile in our
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: dining room where he was fixing a car, or he
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: was buying something to you know, to make into a trailer.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: He always had this other thing, and he had his
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: fantastic sense of humor, big red haired, good looking guy,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: and he was wickedly funny with me and with everybody.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: And he he was quite heroic wherever who lived, because
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: they saw the evolution of this guy. The great story
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: about him was he was the toughest kid in town,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: and no matter what happened in town, he was blamed
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: for it. But he could be SA said, I could
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: be ten miles out of town, but something half I
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: got blamed for it. But every farm kid would when
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: it come down and take him on to try to
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: test themselves. He never lost the fight until when he
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: was about eighteen or nineteen. Professional boxer this is the
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: thirties came through looking for some easy change and they
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: all said, oh, Red Brokeaw, that's your guy. The guy
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: knocked my dad out in the first round. That was
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: he ever went back. Can't do it again. Uh. We
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: interviewed once the athlete Bo Jackson, and he was remembering
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: how everything that happened in his town blamed on him,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: blamed on him, and I said why and he said, well,
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: it's because I did it. In my dad's case, it
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: was the opposite. He didn't do it, and he was
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: too busy, frankly. And the hotel was a sweatshop, you know,
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: it was a sweatshop. He never knew which room he
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: was gonna be in. Whatever room was empty at night
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: is the room that he would take. And it was
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: unheeded from the second floor up. So he had a
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: big buffalo robe that he slept under. Was brother who
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: got the hell out of here after two not too long.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Once California went the Coast Guard, and then in the
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: in the UH and then in the Navy. Was your
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: dad baffled by your decision to pursue media because it
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: seems like it would have been something that probably didn't
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: occur to him. Well, I didn't occur to him, but
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: he also knew of my vivid interest in what was
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: going on field in part because of my mother. My dad,
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: this is a great, great part of his story is
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: that my mother was part of an Irish American family
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: farming south of town, really quite beautiful, skeptic grade. So
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: she was in high school in fifteen, he saw her
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: no play and he said to a friend of his,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: I'd like to get a day with her, and the
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: guy said, what if you do, then I'll get another day.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: So my dad drove out to the farm. He was
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: four or five years older than her at that point,
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: and he left the car running lights on the door open.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: He went up, knocked on the door. He never met her,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: and he said, some of us are going to Finally,
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: he said, some of us we're going to the movie tomorrow.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Would you go with me? And she turned around, looked
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: at her father, and her father said, he has a
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: really good reputation. You know, he's honest, hard working. I
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: think he'll be okay, And so they went to the
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: movie and then over. My mother wanted to be a journalist.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: A lot of my interests came from her. She was
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: always interested in what was going on in the world,
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: reading about stuff, and uh she couldn't afford to go
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: to college. It was a hundred dollars a year, so
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: she was working around town a lot of stuff, and
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: they continued to see each other. My dad was often
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: racing over the Minnesota to work on a construction job
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: of some kind or another. Once he learned how to
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: operate the caterpillar in and the construction company that hired
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: him originally really tried to stay in touch with him
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: because he was such a good hand frankly, and then
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: they decided they get married in the height of the depression,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: and my mother and dad had a little tiny trailer.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: They put it behind the thing. They had two goals
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: in life, which was to do better ear year and
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: say every year at least a thousand hours. I mean,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: that's pretty unusual. No, no credit cards, it was all cash,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. They he had this, as I say,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: this wonderful sense of humor, funny and and and robust.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: And my mother was a great audience for him. She
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: would laugh easily and you know, and she was interested
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: in books and other things. So it was a great
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: Yeana yang. And out of that, I can you briefly
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: touched on uh growing up around four Randle Damn And
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: for our listeners that don't know, that's like one of
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: the biggest damns in North America. And it created like
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: Francis Case on the Missouri River in South Dakota, and
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: that's one of the biggest reservoirs in North America. As well.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: It's hard to fathom seeing the completion of that, seeing
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: the river change just like overnight. So can you talk
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: about that like seeing four ramdas. Remember when we moved
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: from Iklu in the far southwestern part of the state
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: to this place where they were going to build a
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: dam around Lake Antonys and White or in the middle
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: of the yank Tony Seuer Reservation. My dad took me
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: out and still it stood me on a river bluff
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: looking at the wild Missouri below, and he said, there
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: at that time, it was going to be the largest
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: dam of its kind in the world, and he said,
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: they're going to do this. I was in the second
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: grade at that point. He had caught on with the
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: contractor that was building the highway to the site, and
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: he had a really good job because he could do
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. And then he wanted to go back
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: and re enlist in the government again worked with the
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: core of engineers because he had points built up with them,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: and the Corps was desperate to have him because he
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: could do everything. From that moment on, three years later,
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: there was a town of about people. It had the
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: most modern shopping center in South Dakota, had unbelievable, state
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: of the art, high school, curb and gutter, bowling alley,
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: movie theater, hospital, hotel, and and enough room on one
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: end of the town for about two trailer houses of
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: workers who came in from all America. And it went
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: on for ten years seven to build that dam. And
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: they were the best years of anyone's life, because they're
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: all working class. I said to Marath the other day,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: I remember the second Christmas that we were in fixed down.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Every kid in town got the chemistry set or a
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: new gun, or they got you a new set of
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: clothes or whatever, because their families were making real money.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: These are all people who came out of the depression
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: and went through the war, and for the first time
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: they had spending money first time. My other favorite story
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: about it was there was a terrible hail storm one
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: day and all the windows in our little house were
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: knocked out. So that's woke emilies to come on, we're
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: going down to the shop to get this repaired. By
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: the time we got the shop, there must have been
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: forty five guys in there, many of them white collar engineers,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: and they organized themselves very quickly, and they set up
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: this kind of assembly line and they repaired all the
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: windows on a Sunday afternoon. That's what they did. You know,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: it was all can do. They didn't wait and say,
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: once the insurance gonna come, we've gotta get this done
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: and can do thing was phenomenal there when you were
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: involved with that big not that you personally, but being
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: exposed to that big damn construction project. I think I
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: often wonder about people involved in in some of those
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Was there, like, were there any people at that time
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: questioning the idea that you would damn up rivers or
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: would the conversations were having now about the long term.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: It was just, you know, and it's like you were
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: doing God's work that I was. Also they were great
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: ops for one thing, and frankly, the Missouri was out
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: of control constantly. You know, it flooded every year during
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: what they called June Rise. It would come up because
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: it was draining this old part of the world we're
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: in now, and farming would go down and everything. And
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: you know, if you were to go back and do
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: it again, you'd probably do it in a more efficient,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: you know, way of preserving what you need to preserve.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: There were eighteen different species of fishing the Missouri at
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: that time, and we'd go down and go fishing. We'd
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: catch sturgeon for example, you know, and paddlefish, all kinds
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: of fish that were going on. And I don't think
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: there was a day until it got really bad in
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: the wintertime. I wasn't down on the river. Somewhere had
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: an enormous rock collection of rare arrowheads and other things
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: like that, beautiful pieces of baggot, a church, which is
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: a really great chunk of very hard rock if the
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: Indians used to make their tools out of. I collected uh.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: And then there were people my age who came from
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: these other places who had like minded interests. It was
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: a fantastic place to live for a young person. There
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: was a one guy town manager was a really great musician,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: so he would create every year a town musical. He
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: would write the musical and we'd all go to the
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: gym and there would be the musical. And there were
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: enough people in there who could play pianos or violins
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: or whatever they needed and put it on these shows.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: When I went back later and talk to my friends,
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: I'd say to him, Jez, he didn't seem to have
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: They said, we didn't have anything you know, one of
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: my best friends, Jerry Benderson. He said his parents had
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: a small trailer house they build are kind of a
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: an attachment to it. He slept there in the middle
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: witer time in Southcote. He said, I never had it
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: into her plumbing. You know, it was the first time.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: This is great for us or my friends who's not
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: doing well now. I grew up in North Carolina, and
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: he and his mother rode the greyhound bus all the
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: way from North Carolina to South Dakota because his dad
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: had gone out there this job. But I think his
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: dad was trying to leave the family behind and the
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: mother would not allow actually happen. And that was extraordinarily
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: good athlete, funny and everything. So there was this mix.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: I had friends from Oklahoma, I knew all about Oklahoma.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: I had friends from Mississippi, so I learned about Ole
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: miss really early on, about you know, the loyalty that
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: everybody has to that. It was a mixed on white
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: anything else in my age group. Uh routed in South Dakota.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: Now you're a worldly man, obviously, um, but I think
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: South Dakota has a very underrated and unknown cuisine, and
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: so I want to say some names of like some
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: local South Dakota food just like and I want to
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: I want to get your take on them. See if
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: you like them then if you still like them now uh,
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: and if you like ever crave them despite having been
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: all over the world and had all these different foods,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: this is gonna include your tiger meat. The first one
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: is chislick. Though first one's chislick. Yeah, Chislake was a
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: big excusively the University of South Dakota and driver to Freeman,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: are you are very familiar and connected to and spend
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: a Sunday afternoon drinking We were and eating chiselick off
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: I guess paper, wasn't it spread it out on the
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: paper and heavily salted. As I remember, I don't even
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: know what it is. So chislike is cube mutton that
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: it can either be eaten loose or on a stick,
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: and it's deep fat fried or grilled, and it it's
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: like it has a little bit of marbling on there.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: And then there's a Chiselick circle where I grew up,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: which was Freeman Mennow Uh and what would be the
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: other one? Maybe Parkston, I think, And that's like where
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: Chislick was born. Out of and where you go deep
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: fried mutton, deep fried munton depends what you get. Sometimes
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: people serve it with toasts. Sometimes it's with salt, heavily salted,
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: but yeah, garlic salt is common on them, salt pepper.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: But like, have you ever encountered anything like chislick in
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: other places? You would never have? And I took mcgwain
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: uh to South Scota go peasant hunting. We I hadn't
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: find it. Michel pick him up there and we went
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: to remon uh and I said, we're gonna have watch pretty,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: We're gonna have chisselate. He's what it was like, what's chiselock?
