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Just short of a year ago, after nearly four decades as the familiar baritone and trusted face of agriculture for Chicago's WGN, Orion Samuelson did something many of his friends said he was nuts to do. He launched Channel Earth, a dawn-to-dusk channel devoted to agriculture and rural living. Illinois Country Living (ICL) interviewed Samuelson, and his long-time associate, Max Armstrong, on Jan. 8. On Feb. 2, as ICL was going to press, inadequate advertising forced the sun to set on the fledgling channel. While the future of Channel Earth and its crew is uncertain, Samuelson's contributions to both journalism and agriculture are immense - and by no means complete. Orion Samuelson recalls two days of his youth in particular detail. Both illustrate the isolation rural residents experienced before electrification. The first came during the FDR administration and World War II on the Samuelson farm in south-west Wisconsin. "Our mailbox was a mile and a half away. We had no telephone. We had no daily paper," said Samuelson. The family had only rationed V-batteries and used them judiciously, forgoing such programs as Superman, Capt. Midnight and Tom Mix for the war reports of Gabriel Heater and H.V. Kaltenborn. But by January 1945, the batteries were spent. "We were virtually without communications." On April 12, 1945, as 11-year-old Samuelson went about his chores, snow laced the ground, but the earth was warming. Through a foggy mist, nearly a half mile away, he saw his neighbor across the valley, who was banging the bottom of a wash-tub with a hammer. " 'Orion, tell your folks the president died this afternoon.' That's how I got the news. Shouted across the valley," he recalled, from his downtown Chicago office. At the end of this month, Samuelson and his 20-year partner, Max Armstrong, and 28-year assistant, Lottie Kearns, were poised to celebrate the first anniversary of Channel Earth, an agriculture and rural life channel born of a deal between the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) and DirecTV. DirecTV is the largest of the direct 10 ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING MARCH 1998 broadcast satellite services, delivering more than 175 channels to homes and businesses equipped with its pizza-sized dish. Channel Earth was credited with helping to boost DirecTV dish sales to more than 3 million, with more than half of them to rural customers and nearly 350,000 on farms. "Today I go into a TV studio and talk to the world. I'm 63 and in that period of time the dynamic change we have seen in communications is just phenomenal," Samuelson said. Three years after FDR died, nearly to the day, came another important day. "There are days in your life that you never forget and April 11, 1948, is a date that I'll always remember. Because that night I stood at the bottom of the stairs and poked a switch and had light in the bedroom." No longer did he have to carry the kerosene lamp upstairs to go to bed. "That's my REA experience and it's a vivid one. We threw the flat irons away. We no longer had to put butter and eggs into a basket on the end of a rope and drop it down into a water cistern to keep it cool in the summer-time. Had a refrigerator and got a milking machine so we didn't have to milk by hand. So, that's why I will forever be a supporter of rural electrics, because the private utilities wouldn't have come out to the end of this ridge where we were the only farm." Then, just as the lad was to graduate from his eight-grade country school to "town" school, as high school was known then, he was bedridden with a bone disease in his hip. For two years he was confined to a body cast, bed or a wheel chair to keep the disease from spreading. He could no longer do the heavy work of farming, nor could he attend school, or join the FFA. The towering youth's dream of becoming a star basketball player was dashed. He was angry. But a vo-ag instructor, who himself had an artificial arm, kept the boy's education on track, making the trip to the Samuelson farm three nights a week, bringing new assignments and corrected work. All the while, the early seeds of his career were beginning to sprout and take hold. No longer reliant upon rationed batteries, he had plenty of time to while away.
