Wyoming PBS Engage Journal

Wyoming PBS’ Mobile Production Truck arrived in Wyoming in January of 2004 just in time to provide coverage of the…

With a small production staff, you perform triage all the time – hold off on taping the Chronicle host segment…

A long flight to Boston, a slow drive to Portland, ME., where I walked the wet streets late at night looking for a bite to eat, thinking of the New England sea coast towns of The Perfect Storm. A friend had recommended a bed & breakfast, an old Victorian, where I got the least expensive third floor room and listened to the rain on the roof for a fitful night’s sleep. Up in the morning for the drive to Kennebunkport, a wealthy, and somewhat touristy, little coastal town near which President George H.W. Bush and his family – and the Secret Service – spend a portion of the year in a family compound surrounded on three sides by ocean.

In early October of 2008, Wyoming PBS videographer Thompson Coles and myself are in Meeteetse and Kirwin shooting and interviewing people for what would become the documentary “Risky Business: the Ghost Town of Kirwin”. Our trip is cut short, however, by an early snow storm. We leave without some important “B-roll” footage of the spectacular scenery of the upper Wood River valley where Kirwin is located.

The Kennedy brothers of the Camelot generation were not alike: brash Joe had the presumptive air of an aristocratic first son, imperious and unafraid; John, for all the romance that later accrued to him, was as much a bootlegger’s son as a scholarly dreamer, and schemed ruthlessly for a place in history; Bobby was the wounded poet, ambivalent about his quest but obligated to pursue it; and then there was Teddy, who began as the chubby-cheeked family pet, and for many years seemed unable to grow up, lost in the long shadows of his mythologized dead brethren.