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: I said, you're gonna you're gonna find out. You're gonna
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: love it. So we did, Yanny, I gave you some
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: chislock taking me it was great. Is it like crispy
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: on the outside or no, No, it doesn't have that. Yeah, alright.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: So the next one would be tiger meat. Yeah I didn't. Uh.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: I was not breed than that. That was you know
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: what tiger meat is though, Yeah, yeah I do, but
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: I you know, it was not part of it was
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: not part of my households, just raw dear meat. Right, Well,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: it'd be like raw beef and then he's got a
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: lot of uh salt, uh onion, green pepper in. It's
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: all their spices. God's making me hungry. Uh So the
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: next one, how about fleish kikla? No, I don't know
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: that one either. We were pretty much meat and potatoes
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: people in our family. Well this this was like ground
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: meat inside of um, like a pastry that you then
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: de fad fried. It's not was that a German dish?
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: German dish? I'm German to ase that that part I
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: remember that. How about nefli soup or dumpling soup. Yeah,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: we did have that, but in our family, my mother worked,
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: my father worked, so it was at the end of
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the day it was meating potatoes. You know. It wasn't
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: any There was no exotica, as it were. I'm trying
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: to think of. I'll tell you a peasant story that
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: when I was in college, my roommate was one of
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: the two or three best wing shots in the state,
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: and we would arrange our classes uh in the morning
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: from eight until noon. Meredith would pick me up with
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: Tom and in those days, we'd road hunt and we'd
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: drive out for million souths Quo to north along gravel
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: roads along the corn fields and shoot peasants. You know,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: we'd see him of the ditch and flasherman shoot him.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: And by the time Thanksgiving came around, must have had
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: fifty birds in the locker downtown clean. So we bought
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: two kegs of beer. And uh, the way we prepared
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: peasants in those days, you threw everything away except the breast.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: You know, nobody ate the legs or anything like that.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: And you cooked him and big cash rolls with was
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: it tomatoes cream and washroom cream and mushroom over the top.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: That's how Yeah, that's how we cooked. And then we
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: invited all of our faculty members and never worried about
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: our grades for the rest of the years. My mom
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: used to take she would take like just quartered out squirrels.
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: So you take the four legs in the back and
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: then just dump them in a crock pot and then
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: pour cream and mushroom suit in there and then cook
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: it so long that the bones would go soft, be
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: like a bone bed on the bottom. They just settled
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: down to the bottom. You have like an inch of
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: miniature squirrel bones, and then floating up above that would
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: be this squirrel meat laden squirrel suit and then you
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: make toast and put it on toast a shingle, yeah,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: which people also does another popular deer rescume sh out
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: of shingle. I should make that for my kids. They
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: probably like that. Um. And then another one that this
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: is probably a myth, but people that told me that
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: the red beer was popular? Eyes are created in Vermilion
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: where we went to college. Did you drink a lot
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: of red beers down there? You know? It could have?
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: Then at the Varsity, which was a hang out, give
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: me a red you know, I I think that I
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: think that's probably two. It's a beer with tomato juice.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: Do you ever ordered other places and have the bartender
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: look at you funny? That wasn't crazy about it? You know?
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: I kind of like good clean beer. And uh, I'm
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: trying to remember when the occasions it would call for
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: me to drink a red That would be when I
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: was hungover. What was your Your dad didn't hunt? You mentioned? Um?
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: You remember him shooting a deer once? That was it?
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: I mean he never shout a guy again. How did you?
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: At what ages did you start to become aware of
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: and participating in hunting? And fishing. I think twelve. There
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: was a neighbor who had a little poor ten and
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: pheasant season was a religious holiday in South Kota in
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: those days, and I went out with him and he said, look,
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: you could use the poor ten. And then I had
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: other friends. So a lot of the Southern guys are
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: good hunters. For example, we didn't you know, we shot everything.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: We shot squirrels. I didn't have anything to do with
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: eating the squirrels. They all had squirrels stew at home,
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: for example. That kind of thing. But a pheasant season
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: and in those days the limit was four and you
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: could walk into any farm and say, hey, can we
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: hunt a shirt and not to worry about it. Now
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: I go back every year and it's just one big,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: you know, organized, very expensive and very well run by
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: the way. Uh. Place after another. So it was a
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: different time. Did you guys fish in the river? Fished
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: a lot in the river, and we caught something called
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: drum which is a river you know what that is,
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: a river bass of some kind that we caught a
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: small sturgeon. Uh. And then we caught catfish, and we
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: also caught flathead catfishing time or time. So yeah, it
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: was it just my friend was not doing well who
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: came from North Carolina. We'd be down there at night
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: fishing or parkasan up against the you know, the heavy
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: rock part of the rip rap of the river, throwing
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: out these big slugs, you know, a huge nightcrawlers on
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: him and catch eight or nine. He's pretty good, not
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: that bad eating fish. I used to work for the U. S.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service in Yankton at Gavin's Point fish hatchery. Yeah,
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: we don't know. I don't know. You did like a
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: hatchery gig for four years. I Uh, my dad built
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: by the way, I built all those parks around there.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: That was his job. I appreciate his work. What were
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: you guys hatching? We did everything. Primarily we were the
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: pallid sturgeon recovery people, but we also did paddlefish um
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: and every spring we would go catch our broodstock paddlefish
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: at the White River um up by Chamberlain and with
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: enormous uh drift nets um in the White River which
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: did be running up to spawn and so in I
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: think it was, we netted a one hundred forty nine
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: pound paddle fish which would actually break the world record.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: That was just broken. But because we were biologists catching
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: this thing, it doesn't count, right, and the biologist I
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: was with that were certainly certified scale. We took it
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: back to the hatchery sponder out, took millions of eggs
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: from her, and then released her again. Did you ever
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: eat any of those eggs in there? Um? One time
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: we had uh paddlefish die that somebody took the eggs
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: from went home and made some stuff and uh it
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: was fine. I don't know uh when the river was
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: still they was last damn so they had a pretty
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: strong current from there on down there was a guy
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: mamber Henry Wolfe, who was a commercial fisherman. He had
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: a rig, you know, it was out there and they
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: caught a couple of a couple of catfish that were
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: national records at the time, you know, down below Yankton
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: and I run when by the time we moved to
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: Yankton around the waterfront, I rendered boats and sold bait,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: did that kind of thing, took chicks for a ride.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: You you had a bait shop, Yeah, like Johnny Morris
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: from baths Pro h. Yeah, where I was going with
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: that story. The paddlefish that we caught, that one nine
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: pound or seven ft long. The biology sells with said
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: that that was there before the damns were put in,
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: Like that was an O G paddlefish before before his
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: dad finished the damn. Yeah, it's crazy to think about. Well,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and the uh he's he probably swam around telling everybody
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: about what he used to be, like, that's right. I
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: could swim from here clear much different, you know. And
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: for Randall, you know there was there were all those
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: shale cliffs along the river and we peeled them off
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: and we found unfortunately think we found a lot of
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: fish embedded than that. You know that we thousands years old?
