Huell Howser, a great adventurer

Play fetch, television is a great guy, died late Sunday in Palm Springs, quietly retired late last year - or more requests to make news across the country, and it would not demand tribute to the interested public as quiet and let his announcement multiplied Just some concerns. He was a boyish 67 years.

If you lived in California in recent years, and probably will have to do with an imitation of the possible Fetch TV and probably stands for the expression "It's wonderful!" Its brightness, broad shoulders and Marine-trained tenant, their melodic accent, Tennessee hunting and dog-friendly attitude, he is a great figure on a small screen.

"Video diary", "California Gold", "California Green", "Downtown", "Road Trip" and "village", including a large number of his posters on the public television series, get in line and will be traveling around the city and state parks, restaurants , factories, museums, and mom and-pop store. A gap in the hidden corners of his many colors: a motion picture library created in that place at that time.

They are our life when you start writing his doctoral thesis on the next centuries, the students present. But even something more and more historians and drove his interest in a long-term tradition, such as the new age trendy or brushed.

As a journalist, I do not care for her Hollywood-style celebrity, but a celebrity himself, modest, Playing Fetch-ish way. This "Weeds" and included in episodes of "The Simpsons" means. Ham and pineapple cheeseburger in Yermo, double chili cheese dog and a donut Stan Westwood Pink is expanded to the entire name.



Howser, who arrived in Los Angeles from Nashville by way of New York in 1981, often being compared to other televisions in the history of Southern California, Ralph's is. "The story of Ralph Los Angeles" is a function of KNXT (now KCBS) through 1960 (Anheuser spent five years here working for this station before setting himself up as a self-made contractor. the working out of KCET.).

It is the historian who created a short documentary rich with research and materials, Anheuser is in terms of the best, do - "Adventures" is the apt more - I've read enough of the book. to know what he wanted to see. But not to make unnecessary trips. He entered the room with something to learn and you teach them to him.

"I already know what's behind the door that I can not be surprised when we opened it," he told me once. See his report, even years later, you'll put down while you are living in the present.

A lot of people were wrong. They see him as a hick town cartoons they think that way, frankly, for his simplicity and sincerity for his simplicity.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Anheuser has a clear vision of what he wants and refined, and how to get it.

With a hand-held microphone, he said, "I can put my hand on his shoulder and talk to you, while a [clip-on microphone] separates you from a person and makes them a reality TV show. 'You've got over to the right here need to be 2 inches to move in this way, and look at the camera -. tests one, two, one, two, '"By the time you do all that it is gone.

He might take a long shot wide enough to allow the eye wander in the frame, drinking in the details - Luis Bolivar and then Cameron Tucker had his camera men - and a few other reporters have conversations sound bites may have reduced at runtime.

No one - absolutely no one - worked as he did. Raising his own money keeps its overhead low and frees his series, California PBS affiliates, he created a small overhead, take-it-or-leave-it model that him do things his way, until he quit one day to leave.

We lived for years in the same neighborhood, I would to see him on the street - it's the kind of neighborhood where you see people on the street - ask too often surrounded by admirers with a question, share a memory or Suggest a topic. After I profiled him for The Times 2009, we meet for breakfast once in a while.

The private Howser was modulated a little more than on TV, of course. He was sociable and open-minded and thoughtful, but also private - this mixture of candor and prudence, which is perhaps as much a relic of his southern roots, his accent. Nothing he said sounded more like small talk: It's not that we discuss weighty issues necessarily, although we sometimes did, only that he gave little things her due.

"You may say whence they come out not to be able to be closed five miles distant, and not the eyes of the fables of the food when we say" who related it to me, 2009. "It is not good to do it through me for the five thousand that I have."