TUESDAY TRAVELS

Back in my youth . . way, way back in the 1940's I was captivated by the tales of the gigantic lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his great blue ox, Babe.

He was a product of oral folklore that later found his way into print.

Supposedly Bunyan had logged millions of trees in North Dakota (my childhood home) which accounted for the miles of treeless prairie land.

The stories of his exploits are legendary but I know that the gigantic Bunyan was REAL because I met him once and he called me by name.

I am in the lower left of the photo, standing next to one of Paul's big dogs and in front of the man himself.

Paul would turn his head, raise one arm and greet visitors by name and perhaps the town they came from.

At this time he was located in the Paul Bunyan Amusement Park near Brainerd, Minnesota.

Later the park closed but Paul and Babe were relocated to what is now Paul Bunyan Land, a few miles east of Brainerd.

When I visited Paul back in the day I was also photographed with a chipmunk from his tales.

Everything was outsize in the park, including my long legs.

An uncle of mine owned a cabin on Camp Lake, which was only about 20 miles away so my visit to the mighty woodsman was a natural stop on our way back to North Dakota.

PAUL BUNYAN LIVES!

Back in April of this year I wrote a post about my meeting with the legendary lumberjack, Paul Bunyan.

You can read that post and see picture of our meeting here.

Today I can report, for any of you Gentle Readers who may have doubted my story, that the newspaper of record, the New York Times, has authenticated the "history" of Paul Bunyan in Minnesota.

You can read it here.

And that may be all you will ever hear about Paul Bunyan on this blog.

Maybe.

FAME

When you've spent your working life as a broadcast journalist, as I did, you run into a lot of famous, or at least well-known people.

But my first brush with the famous started when I was a wee lad and was photographed with that mighty lumberjack of the north woods, Paul Bunyan.

I'm in the lower left of this photograph.

It was at a theme park in some part of northern Minnesota.

That brief meeting with a storybook hero may have led me on.

Later on, as a rock and roll disc jockey I conducted my first interview with a famous piano player and singer, Fats Domino.

Unfortunately the interview was done over the telephone and I didn't get a picture with him.

But I did get a photo of me greeting one of my personal heroes, the late NBC newscaster, Chet Huntley.

Later on, I met his broadcast partner, David Brinkley, but again no photo.

Barry Goldwater brought his presidential campaign to North Dakota in 1964 and I was nearby, peering over someone's shoulder.

The gentleman standing with Goldwater is Tom Kleppe, at the time a congressman from North Dakota who later served as administrator of the Small Business Administration and then Secretary of the Interior.

A couple of years later, the Democrats were descending on the state.

I was a news director welcoming Vice-President Hubert Humphrey into my t.v. station for an exclusive interview.

 And around that same time, I caught up with Senator Eugene McCarthy when he came to town.

In Phoenix, I would see Senator Goldwater fairly frequently, along with many other politicians.

But I also interviewed a local celebrity who made it big, Vincent Furnier.

You might not recognize him without his stage makeup, where he's more commonly known as Alice Cooper.

I also ran into another famous rock and roll singer when he was on tour in Seattle.

Well, Elvis Presley was long gone by then but this statue of him was in some shops in the Pike's Place Marketplace.

Speaking of "statuesque", John Wayne dropped by one of my homes for a visit one day.

Okay, to be honest, that's just a cardboard cutout but I actually did meet the real "Duke" on the patio of his home in Newport Beach, California some years before.

The subject matter we discussed was his plan to take a few Vietnamese refugees and give them a home on one of his Arizona ranches.

This was the same week I met a Vietnamese refugee, the former Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and his lovely wife.

Speaking of Prime Ministers, while I never met him, I did pay a visit to a statue of my 15th cousin in the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill.

Back in the U.S. of A., retirement took me to my acting career.

As an un-credited extra.

In a movie called "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", I was briefly seen carrying a bag of groceries to the parking lot of a store behind the nearly unknown actor at the time: Johnny Depp.

Leonardo DiCaprio was also in that movie and received his first Academy Award nomination for his role.

Another extra role had me on screen for about a quarter of a second but the film "A Perfect World" got me a handshake from the director, Clint Eastwood, when my brief scene was over.

Ah, yes, it's been an interesting life.