From Tony Rossi, of The Christophers:
My last column introduced you to Award-winning NBC News correspondent Bob Dotson, who has spent 40 years profiling ordinary people who have overcome the odds to accomplish extraordinary things. His “American Story” segments on the “Today Show” have been so popular that he collected many of them in a new book, also called “American Story.”
In an industry that tends to focus on bad news, why is Dotson different? Well, his “can do” attitude was born during his childhood battle with polio, which shrunk the tendon in his left leg, inhibiting his ability to walk. For almost 10 years, his mother would take him to their local hospital in St. Louis three days a week for therapy.
When he was five or six, Dotson remembers his doctor giving him the book “The Little Engine That Could,” which was grounded in the message, “I think I can, I know I can.” Dotson took that message to heart, determined that he would live a normal life. At age 10, doctors performed surgery on him to implant six inches of fake tendon. Now age 66, Dotson told me on “Christopher Closeup” that “it’s still working pretty good.”
The lesson he learned from his own experiences and those of the people he’s met is simple, yet profound: “Success and thriving in this country is not a question of just being dealt a good hand; it’s playing a bad hand well over and over again.” That wisdom has given him an appreciation for people who connect with regular folks—and even those who can connect regular folks with God.
“One of the most interesting stories in the book,” says Dotson, “is about a group called The Flying Fathers, ex-hockey players who ended up in the priesthood. They formed a hockey team that was a lot like the Harlem Globetrotters. The head of this was Father Vaughan Quinn in Detroit. He decided that in order to help people, you have to make them laugh…After their performance, people would come up and share a cup of coffee, and they would start to talk to the Fathers about their lives. And that’s when they got through with their faith. The people realized that the Fathers are as regular as they are.”
Though Dotson has accumulated a lot of stories over his career, he’s also interested in sharing his knowledge with the next generation. When talking to students at his old high school recently, he told them, “When I started, you couldn’t run a story over a minute on the ‘Today Show’…so I spent a year doing fifty-nine-second stories. Whether it was a hurricane or a revolution, I came in at fifty-nine seconds, when everybody else was asking for another 10 seconds every morning. While I did that, I found a story I thought would be fascinating. So I went to my boss at the end of the year and said, ‘Could I have a couple of minutes to do a special story?’ And he said, ‘You can have four minutes.’”
In essence, the young reporter had earned a reputation for doing his job well without complaining, so his boss rewarded that. Dotson said, “You’ve got to do the job somebody’s hired you to do, but that doesn’t mean that on your own time…you can’t polish your skills and get to the point where they see the best that you can do.”
Dotson notes that the most fundamental aspect of journalism remains the same: namely, storytelling. “If you learn how to tell stories so that people will actually listen to you,” he said, “you’ll be in demand.”
This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
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The Christophers: Christopher Radio & Video
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