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Oh no, kids, fish skeletons. Yeah. Do you remember the
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Channel catfish record in South Dakota that was caught down
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: by Vermillion. Yeah, it was turned out to the Elk
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: point and yanked, but then it took out the scandal bow.
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: Then it turned out to be a blue catfish in
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: the photos. Right, you remember that story. I remember what
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: had happened. I don't remember. I knew those guys and
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: Henroy Wolf, the guy that I was talking about from Yankton.
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: They were his buddies and they would come up in
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: the morning and they have coffee and I would sit
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: in his little powered boat, you know it wasn't like
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: a little tug, and sit and have coffee with him
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: in the morning. And he we became very close friends.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: And he said, you gotta go to medical school and
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: become a doctor. That's the best profession there was. I said,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: you know, I think that would be a journal. What
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: don't want to tell that area had some great cat
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: fishermen from that area. The pictures you see himself. Now,
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: you gotta walk through it like you gotta walk through
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: the story. So how the how this fish for how
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: many ever decades had been misdiagnosed because identified? Can't you
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: remember that the area has the three species of catfish, blues, channels,
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: and flatheads, And as a channel catfish and a blue
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: catfish mature, they tend to look very similar. And it
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: gets to a point where the only way to identify
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: them with some catfish is to count the anal rays
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: on their fin, and they blew, I might have this
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: wrong and I can't google it right now. Look like
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: which a blue has twenty while a channel have twenty
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: two to twenty four. You gotta remember that before all
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: those damns went in, the Missouri River was primordial, you know,
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: it drained out of the mountain west, came all the
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: way across North Dakota, I mean Montana, Persta, North Dakota. Uh.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: And there was stuff that people had no idea that
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: they were there, you know, the species that they were there,
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: they've been living there prettyistoric times, uninterrupted travel. Yeah, from
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: you know, yeah, the Gulf and the lower end all
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: the way until some mountain stream. So the great calt
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: cat fisherman from that area, one of them caught a
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: fifty five pound what he thought was the channel catfish,
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: and what a biologist agreed was a channel catfish. And
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: luckily there's photo evidence that exists showing you can count
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: the anal rays. You can see that it's you know,
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: rounded or flat where it shouldn't be. Uh. And the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: record was pulled here about two years ago. And I
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: wrote about this um when I first started writing for
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: the Farm Forum in South Dakota. I said, this record
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: is the forest. They need to look into it, um.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: Other people I talked about it too. Then a few
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: years later they indeed did pull it because it was
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: not a channel catfish. And for a channel catfish, it
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: was at one time the world record I think South
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: Carolina ended up having a bigger one. But for a
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: channel catfish, this is enormous, like the biggest channel in
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: the world. But for a blue it's probably half the
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: size of like what the blue cat fish record is.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: So this was indeed just a small blue catfish they
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: misidentified as a channel and then they reset the state
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: record at zero. They said it to zero and where
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: I can't even rememb because people were breaking it every day.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, every day. They started like a catfish festival,
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: and they really embraced it. And there was two pounds,
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: and it was four pounds, and it was ten, then
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: it was eleven. Uh you know where. I can't remember
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: where it's at right now. No, there was an enormous jump.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: There was like it was like seven to eight and
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: then like eight to eleven and eleven and thirteen. Then
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: someone got like thirty two or something and then it's
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: kind of slowed it down. Now, Tom, I was reading, Um,
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: I don't want to tell you my source because if
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: as a life journalist, uh you probably aren't. You're probably
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: aware of the fallibility of Wikipedia. However, I was reading
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: that's where it's where I going for all my news.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: I was when I was reading in Wikipedia, was that
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: after Martin Luther King's assassination and then the Kennedy assassination. Uh,
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: you got fed up with guns? It didn't want a firearm.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: I was living in California. Gave my gun toy. Yeah,
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: what was explained that thought? I said, I had, you
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: know I had. I didn't give away my uh antique
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: guns my father had been given because I wasn't shooting
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: them anyway, but I had, and it's already already in
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: a you know, a little twenty two Remington and uh,
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: I think probably that was when I had a wing
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Master full of gauge pump shotgun and I said to
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: the camera crews, who wants a gun? I'm not going
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: to have him in the house. We had three girls.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: You know, I was just so devastated by all the
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: shooting that was going I gave them away and I
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: didn't get involved again until I moved to New York.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: And I had some friends who we're making more money
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: than the new how to spend so a lot of
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: more going out and buying expensive guns, enjoying hunting clubs
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: and so on. And one of them said to me
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: one day, Hey, you grew up in that part of
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: the world. You must have been a shooter, you know.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: We we created these great pheasant lodges, and so you
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: want to go, and I said, okay, I go. So
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: they got a gun for me, and I, you know,
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: quickly came back and at the end of the day
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: they said, God, you gotta do this. And by then
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: I could afford a really nice gun, and I got
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: involved again, and I started coming out this house quota
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: every year to hunt pressance with my pals. It's a
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: religion in this house quota, frankly, and there was a
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: way for us to reconnect again. And that's what I do.
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: You know. I have a bird hunter, and until recently
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: in Montana, I could shoot a lot of game birds
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: that are not here anymore. We don't know why. So
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: I have disappeared. And then you got you eventually became
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: a avid fly fisherman, correct, Yeah, that yeah. I remember
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: the first time I went fly fishing. I I was
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: down at Jackson Hole and I had a cameraman who
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: was very good fly fisherman. He said, you ought to
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: try this. So we went to town and bought me
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: some kind of rudimentary equipment and I went out and
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: a reasonably good athlete, and I was catching on pretty quickly.
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: But my favorite story about that is there's a bend
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: in the Snake where I was working when I was fishing,
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: and there was a boatload of tourist coming by. I
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: wanted to show them, so I, you know, do a
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: double hall cast and the two tips from my rod
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: went flying across the river in front of them. I
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: just pretended like that's the way it is, That's that's
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: the intention. My favorite part of pheasant hunting is just
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: the camaraderie and like the buzz of that opening weekend. Uh,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: but you keep doing it, not even in South Dakota sometimes.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: So what is about pheasant hunting that you like so much?
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: Why do It? Was a camarade rail, why don't It
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: was the uh, you know kind of being with your pals, um,
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: wonderful part of the outdoors above the fall on the
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: great plains. Um. And friends of mine who were hunting quails.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: Anybody get hit one of those fast, I said, come
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: with me, you know, very fast. Um. And but it
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: was it was a religion when I was growing up,
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: and it was a big social thing. And you know
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: the other part of my life is that I want
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: to be involved whatever was going on, you know, well
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: that ek cteresting. Let me try that. Uh. But then
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: I moved to and I created a little group there
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: and continue to hunt, and then went to Atlanta quick hunting.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: When moved to Los Angeles, quite hunting, and then from
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: l A Washington and then New York, and then I
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: got involved with a club business. I didn't I belong
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: to one, and it's uh, the only reason I stay
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: is the handlers everything. I had a fantastic dog, one
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: of the best dogs in the world, got by accident. Frankly,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: it was trained, and everybody wanted to be around that dog,
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: and that dog kept me hunting. So I'd go up
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: to this very high end club and the general manager,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: the guy who really put it together, would say, field one,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: it's all yours. Don't worry about it, you know, And
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: so I'd have the best place to hunt and just
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: me and my dog, and I love that. Did you
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: in that era working in media did you need to
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: Did you ever feel social repercussions um from being a hunter?