"I listened to the radio a lot," he said, now recognizing his misfortune was the best thing that ever happened to him. "You know, had that not happened, I'd probably still be milking cows." "I'm listening to Burt Wilson do Chicago Cubs games, and I thought, 'Hey, that would maybe be something I could do." As soon as young Samuelson was back on his feet, he got into FFA public speaking and in two years was one of the five state finalists in Wisconsin FFA. He went on to graduate as salutatorian, and when the valedictorian passed up a year's scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, Samuelson snapped it up. "My dad had a sixth-grade education. My mother had a high school education, and so, they were excited that their first-born was going to college." He lasted three weeks in college, and the itch to become a radio broadcaster, now, was strong. "There wasn't anything there that was going to teach me to be a radio announcer." Samuelson admitted he was homesick. "All I'm getting is journalism books that are going to teach me how to write. And I don't want to write. I want to talk." The father agreed to let his son go to broadcasting school, and young Samuelson found a six-month school in Minneapolis. Two days after graduating on Aug. 15, 1952, he went to work at a radio station about 17 miles from the farm. "It was a daytime station, so I'd get up in the morning and milk the cows and change clothes and go to town and be a radio announcer, and get home at night in time to milk cows." Two years later he left for Appleton, where he worked two years as a disc jockey. When the station's owner in Green Bay needed an ag reporter in 1956, someone remembered that Samuelson grew up on a farm. The station, WBAY-TV in Green Bay, already was airing an hour of live agriculture every day. "We'd had a live van. We'd drive tractors in the studio or bring steers and dairy cows and hogs into the studio." In 1960, along came an opportunity to interview at WGN in Chicago. "I sort of came down here on a lark to look at the idea and I've been here 37 years. Be 38 at the end of September." Upon accepting the job, he asked for a full-time assistant. "You can't cover agriculture from a studio in downtown Chicago." He had two
MARCH 1998 ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING 11 before the opportunity came 20 years ago to lure Max Armstrong away from the Illinois Farm Bureau in Normal, and his home near Towanda where he also served on the volunteer fire department. Armstrong grew up on a farm in Indiana, where his father always attended rural electric meetings and, he recalled, the battles with the investor-owned utilities were regular supper table discussion material. "I remember many, many nights he parked the tractor to go to the rural electric co-op meeting. He always went to the NRECA (National Rural Electric Cooperative Association) meeting every year," Armstrong said. As soon as Samuelson heard Armstrong on a Farm Bureau tape, he knew he wanted to try to hire him if the opportunity arose, and it did a year later. "It is a good relationship," said Samuelson. "I have nothing but the highest regard for his (Armstrong's) journalistic ability and his editorial judgment. When I leave, when I travel, which I do a great deal, I have no concern at all that everything is in good hands, with Lottie handling the production end of it and Max doing the editorial and delivery end of it." With the birth of Channel Earth on March 28 last year, personal appearances were as important as ever. Samuelson said he made about 70 appearances a year, serving either as master of ceremonies, a speaker or a panel moderator. During a recent appearance in Charlotte, N. C., the American Farm Bureau Federation rewarded him with its Distinguished Service Award. Sometimes Samuelson flies to appearances himself, piloting his single-engine Cessna 210. And that's why a more recent date, Aug. 22, 1996, is another he will never forget. On that day he was flying back from a speaking engagement in North Dakota about midnight over McHenry County when a rod broke, giving Samuelson "the most interesting seven minutes of my life. God decided he ain't done with me yet, I guess. We managed to find a lighted runway and get it down without killing ourselves."
Samuelson, Armstrong, Kearns and at least two other staffers left WGN, which is owned by the Tribune Company, with the station's blessings — and a contractual relationship. They continue to provide the Tribune Radio Network's "National Farm Report" and a nationally syndicated weekly television show, "U.S. Farm Report." "I wanted to continue the affiliation because it's an important one that serves a large agricultural audience. But at the same time I wanted to be able to do this, which to me was sort of the culmination of a dream of being able to bring the same sort of communications to farm and ranch homes that their city cousins have been getting for years." He admits he's taken a ribbing from colleagues, many of whom thought he was nuts, a man nearing retirement age to launch a new channel.
"Some of my friends say, 'My God! You're 62 years old. Why don't you live out your retirement at WGN and forget about it.' I just couldn't do that The technology was just too exciting. I said I've gotta do this. I'm egotistical enough to think my 37 years gave me the knowledge and the recognition level to do it." As the chairman, he had the freedom to do what he enjoyed and did best — programming, public speaking and attending special events. But it also required him to be more deeply involved in selling advertising and raising investor money than he planned to be. And ad sales were slow in coming. "We're not only a new company, we're a new medium in the minds of people," he said. It was the flexibility and expanded time slot that Samuelson relished. "If we needed to do 45 minutes on a topic, we could do 45 minutes on a topic. We didn't have to limit ourselves to 5 minutes or 30 minutes. To me that was the exciting concept." Channel Earth broadcast dawn to dusk, but viewers were clamoring for more, and before the plug was pulled, Samuelson and Armstrong were pushing for still more air time. Farmers and ranchers on the West Coast, where Chicago's 6:30 p.m. signoff is two hours earlier, were particularly vocal, he said. And he wanted to go global. "I've been covering this business for 45 years, so people are now asking me 'What's the biggest change you've seen in agriculture in America?' and I have a one-word answer. It's globalizadon," he said. "We've had interest expressed from Bolivia, from Brazil, from Sweden, from Germany, from France, and cable systems and satellite systems that are interested in getting our programming. So down the road, I would like to be able to do a 24-hour global information network that would serve agriculture," he said. "To me farmers and ranchers, 2 percent of the population, are the most important minority in the world, because they produce food, fiber and energy. I just couldn't walk away from it. So, when we formed the company, I told the directors, "I'll give you eight hard years. I'll keep getting up at 2:45 a.m. and being here at 4, but when I get to be 70, I'll start sleeping in — at least until 5." With Channel Earth's sudden demise, Samuelson certainly has that opportunity now, but nobody's taking any bets. 12 ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING MARCH 1998 |
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