By RICHARD KELLY
Steve Hartman is a TV journalist who knows a good story when he hears one. He has a bookcase of hardware to prove it: 23 Emmy awards and three times named reporter of the year in California by Associated Press.
Two years ago he read the New York Times story about Idaho journalist Dave Johnson's unorthodox column Everyone Has a Story.
Hartman went to Lewiston to file his own story about Johnson and to try the system himself, picking random phone numbers.
"I wish it had been my idea," says Hartman, who now does his own segment on CBS News. "David stumbled into something really neat here.
"It's been the most magical thing I have ever been involved with as a journalist."
Hartman has produced 50 four-minute stories in two years. He has an agreement that CBS will not pick and choose, but air everything he files.
CBS likes the series so much that twice as many shows are being considered. But Hartman is not so sure, figuring that there could be more pressure to come up with "characters" in the big leagues. He would not be willing to fudge the system by screening for people with a compelling story - the idea being that everyone has a story.
"There is a general tendency not to put people on TV if they don't look quite right or sound right or are too boring," Hartman says. "Johnson came up with a way to eliminate the filter process and that's what intrigued me."
Johnson gave his blessing to the CBS project and is given credit for the idea on the company's website.
Sometimes Hartman finds that getting invited into people's homes can be an uphill battle.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, it took him 46 calls before someone agreed, but it usually takes about six attempts. "A lot of the time they just don't believe you," he says. "They think you're going to sell them sliding doors."
His first story took him to Glasscock County, Texas, to meet Pedro Talamantes, a Mexican bulldozer driver. Talamantes talked about learning his prodigious work ethic from his deaf and mute father, Orturo. The two had communicated all their lives through a sign language they devised themselves.
"The man had raised his kid to be hardworking without ever saying a word," says, Hartman. "It was incredible."
Since that story Hartman has interviewed Lavelle Johle, 38, an Apache Indian who adopted a baby who had been left in the back of a pickup truck a few hours after birth. The girl, by now seven, was named Angel because her biological parents had never been found. Johle believed she had been left by angels.
He also met Dianne Ludt, 50, of Tupelo in Mississippi, who visited primary schools in "the world's ugliest dinosaur costume" to teach kids the value of kindness.
The dinosaur is called Raktor (RAK = random acts of kindness).
"Where would I find these stories?" Hartman says. "You can't assign something like this. In some way you're finding a whole new genre of news story.
Hartman can't imagine quitting. As he said at the end of his first show: "One down, 270 million to go."
The dial-a-story numbers game
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