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Like now, I feel that there are a lot of
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: people who are very I don't want to. I don't
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: want to out them. But I'm always hearing from various
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: celebrities who like to hunt a little bit but don't
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: want anyone to know they hunt. Well. I didn't think
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: about that, Frankly, I was always willing to defend. I said, look,
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: I eat when I shoot, you know, and we do limits,
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: you know, and the conservation goes hand in hand with
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: good hunting properties. So I don't have any worry about that.
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: And it's it's always it's for me especially. It's been
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: a great social connection to my friends in South Dakota.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: You know that we all grew up the same way,
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: and you know, I got to a certain place in
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: life and I could go back to South Dkota to
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: be one of the guys. And then they had this
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: fantastic dog called Sage, and everybody wanted to be around Stage.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: So I would go out there every year and hunt
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: with Stage. No apologies, it's not It's different when you're
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: a sport hunter and you're using a shotgun, or if
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: even if you're shooting game like deer or whatever, then
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: the crazies. I mean, there's a great place and uh
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: and Big Timber or the guy kind of white eyed
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: said to me, they want machine guns now so they
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: can shoot kios from the sky. And I said, it's crazy.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: That's not something he said, I know, but it's not
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: illegal in many instances. That's what rakes me crazy. And
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: people the whole carry business. You know, we were my
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: son in law's mother died and we went back to
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: the small town in Oklahoma where he'd been raised in
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: a big, wonderful place where everybody gathers on Sunday night.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Four or five guys walked out with their hip, you know,
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: with her family. What's that all about? You know you
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: didn't like it? Well, I I didn't stand up object
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: to it, but I don't know. It's hard to it's
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: hard to object, you know. It's it's just, uh, you know,
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: it wasn't necessary. Look, people have a right to harm themselves.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: You know. I've got guns on the property where you
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: sit right now. Was there secure? You know? I don't.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: I don't remember under my bed or anything. But I
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: know the whole idea that I'm defined by what I've
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: gone on my hip I find offensive. Did you introduce
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: any celebrities to pheasant hunting or guns? No? I was.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: I think, Uh, you know, one of those guys uh.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: One of the guy now as the CEO of I
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: Heart Rate of a big, big broadcaster type. I think
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: he was the one who said to me much about it,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: you know, and what happened in Wall Street. They said,
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: like a lot of guys made a lot of money
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: right away, and one out and bought guns. And then
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: these clubs kind of developed around the rim of the city,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: and a lot of it had to do with old
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: Eastern culture. You know, they've grown up, you know, shooting
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So that's when I got involved.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: But I have I've kind of stayed in the Middle
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: I don't go to Europe and hunt uh uh, you know,
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: in scott Own or anything like that, although arrest I
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: might if I was gonna ask if any if your
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: travels for work ever took you to a place where
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: you had come upon the opportunity to fish or to
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: hunt in a you know, I'm so busy when I'm traveling.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: I'm always aware, uh you know, I was, you know,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: when I'm in the Middle East. A number of my
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: ich theology friends say, you know, there's a species of
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: of prout. You know, it's in some of those rivers.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: You I said, you know, look I'm not looking for fishing.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: I'm looking for sanctuary when I'm over there, you know,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: I don't. I'm not gonna go down and wade into
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: the river. There was a famous story about Saddan Hussein
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: since after the after he came down, I went to
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: a the third division. I had been following a kid.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: He was a border man, and we've been following from
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: basic training through and following him over there. Uh had
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: a really tough war. Anyhow, he was at the base
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: of the dam and they were protecting the damn hydro
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: electric and UH. One guy they befriended who was a local,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: and he told them that Saddam had a big palace.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: I went to see the palace. It was a huge palace.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: By then the army taking over and they were using
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: it as a headquarters. And they said, some locals before
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: the war came up here and they were fishing at
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: the base of the damn because it was so rich.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: And then one day out of the palace, helicopter rises,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: comes up, blows the hell out of the guys, and
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: nobody went back to fish again. You know that's how
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: operators Seriously, seriously, huh, seriously, you are you had a
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: hard time getting started in college, Like you kind of
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: bombed out at a couple of schools. Yeah, I did.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: And then you're and then your your wife to be shamed.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: You pulled the Jane hard. I still don't know what
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: happened to me. You know, I came out of high school.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: This is I'm honest. But I was a real wizkd
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: you know, his boy state governor. And I was a jock,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: and you know, and I was president of my class,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: and I was getting all these honors. I was being
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: recruited by schools I once the University of Iowa and
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: uh University. I was very good school, a lot of
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: fantastic co eds from the north shore of Chicago who
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: proved to be a bit distraction to me. Uh. And
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: I was interested in not going to class but going
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: to other things. I remember going they have something called
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: the Old Capital. It was a lecture place, and I'd
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: go over there and hear these anxotic lectures by guys
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: talking about theology and the nuclear age, that kind of thing.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: But going to the classes that I should have been
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: going to, I wasn't doing as much. And uh, I
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: guess I just thought I could get along what had
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: carried me through before. I had not always been a
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: good student, but I just wasn't paying attention. And I
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: most of my friends were a little bit older, uh
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: someone were football players, and so I didn't funk out,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: but I came close. So at the end of the year,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: I was so kind of at odds with myself. I
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: thought I'd better go back get my act together, and
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: I went to the South enrolled at the University of
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: South Dakota. Continued on that same plane, and at the
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: end of that year, a fabulous professor they're ahead of
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: the political science department, and there was a small group
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: of us who were political science majors called me over
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: to his house for dinner and he said, get out
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: of here, get it out of your assistant. Come back,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: but you could do yourself some good, your family some good.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Get out of here, just whatever it takes. I don't
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: want to see you next year. I thought that was
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: a ticket to go do whatever the hell I wanted
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: to do. And because I had a certain skill set
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: as a you know, rad you were just chocking other things.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: I got jobs and then I got a job in
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: Sioux City, Iowa, which is sixty miles away from the
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: University of South Dkota as a uh A booth announcer,
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: weekend weather man, and kind of an old purpose guy
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: for seventy five bucks a week. And they had a
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: wonderful news director who would come from Northwestern and he
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: was destined to do well, and he ended up being
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: a CBS correspondent, and he became a good friend, and
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: he became a mentor, and he said, Tom, this is
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: not the way for you. You've got to get your
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: act together. So I went back to the university, and Uh,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: I called Meredith, my friend from high school, UH, who
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: was kind of all everything. She was a big scholastic
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: leader at Universe, she had been in South Dakota and
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: all these other things. She was so highly regarded with
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: good reason. And I said, yeah, I'm gonna be in town.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: Let's get together. She wrote me the most dismissive note
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: you can possibly imagine. I'm not interested. I don't want
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: to see you again. Your mother doesn't know what to
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: do with you. She's terribly disappointed. Uh. You know, I
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: don't know what's going on. So I took that letter
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: to a very close friend of ours who later and I,
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: you know, because I stayed in touch with the intellectual circles,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: and Bob became one of the leading Soviet authorities in America.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: Still at it, Bob wig Bold, and I said, can
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: you probablylieve that merth would? And he said, yeah, I
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: can't believe it. We don't know what's going on with you.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: A wake up call. So I went back. I got
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: in the carpool and I started righting. You know, I
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: get all fourk at midnight, I get up at five,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: go to the university, be in classical noon, and go
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: back and work. But about I don't know. Five months
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: into that, I was in the library one day and
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: Meredith came home and said I went too far, And
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: I said, no, you didn't. I had it coming. I
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: went from there and fifty eight years later, what's the
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: what's the key to fifty eight years of marriage? Oh? Easy?
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: Key in my case is that she can do everything.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, what you see around here her. She's an
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: expert bridge player. She's a great came out of here
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: when I wanted by the ranch. She's always the worst
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: idea ever had was in two years she was one
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: of the leading sliders writers in Montana. She you know,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: she could just do whatever and and outbreak a sweat
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: and uh and the in terms of the public profile
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: which comes with my life not interesting. You know, she
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: has everybody is, she didn't have any enemies. Everybody's an admirer.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: Bit of rolls off from her. It's a great story
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: about that I wrote about when we were young and
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: in California. Uh, we suddenly got pulled into the old
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: Hollywood crowd because it would be big benefits and that
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: kind of thing, and I would be there as an
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: NBC guy. And then they saw Meredith and was just
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: so dropped dead beautiful and easy and charming and everything
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: that we suddenly that kind of pulled into that. And
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: my favorite story is that uh rosal and Russell came
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: up to me at a party and said, you know
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: who I am? Much broke on Of course I do.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: And she said, I hear that beautiful young woman over there.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: Your wife, I said. She She said, we're having a
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: wedding anniversary Freddie and I her husband, very Brasada. We
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: don't have any young people. Would you come? Can you imagine?
