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