Blog

The Red Dirt Rebellion is Oklahoma’s only all-female, banked-track roller derby league. If you think you know roller-derby, think again.

I recently had the privilege to attend a renuion. It wasn’t high school or college, it was a war reunion. Four decades ago Gary Bain was shot down over North Vietnam. For the past 40 years Gary has been trying to track down the men responsible for making sure he made it out of Vietnam alive.

I despise most (if not all) of the so-called “reality” TV. This may seem like an odd position for me to take , since I work at a Fox TV station and American Idol is our bread and butter. I made a good friend while I was at the University of Cambridge, who put it this way; ‘Look at the TV, then look away…THAT’S bloody reality!’ It seemed to have so much more effect and resonance coming from Greg and his thick Australian accent.

This post has been a long time coming…however I suppose it is better late than never. This was a very interesting story to cover because it had several unique aspects. I have covered several soldier homecomings and think each welcome home deserves as much coverage as possible. This wasn’t a group of soldiers, it was a single soldier. But this was like no homecoming I have ever attended.

It was snow day. Already into spring, but there was a winter storm on the horizon. Doomsday predictions, rampant speculation from all sorts of media. We were all in the afternoon news meeting trying to decide what stories to cover for the day. Each reporter trying to pitch a story interesting enough to keep us out of a live shot in the cold weather telling people how cold it is outside.

This story took some work to get put together. I heard about it while checking in with Jack Haley and knew it was too good to pass up, no matter how hard it would be to pull together.