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I'm doing the eleven o'clock News.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: Were four years out of South Dakota at that point,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: five years out of South Dakota. I said, yeah. She
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: said you have a tuxedo and I said no, she's
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: a rent one, okay, and so and she said, I'll
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: send you a telegram. That's how they did things. So
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: we got to this party. We're the only ones. We
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: don't know. In a way it was, you know, it
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: was Jack Lemon and Kirk Douglas and Ronald Reagan, who
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: had just been elected governor of California, who I knew
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: a little bit because that was covering him. But it
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: was like that. It was filled both the Triple A stars.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: So rons Russell says, okay, we're gonna have dancing, that
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: real old fashioned stuff. And she went by went and
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: I couldn't figure out why. And she had hats caps
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: for the guys and scars for the women. You had
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: to match the cap on the scarpet. That was your
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: dancing partner. And I woke up and Marith has been
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: led onto the dance floor by Ronald Reagan and he,
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: you know, he was a huge star at the time.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: He's just been elected and merit's a very good dancer
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: and Dutch, we like to him with outstanding the answer
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: within three beats. Everybody stands back and watches My wife
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: at that point, twenty eight years old, most pointy she
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: ever spent on address was ninety four hours for that party,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: and they just tear up the floor and they're having
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: the best time out there. So now the dance ends,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: Mary starts back and Reagan says, oh, no, we're gonna
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: do this again. Two beats into the dance, Nancy, Reagan says, Ronnie,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: there's a question I can't answer, and pulls them away
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: back to their table. So it's one of our favorite
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: stories that we became very very close to Nancy before
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: the end of everything. So, you know, we've just had
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: this right place, right time, magical life. Add huge part
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: of it for me is that arrasses there, you know,
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: kind of even keel, you know, winning for everybody. So
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: we we've been for two kids from the ancient high
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: school worked out pretty well. When you were doing those
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: early jobs you mentioned like disc jockeying and doing weekend news. Uh,
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: what was it that you were doing well enough to
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: keep it advancing along? Like when you look back now,
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: you know, like what were the characteristics or traits? Was
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: it just work? Is there sort of a talent and
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: is there a native talent. Well, I don't know. People
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: determined that I was interested what I was doing, and
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: I was serious about journalism and you know, and I
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: had a certain cosmetics thing where I could get on
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: television and you know, and I was from the time
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: I remember or anybody could remember about me, I was
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: at ease talking and doing things. So I was not
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: a bad performer, but I was really interested in the
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: substance of it. So I went from Sioux City to
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: Omahaw for two uh two years in Omahaw doing all
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: kinds of things here, morning, noon, tonight, and bang, I
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: get picked up by the biggest station in the south
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: of Atlanta's origin the height of the civil rights movement.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: The next thing I know, I'm covering Dr King and
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: everybody down there and feeding the stuff to NBC. Eight
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: months after I'm in Atlanta, NBC comes, we want you
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: to come to California, go to work for us. So
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: it was bang, bang, bang. I get to California in
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty six. The person thing I did to
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: start covering Ronald Reagan, who everybody said that he can't win.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: And I got to know the whole team and I
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: was on the air on election night and doing all
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: of this stuff. And then California in those days especially,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: and I think it's still true, they don't ask about
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: your pedigree. Can you do the job or not. We
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: had a great life out there. The closest friends that
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: we have for this day are people our age who
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: came to at the same time. Warren Buffett's Irreplaceable Warrior,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: one of the greatest layers in America, came from a
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: small town in Io. At the same time we were there.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: There were other couples like that. California was on the rise.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: Everything was affordable. We bought a wonderful house up in
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: the valley, up in the hills, five hundred dollars, you know,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: and we three couples would go out for dinner would
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: be a hundred It would not be a hundred bucks
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: for three couples, you know, some of the best restaurants
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: of town. And then I was doing a lot of
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: work for a v C. And then, you know, we
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: had a really good life there, and Marath had a
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: good life as she was a linguistic And then in
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: d C came and said time to move. We've got
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: to come back east. Chancellor had been trying to get
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: me to do I said, yeah, why do I wanted
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: to that? So you got it? So I went back.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: I became the White House chorus about it, and the
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: timing again was in Brocose favor. I caught Watergate. Yeah
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: is it? Uh? I also read that it's rumored. I
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: don't know if you've ever knowledge that, or maybe it
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: came from you that you were offered but turned down,
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: an opportunity to be Nixon's press secretary. It was true,
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: the whole career would have went in a way different direction. No,
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: there was no way I was gonna do so. You
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: didn't even entertain the idea. You not even entertain it.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: I almost threw up when they made the offer. Yeah,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: there's no one more reviled than the press secretary during
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: a crisis. And that's not what I wanted to do.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: I want to be a journalist. I didn't want to
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: be on the other side. I want to do what
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: I was doing. And I ended up having a good
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: Bob Haldoman, who has made the offer and was persistent. Finally,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: you know, he went to jail and Watergates over onwards.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: I'm uh in New York doing a kind of retrospect
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: upon Watergate, and I guess this big bear hunt from
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: behind me and I turned around. It's Bob haul him
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: and he said, hey, Tom, you know how many times
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: I've watched you, And so I got I could have
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: sent him to jail. Uh. So you remained friendly with
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan? Yeah, like you. You speak well of him now,
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: mostly Nancy, but also Reagan. I didn't think he was
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: up to the job when he got the job. I was.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: I was worried about it. I thought he was successful
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: in California because he had a strong state legislation. He
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: learned how to work with him, and then I learned
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: as president because became very very close to Jim Baker,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: his chief of staff, who said he knew what he
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: knew and that's where he spent his time and what
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: he didn't know. He didn't want to go there. He
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: didn't want to fake it. So he said we'd have
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: these staff meetings at seven o'clock in the morning. Baker
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: would run him it, and then the President would show
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: up at eight and Baker would say, Mr President, this
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: is what we think you ought to do today, and
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: this is the area that we ought to concentrate on
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: and he'd say, okay, Jim, but I don't like that part.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: And he said, well he didn't like something, he really
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: had strong reason for not liking it. He always knew
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: who he was, so I came to admire him. You know,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: we were different, you know a lot of philosophical things.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: I think he was still you know, in the thirties
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: when it came to race, for example, he didn't quite
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: understand how that was going. But I thought he was
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: very important in standing up to the Russians and making
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: a stand about the Berlin Wall, and he made the
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: country optimistic, you know, that they came to believe that
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: they could do what they needed to do and wanted
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: to do it. He had that kind of cheerfulness about him,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: and he didn't things rolled off his back. You know.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: He talked Sam Donaldson. I've talked about this a lot.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: Sam came. We have the same feeling. We were the
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: two that were invited to Nancy's uh to Nancy's funeral,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: and I spoke and Sam was there as well, the
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: only two correspondents. Because we dealt with him in a
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: way that we tried to see what he was up to,
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: and we had an appreciation what he got right and
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: also when he got wrong, we pulled the chain and
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: he could handle it. Now we look at news and
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: it's um and and the people who bring us news,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: and I think the idea of of impartiality, bipartisanship, we're
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: almost to the point where people don't even give it
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: lip service anymore. Uh. But you were of the era
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: when you at least had to pretend how uh how
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: much is you because looking at your the people you've known,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: and the way you speak about the way you just
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: spoke about Reagan, for instance, the fact you may have
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: you know that someone at the NICK within the Nixon
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: administration looked at you, um that you received a great
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: award under Obama, like I look at the resume and
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: be like, oh, that must be like a fairly bipartisan,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: open minded person. But did you find it because of
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: your career you had the foster that and bury your
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: impulses and instincts in order to maintain this aura of
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: impartiality or did you naturally feel that way? No? I
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: think it's the role of a journalist, you know, I had,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: as I've often said to people, have very strong ideological,
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: philosophical feelings, great interest in a lot of things that
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: don't always match the people that I'm covering. But that's
