Sunday Read: My Travels with Dad
Photowalking through life
People ask, you do a travel show; your dad did one too. Are you following in his footsteps, keeping the family business alive?
What did you learn from him?
The funny thing is, everything and nothing.
Did I develop my love of travel from my late father, Jerry, who back in the 1980s and 90s hosted the Bay Area Backroads TV show in San Francisco?
That would be a big no. Growing up, we as a family never traveled. I can count a handful of family trips with my parents and brother, then known as Jimmy: to Indianapolis and Hawaii to see the grandparents, an excursion to Puerto Rico and Miami, a drive into rural Pennsylvania, where uncle Hal and his family had rented a summer house. They did a trip together to L.A. once, but I didn’t participate.
That was it. Otherwise, we loaded up into the family Buick and drove from New York City to Candlewood Lake, Connecticut, where we had a vacation home that we visited all summer lomg and on many weekends.
As a proud city boy, I didn’t like leaving New York, home of self-sufficient living, where rock concerts were happening nightly. I eventually arranged with the family to just stay behind in the apartment for one summer while the rest of the family were at the lake.
So no, we didn’t travel together. We never talked travel. Ever.
I didn’t develop my love of travel until I was 21 years old, living in Marin County, where in search of great photo subjects I grew to love hopping in the car with my Pentax and photographing the backroads of those great old towns in the shadow of San Francisco, like San Anselmo, Larkspur, Novato and Petaluma. (What’s changed, right?)
My dad did join me on a shoot to Petaluma once. But trust me, he was not touring the backroads in his free time. It wasn’t his thing. He liked sticking around home, and driving to small towns in the Bay Area during the week for the job.
So what I did learn: how to write and communicate.
Jerry worked in radio, first as a writer and later as news and program director at WNEW in New York, which led to co-owning and operating a radio station in Pittsfield, Mass.
He wasn’t a good businessman (the station was constantly losing money) but he knew how to write. He would dash out daily editorials that were acclaimed (the New York Times even came up to profile him) that zipped out of his typewriter within minutes, with no time for reflection.
Like these columns all these years later. They get transferred from my brain to the computer seemingly as fast as I can think them.
Remember that my school years were ones of total boredom. I just didn’t find any of it interesting, and tuned out much of what the teachers were saying.
So when I started working at the radio station for him, I had very poor writing abilities. I couldn’t spell. I certainly couldn’t craft a sentence.
But unlike school, I found broadcasting fascinating, and dived in headfirst.
I remember him telling me to make my writing copy at the radio station for commercials conversational. (I was so bad he really shouldn’t have had been paying me to work there. But that’s another story.) And years later, when I showed him some of my early USA TODAY videos, he warned me about trying too hard to be funny, when I should just stick to the facts and offer viewers news they could use.
I now think about that every time I write an article or make a video—what will the viewer/reader get out of this? So chalk that up to my dad.
If I do anything, I somehow learned storytelling, either by, as I said, osmosis from being around Jerry Graham and watching him work, through the genes or something else that I’m just not aware of.
The apple not falling too far from the tree.
When he did his travel show, starting in the late 1980s, I was just starting my career at USA TODAY, on the TV beat, and very happy and focused on covering the world that he was working in (network TV vs. local television.) The idea of me doing my own travel show one day never popped up.
So why did I start Photowalks (which airs Sundays at 10 a.m. ET on Scripps News and on YouTube, BTW.) years later?
On a lark one day while filming an episode of my video series Talking Tech for USA TODAY, I had a camera operator with me in San Francisco, and thought it would be fun, for the heck of it, to do a piece on why I loved the Italian enclave of North Beach.
Stepping out of the tech reviewer restrictions (Ooh, here’s a cool new gadget!) and getting to interview the local cop at Caffe Triestte, a sandwich artisan at Molinari’s Deli and the long-time female bartender at one of the oldest restaurants in the city was a thrill, and a stretch.
Cut to a few years later, and while visiting our son Sam in Japan, I decided to make another travel video, just for the fun of it, from Osaka, and I loved the way it looked. The pictures seemed more impressive when collected within moving video. I got a thrill of signing out from Japan. A world traveler!
So much so, that I wanted to do more of them.
I showed the Osaka video to my friend Bill, who liked what I did, but he said it needed the twist of photo tips to make it stand out from other travel videos.
So I did just that, and people responded. So much so, I started shooting the entire show on my iPhone. And photo tips are one of the unique selling points of the Photowalks. A show that has now filmed in 24 states—and next week Michigan makes an even 25!
My dad died in 2013, five years before I started Photowalks, and I have no idea what he might have thought of the show. Rip-off? Tribute? Who knows?
He did buy me that first camera at age 13, the same year I was gifted an Epiphone guitar, two tools still being used every day since.
I look like him, I sound like him, but I do enough differently that I’d like to think I’m my own person. Still the influence, even if just by osmosis, was huge. In the long list of media influences in life, who could be bigger than your father?
As many of you know, I embarked on a project to merge some of the old Backroads footage with Photowalks, by stepping into the footsteps of places he visited back in the day. If you’ve never seen them, please check it out.
How did your father influence you? I’d love to hear all about it.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there.
P.S. From the archives: Do a video interview with Dad!
My dad was a big musical influence. He had a great voice, and we would always sing along to the radio in the car and at home. He encouraged me to follow my interest in music and took me to numerous auditions, and he was my first manager. I'm grateful that I always had his support.
What fun to understand the route that took you to this moment. It makes all of your videos even better. And it reminds me let go and see where the world takes you--often a good place.