Portland program set a high bar

OK. A guy has just lifted my coattails up and started to attach a battery pack to my belt.
What the heck is going on?
Welcome to the often-unreal world of television.
Back when WIPB-TV, the Public Broadcasting station out of Muncie, had first pitched the idea of a show about Portland, I was one of the first to buy in to the concept.
The idea — community engagement honcho Michelle Kinsey explained — was to have a town tell its own stories.
Instead of having a reporter and crew roll in to, say, Dunkirk and go looking for stories. The crew would ask the town to step up and tell its own stories.
From a journalistic standpoint, I was intrigued from the get-go. I know how easy it is for a reporter to have blind spots and biases they’re not even aware of. Objectivity is the goal, but anyone who tells you it is easy is wrong. It is hard. Sometimes it’s borderline impossible.
So this all-skate, everyone can participate, anyone can tell a story approach caught my attention.
And I bought in.
For family reasons, I figured I had a responsibility to tell the story of Elwood Haynes and his connection to the Gas Boom and Portland and his first car.
And I quickly caught on that it made sense to tell the story of the daily newspaper.
How often do we get to tell those stories? Not often.
But not everyone got the concept.
If you have enough time, I could provide you with a long list of stories that could have been told: Jay County’s Twila Tharp, one of the premiere choreographers of the 20th century, who was born in Portland and spent part of her childhood in rural Dunkirk; Jack Imel, a fixture on the Lawrence Welk Show for decades; harness racing legend Jerry Landess; internet investment guru Mary Meeker; and on and on and on.
But I had two stories to tell and figured it was someone else’s responsibility to tell the others.
There were also stories that didn’t fit into a “Portland” pigeonhole.
For something like 40 years now, we’ve been doing our best to behave like a countywide community. But countywide stories didn’t fit the “Now Entering Portland” model.
As a result, a whole bunch of good stories about Jay County High School didn’t get told. The Marching Patriots alone were good for several minutes, but without a storyteller and without a clean fit to the format, that tale went untold.
So, here’s how it worked from a storyteller perspective.
I’d agreed to talk about a couple of subjects and was told to round up visual images to help tell the story — videos, old photos, digital photos, and more.
Those were delivered on a couple of flash drives, and then I showed up on a Saturday morning in February to be interviewed.
The interview was painless, mostly because it was going to be edited. Say something stupid? They can cut that out.
And that was pretty much it from a storyteller standpoint. Meanwhile, over a period of weeks and months the WIPB staff tried to make something out of all this stuff they had been given. It was not an easy chore.
Proof of that is the fact that the premiere of the program was originally set for March and actually happened in June. In fact, director Sam Clemmons contacted me just days before the broadcast in search of some images to illustrate a story.
Finally, a couple weeks ago, the finished product was broadcast.
And as part of that broadcast, I had to make the transition from safely babbling in front of a camera to trying to be coherent on live TV.
That is not an easy transition, let me tell you.
I did my best not to babble, but I did feel my heart-rate increase and did experience — as Al Rent had warned me — a suddenly dry mouth. The best verdict: I survived.
And the WIPB people were thrilled with the community’s response and involvement.
The questions now are: Who is next? And how will they measure up?
The bar has been set pretty high.