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: not My job is not to impose on my audience.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: What I believe my job is to find out what
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: the president or a decision maker is about and how
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: they arrived at that conclusion, whether it holds water or
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: doesn't hold water, and to be fair about it. And
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: the thing that I've had the greatest pride, and I
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: suppose as a journalist is that over the years, people
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: have come up to me and say, you know, broke off.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: I don't agree with a lot about yours saying, but
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: I always believe that you have integrity. You know that
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: you've arrived at this honestly, and that's what counts. And
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: I'm also I don't go in looking for a fight.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: I go on trying to find out what does the
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: public need to know here? What's important to him? And
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: part of that was I kept my parents in mind.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: I kept Main Street in mind because of how I
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: had grown up. What do they need to know? You know,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: wherever I was in the world, I think, is this
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: gonna play in Yankton? You know? Uh? I remember looking
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: at rivers in the Middle East, and I think it
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: kind of looks a little bit like the Missouri Uh
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: So I carried that with me wherever I went. During
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: the height of nightly news, there was a big three
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: like you, Dan Rather and Jens Peter Jennings. What was
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: your relationship like with those guys. It was a competitive
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: or friendly or no relationship at all. It was a relationship,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: and we actually we were very competitive, very competitive, and
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: we got angry with each other from time to time.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, when I left
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: nightly early because I wanted to have a life beyond
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: just being on the air at six thirty every night,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: it was stunned a lot of people. Peter and Dan
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: spoke at a testimonial to me, and Peter kind of
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: nailed it. He came out and he said, people often
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: ask I have to make sure I get this right.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: People often ask do you like each other? And he
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: would say not every day, but we all have respect
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: for each other because we're committed journalists. At the end
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: of the day, all three of us admire what the
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: other one is doing, and we've compared it, competed all
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: over the world, and our social relationship was Peter and
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: I gave Dan a dinner at our house. For example,
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: when he got in that jam, you know about whether
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: he reported on Bush. We had a dinner for him
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: because his life was, you know, disappearence before his eyes.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: And we and we put together some of his friends
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: and Peter and I gave him a dinner and said, Dan,
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: there is life after all of this, after all, and
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: we all have to be aware of that. And I
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: was heartbroken when Peter got sick and died as early
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: as he did. Uh. I just made the decision to
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: leave about a year before that, and he came to me,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: but he called everybody, Lad, Glad, what are you thinking?
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: I said, Peter, I want another life. I mean, it's
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: hard for me to improve of what I've been able
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: to do. The last big story I Coverad was nine eleven.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: And uh, I want to go to South Kota when
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: the pheasant hunting is going on. I want to be
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: able to spend more time in Montana. I want to
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: travel the places, not to be there on assignment, but
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: just because I want to be there. So I want
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: a life. And you know, you have to be careful
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: about in these jobs. That's the public actulation. The attention
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: that you get doesn't become toxic, and I was determined
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: not to have it become toxic. I wanted to go
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: out on my terms. What does it look like when
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: it's toxic. Well, when it's toxic is that you get
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: to believe all the attention that you're getting is because
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: you're a wonderful person. That's when it's toxic. You know,
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: all the attention you're getting often is because they think
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: you can do something for them, or they want to
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: kind of rub shoulders with you. Uh. That that's when
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: it becomes toxic. Thank god I had Marathon my side
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: because I never got out of control and she was
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: always totally you know, uh, totally and sink with how
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: life should be led. I remember when I was doing
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: the Today's Show and things were got very difficult en VC.
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: He was a mess at one point, and I didn't
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: know whether or not my career was going to go on.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: And I came on one night and I was quite
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: ancient vers a toime. We have each other, We have
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: these three fabulous girls. What are we worried about? Look
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: at us, but we've come from the rank in South
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: Dakota to where we are. You'll always have a job.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: Don't worry about it. You need to hear that. A
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: friend of mine recently sold his business and he described
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: himself as being in the process of crawling into a
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: deep dark hole. Um, wilfully right. He just wanted to
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: take just to check out. Did you imagine like looking
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: where you now live on the edge of a creek,
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: surrounded by big cotton woods. Um, very secluded all along?
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: Did you think when I'm done, I will go and
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: live on a dirt road and fish. No. I wanted
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: to be part of my life. I didn't want to
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: give up on everything I told. Kind of active now,
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm in touch with people and then you
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: see every day. Yeah, email, I was just I'm with Andrew.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: Uh the air was her when uh the President was
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: going to Mount Rushmore because I wanted to tell the
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: Lakota store and I said to put me on I've
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: got something to say. And I got an enormous reaction
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: because almost no one knew that the Black Hills were
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: really seated to the Lakota people in the eighteen sixty
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: and Custer rode in and broad gold miners, and they
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: ran the tribes out and sent them out to the
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: reservations and then in nineteen eighty U. S. Supreme Court
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: rule that was illegal and they have just compensation coming.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: So they started to fund and the Indians will not
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: accept that. They want the land, they don't want the money.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: And they've got more than a billion dollars rightly and
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: funds that have been put away for them. And I
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: told that story on the air. I said, this is
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: what you need to know about where we are now.
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: A huge reaction. Almost no one knew about that growing
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: up in Igloon picks Downy Action. You spent like your
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: whole childhood in reservations around the edge of reservations. You
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: said you were very exposed to those people in that culture.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: Like did you feel and obligate in your career to
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: cover that more, cover differently, educate people on reservations. You know,
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: I have a lot. I've done a lot. One of
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: the Today Show was doing every state one year, uh,
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: and they were doing kind of on the Chief. I said,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to do it. If you want me
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: to do it, I won't do it on the Chief.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: I'm going to South Dakota. And I got my friend
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: Gerald one Feather to come to be my representative of
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: the Lakota tribe and talked about the history of them.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: I went back and broke the big magazine piece about
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: growing up among the tribes in South Dquota for the
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles Times m when we were doing the Olympics
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: and UH Australia. I went back U fund Billy Mills,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: who was you know, the great long distance runner who
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: was a Ladcota Sue who has a foundation now I
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: think in Colorado. And he came up and I did
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: a story about him. But the story by and largest
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: heartbreaking bright. I we Marath. I actively support a little
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: junior college on the on the Pine Ridge, whereas one
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: of my friends, Jerry One Feather, who was a classmate
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: of mine at the University of South Dakota, a serious
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: political science student. He was in the library when I
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: was at the bar. I mean that tells you the difference.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: And we put a scholarship in his name there and
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: they've gotten they've used it to get a lot of
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: other contributions. We lost youry a few years ago, but
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: if you'll permit me, I will tell one quick story
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: about it. I hadn't seen him in a number of years,
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: and he was a really serious, typical kind of Sue
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: warrior type, and he's continued. He got a masters degree
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: in political science. So our eldest daughter it's a position.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: I was thinking about doing a summer internship at at
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: the reservation on Pine Ridge. So we're there, driving around.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: It got dark and I said, we could will find
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: my friend Jerry one feathers. All know where he lists? Well,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: he stopped us and he said, oh, you go to
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: a mile north. You go one mile, he's go another
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: half mile and that's Jerry one Feather's house. So that's
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: what we did. And it was dark when we got there,
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: but his mother was outside, native to us, and she said, oh,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: I know who you are. I said, well, where's Jerry.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: She said, he has new babies in that house over there.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: So I went over, opened the door to the house,
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: walked in, not knocking, beautiful young Indian woman stove cooking
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: dinner and over on the sofa with my friend Jerry
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: one Feather with a baby. And I said, hey, Jerry,
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: how's it going. He looked at me, and he looked
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: at his wife and he said, I told you I
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: knew him. That's great, do you uh this? I've tried
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: to think out how to ask the questions. I don't
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: really understand. I don't fully understand it myself, but I
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: hear about. All I hear about, and I even tell
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: all people about it is how ripped apart we are
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: as a nation right now. Part isn't you know, partisanship?
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: Right If you read the news, watch the news, that's
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: your understanding of what is going on right now in
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: this country. But if you just go about, uh, your
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: daily existence. I'm not talking in the last month. I
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: just mean, like in recent years, you go about your
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: daily existence, I feel that every day you still encounter
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: examples of human decency, like decency being all around you.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: And so I find myself struggling to reconcile uh, what
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: I understand to be going on with what I see
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: going on, Well, what you see on television. Another area
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: is a distillation of the toxic environment, if you will,
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: that we're living in and the incendiary equality of the
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: time that we're living in. Because that's what news is,
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: you know, here's they don't talk. Everything's great, Yeah, here's
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: a nice guy to help the guy. You got to
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: talk about what needs to be corrected and what's going wrong.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: So but I think what I do believe is a
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: student of journalism, and especially this time, is that the
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: screen is so crowded. Frankly now was everybody who wants
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: to claim a place of some kind, that it does
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: get out of proportion. And I think the biggest challenge
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: for whoever the next president is, whether it's this one
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: or whether it's Joe Uh, they're going to have to
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: find a way to pull the country back together again.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: And that's gonna mean they're gonna have to reach across
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: party lines. I thought, I actually what's called to the
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: White House. When President Obama was first elected by friends
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: of mine who are on his staff, and they were
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: off to a uncertain start, and there was an intellectual
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: African American guy from Harvard who was a liberal Democrat UH,
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: who had not served in Washington, and it was things
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: were not going very well at the beginning. So I
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: went down, I had lunch with my friend and then
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: he said, well, I have a president coming. It was
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: a setup. I said, look, I don't advise presidents to him.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: I said, you know, that's not what I do on
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: my journalists I cover, But in this case, just make
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: a couple of observations while you got while you got me. Yeah,
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: if you know, I think if you he said, look,
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: these guys, Haley Barber is a real Republican from Mississippi.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: You know, really tough, smart guy, could be adopted at charming,
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: but also you know his his philosophy is what he's
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: gonna pursue. He's sitting here, he said, saying nice to me.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: He's walks outside and beats my brains. And I said,
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: that's what he does. That's what you know? Was what job?
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: What if you surprise everybody and said you want to
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: go to the state of Kansas and speak to a
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: joint session of the legislature about the common problems that
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: we all have and get yourself schooled on what Kansas
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: is all about before you go out there, why are
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: they that way? And try to get a dialogue going
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: reach across the party lines. Didn't work, And then there
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: was another episode quite similar to that with him later on.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: And I always believed it was in part because he's
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: a brilliant guy, no question about it, and he also
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: has a strong sense of who he is. Extraordinary background.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: You know, it was his mother and his father and
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. But everybody I've ever known who spent
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: time with him when he was an undergraduate in California
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: where he said Harvard and all say the same thing,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: which I agree, was he's got a great mind. He
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: didn't have enough boots on the ground experience, in my judgment,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: you know that Uh. For example, in the first two
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: years they lost the House. You know, he was barely
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: getting started. The Republicans took the House. So at the
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: end of that election, instead of having people come to
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: the White House for dinnery had him come to a
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: hotel with the Jefferson Hotel and put on a dinner there.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: The wrong thing to do, you know, bring him into
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: the system, show him the White House. I used to
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: watch Bill Clinton was a mastress this get these guys
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: who were uncertain about him and invite him over. We
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: want to go for a morning jog, and they go
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: for a morning and then they'd come back into the
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: Oval office and they, uh, you know, they were blown
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: away by it. So for all of his great strengths,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: and they were considerable, he was never really comfortable being
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: a pall. It was not just my conclusion. I knew
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: staff around him on the other but I'm not taking
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: anything away from it. He was elected twice. He's a
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: brilliant guy. He'll be well remembered. Uh for his integrity,
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: his personality, his wife, his children. I mean, he's an
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: extraordinary example of what we want for American leadership. But
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: then it also requires, you know, an ability to say,
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: maybe they have to change a little bit to get
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: them to see it my way. Uh, you don't think that.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: You think it was more of a personality trait rather
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: than being like he's criticized as being an elitist. Uh,
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: I think personality. I mean, everybody who knew him in Harvard,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: everybody who knew him when he was in the state
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: legislature in Illinois said the same thing. And I understood why.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: You know, he found a way to present himself that
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: was acceptable to the people that he needed to get
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: him elected. And it's just not his nature, you know,
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: to pick a fight to go off, and particularly just
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: find a way to pick a fight. He can be
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: dropped day charming. I mean, I was in a big
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: event in New York recently and uh, it was a
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: Kennedy thing. He spotted me and he turned around, Hey Tommy,
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: he sat down, he said, how's it going, what's going
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: on and so on. But it was not a Paul's
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: Paul kind of thing. It was just he was genuinely
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: interested in what we were doing. Do you do you
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: picture that will as a country, um pull out of this? God?
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: I hope so. Uh. It's not gonna be easy. They're
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: huge changes going on. They're going on politically, culturally, socially, economically. Uh.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: And it's gonna take And I know that there are
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: very smart people were thinking about this. You know, how
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: are we gonna stitch us back together again? How are
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: you going to create a new environment? Uh? And then
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: what are the parts of that environment? Uh? The blueprint
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: is not clear to me at this point, and we
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: have to get through the election. I remember talking to
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: Bill Gates, uh about I don't know. I talked to
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: him a couple of times when the epidemics started and
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: I said, Bill, I've been on the are He said, no,
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: I understand. It was very nice what you're doing Bill
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: in the winda or geniuses that wasn't been doing in
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: terms of was hacking that. I said, make them like
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: the work the Gates Foundation does. And I said, it
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: made them the head of a new, larger reaching out
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: kind of apparatus, and he said, Tom got away till
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: the election is over. And he's right. You know that
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: when the election is still going on, the stakes are
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: so big about who gets to sit in the White
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: House that you're going to get through that first before
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: you can go to the next step. When when you
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: asked Spencer if he was Mennonite, a Mennonite was because
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: his stunning beard, because where he's from, you it's just
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: that area, oh that neck of it was. My hometown
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: is called Mennow So yeah, do you ever think about
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: shaving your mustache off and going with more of an
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: amish look? Uh? It naturally happened when my beard first
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: started coming in so accidentally that was a period of time.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: But now, yeah, that's an unusual group because you're the
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: only one with the beard. Beards have taken over America.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: Have my Wall Street buddies are all bearded now, you know,
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: not clean shaven. It's it's happening, but in a way
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: that I am always interested in how these trends start,
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: you know, and how it becomes. I have a theory
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: about it. I think it had to do with the
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: War on Terror and that when the Special forces soldiers
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: started growing up going in and they were trying to
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: assimilate a little bit in appearance to Northern Alliance soldiers
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: and things, that they started growing beards, and I think
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: that that took off the that it was a certain
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: like toughness to having one. Yeah, you know, I think
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: that could have been all. I'm trying to think of
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: a kind of iconic public figures in our lifetime who
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: are not growing beards now because they can't because of
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: will that be me? Well I could grow a chin one. Yeah,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: I don't have any. But I mean like Harrison Ford
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: doesn't have a beard, for example, or a lot of
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: big stars don't have beards. Nobody in our vices on
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: television has gone there. I don't think that's a good point. Yeah.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: Uh one last one for you, uh in terms like
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: I've all I don't know how I've always known this,
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: but I've always known that you were a hunter and
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: an angler. Um. It was like if someone asked me, like,
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: name a fact about yeah, I'd be like Tom Broke,
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: I know he likes a hunting fish. When you list
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: your you know how you self identify right, people say like,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: what are you like? What makes you tick? Um? How
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: towards the top or towards the bottom when you're rattling off,
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: like where do you throw that in? Oh? And I
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: like to hunting fish, like is that right away? Is
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: it way down below? Golfing? Like? Where does it say?
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I know, for for one thing, I
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: sell them self, identify and I know you are you
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: people who do know. I know who I am. I
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: know what my interests are. Um. You know, in the
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: last or of my life, I've become a writer of
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: some note and that's very important to me. But I
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: don't say I'm Tom Broco I'm a writer, But I
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: generally say is that I'm Tom Broco, I'm a journalist,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: and journalism because you're a big tent, which you can
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: do sort of a lot of different things. And then
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: when it comes to my interests, uh, I am well,
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: I think kid who wanted to see the Florida Post Office?
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: I wanted to see what's going on. I want to
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: turn over rocks and do things go out of the world.
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: When Marith and I were finally got together, it's stunned everybody.
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: She came. She was a doctor's daughter and really straight arrow,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: and here I was been through this kind of wild
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: period and she always had the best answer. Her sister
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: came and said, why Tom, She said, it's gonna be interesting.
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: It's gonna be interesting. I want to hate you with one.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: One last one is I asked you about this key
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: to fifty eight years of marriage, and it seemed like
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: the answer basically is like trying to marry someone really good. Ah.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: What is do you have? Like? Uh, do you have
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: a bit of life advice that you dispel about couples
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: and no? No, just in general, like a thing you found,
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: a thing you found to be true that would be
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: of value to um, that would be of value to
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: people that are now in their twenty and thirties. Uh,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: get up every morning determined to learn something that's new. Uh,
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: take a chance, you know, don't be afraid to lean
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: out over the precipice a little far, don't fall, but
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: take a chance. I think that's a big, big part
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: of it. But also what you need to do is
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: to understand that proportion is an important part of life.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: You know, don't get carried away with getting a jet,
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: you know, drinking too much, reaching too far. Uh. One
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: of the reasons that our marriage works so well is
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: that we have that kind of balance the two of us.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: You know, I have a guy who gets on the
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: earth pointe flies off to a war zone bank like that,
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: and Actor is saying, you know, we're gonna keep everything
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: in balance. On the other hand, she went off to
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: Africa to do a project in ages and ended up
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: creating a fantastic business and uh, southwestern southeastern Africa for
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: small villages of tomato plants. So break the rules, do things,
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: but always know that there's a downside. You've gotta be careful.
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: You know, it's not gonna happen without you using good judgment.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: What value do you most highly rate for yourself? But
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: that's most important? Well, you know I think I I
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: think honestly it's the greatest value. I just think you
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: have to be honest about who you are, how you
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: deal with people, and how they can rely on you
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: are not really and we all stumble from time to time.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: You know, I've stumbled. Everybody I know is stubbled at
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: one point or another. But you have to look at
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: the big picture of word. Is that all fit in? Then? Uh?
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: You know, stumbles all not to define your entire life.
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: For example. On the other hand, some small achievement ought
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: not to be out of proportion either. You know, that's
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: that's kind of what's expected. I am what I am,
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: you know, and uh, you know a lot of young
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: correspondents come to me now and I we have a great,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: great group. I'm really proud of him. You know who
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: Richard Engel was. Uh No, I don't fearless correspondent. It
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: works for us, and I helped recruit him to where
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: we are. We stay in touch, and we stay in
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: touch because I can kind of help him with you know,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: proportion in your life. A lot of the young people
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: who are at NBC now, I've you know, I've come
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: up through all the ranks, and I'm so proud of him,
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: and I try to help him. But I don't try
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: to say my wife, I just say, use your head.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: What tell me? Your story is like an inspiration for uh,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: like a kid they grew up in rural South Dakota
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: that wanted to work in media. So I'm thrilled to
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: be sitting here with the guy from the nightly news
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: that was from South Dakota. Uh, it's a pleasure to
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: meet you and see your ranch. Well. One of one
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: of those things that I say, I'm always a comfortable
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: more comfortable when I'm here with somebody from South Dakota
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: because we have we're rooted in the same culture in
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of ways. At what I when I am
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: out there and I well, that was a dollar lama.
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: You know I was bunk shower pain and Beijing, or
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: what I was gorbut shop in Russia, or when I
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: was you know, in South Africa. When things are going on,
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: I always think what they want to know on Main
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: Street Yankton. What is it that's important to them I'm
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: doing this. What is it that I can do that
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: will make their world a little more clear for him?
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: And I think that served me pretty well. Uh. You know,
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: my friends who grew up in a narrow Eastern a
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: board for example, are always stunned when't we go out
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: to the Midwest and I take him to a coffee shop.
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: I take him to a smaller town and I tell
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: him give me twenty menutes, I'll tell you where the
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: Republicans are having coffee or where the Democrats are having coffee.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: And that is universal. You can find out, you know,
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: how the world divides itself, and that's important to be
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: able to know. That is there. Um. Kind of a
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: follow up question on that, But you've got to cover
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: a lot of great, big events and stories in your career.
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: Was there a and and and people might rate that
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: or you might be able to rate it as like
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: the biggest story and then on down. But is there
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: a story that you covered, um, and from your personal
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: perspective like very well and something that you did as
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: a journalist? You said, where I really nailed it when
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: I covered that event. Yeah, the brilliant Wall. I owned it.
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: You know, there was nobody else there and it was
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: a defining event of the twentieth century. And had a
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: colleague in New York with our foreign editor, and Jerry
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: said to me, not much going on here, why don't
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: you go to Germany? They were beginning to spill out
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: of the borders. And I said, that's a good idea.
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: So I went over and I I got there and
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: there was not much going on. So we started, you know,
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: doing stories about how you could go in and out
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: of each Germany. Now, the next day there was this
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: big news conference with a guy my name at Gutra Shobowski.
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: And at the end he was given a piece of
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: paper and he said, oh, and it turns out and
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: he misinterpreted it and he said, uh, members of the GDR,
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: the German Democratic Republic are allowed now to go out.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: So the next day this news conference, good Shabowski says,
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: you can go wherever we want to go. And it
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: was like lightning had hit this room where we were,
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: and nobody thought, was that true? Can it be true?
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: And I had a prior appointment with him, and so
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: I went upstairs at my for this wonderful woman threw
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: herself against the door to keep other reporters out. I said,
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: say to my camera, what's going on? And he tells,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: you know, and then we put that on the air
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: and the world blew up. You know, it was it
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: was chaotic. At first. The guards thought they had to
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: shoot the people who were going to come across. And
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: I was the only one of the world who had
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: a satellite to get out of that night and it
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: was a clean kill. And it was because others had
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: made preparations. You know, Broadcast journalism is not a one
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: man sport. It's a you know, it's a team effort.
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: So everybody did their job and we were you know,
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: it was the biggest single triumph of my lifetime. In
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: terms of a scoop as you were changed the world.
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: Here's the other part of the story. That's fun. So
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: h the next day we continue to work and I,
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: I guess I didn't get a asked to talk to
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: Marath until I got back, and uh so when I
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: got back, I said to her, well, what did you think?
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: She said, You're not gonna believe this, And I said
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: what she said? We had apartment, our apartment with some
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: work was being done, so Tim Rosser had an apartment
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: of New York and we were using that. So she said,
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: I was, you know, at Tim the Marines and I
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: went out to play and I came home, took the
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: dogs out for walkdon turn on television, and I had
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: no idea that this was going on. And the next
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: morning I went for a walk in the park with
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: the dogs and everybody came up with tears in their
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: eyes and saying, my god, you must be so proud
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: of that. The most thrilling thing I've ever seen shed.
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: I had no idea what they were talking. That's great.
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: So all right, well, Tom Brokell, thank you very much
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: for joining us. Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time,
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: especially letting us come into your beautiful home here. So
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: here's too that prospective healing of the country that I
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: hope will well. I think that's the most important. Is
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: the greatest test for America since the Civil War. That's
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: the last word I'd like to say there. Uh, you know,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: when we went through the depression, everybody was in the
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: same boat and pulling on the same levers as it were,
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: to try to survive. World War two is a classic
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: example of America being more than some of its parts.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: How good it wasn't what it did. The sixties were
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: very divisive in America, but we emerged from them and
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: learned from them. This is a double whammy. We've got
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: a fatal disease in the air that people are inhaling,
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: and we don't have control of it yet, and thousands
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: of people are dying. We also have a toxic political
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: environment in which the current President of United States is
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: doing all that he can two divide the country, not
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: to unite it. And therefore the challenges for all of us,
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: not just on the right, although I think more of
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: them have to step up, or on the left by
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: taking advantage of what's going on. We all have to
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: find a way to work together and there are some
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: truths that are hard and people are having a hard
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: time facing up to them. But unless we do, you know,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: this great, great experiment is going to be in a
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: lot of trouble. There's no need for that. Thank you
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: and preaching