Ken Bilderback

I’m not an angry person by nature, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen my sweet Kris angry. But here’s a little background:

When I quit the department, I turned over a list of concerns, hoping that they could be addressed quietly before the book came out. Chief among them was what I saw as a culture of intimidation and retaliation against people who speak out, up to and including threats against a person’s livelihood. In return, all I asked was that attacks against my professional and personal character stop.

When reporters called the department to get a comment on my departure (along the lines of “We appreciate Ken’s years of service, blah, blah, blah”) what they got instead were angry innuendos that I was the subject of a probe, possibly criminal in nature.

After a week of calls and visits from members of the board of directors urging me to reconsider my decision to quit, the board chairman, a retired Oregon State Police officer, called me and angrily demanded that I return all fire department equipment within an hour. He followed through on his implied threat, all the while ignoring that I was still paying to host the department website and had not been reimbursed for a recent public opinion survey that I created and paid for at the district’s request.

From there, the innuendos to the media increased, with officials doing nothing publicly to shift the focus away from me. Through it all, I defended the volunteers and refrained from counter-punching against those spreading lies about me in public forums. We received a private thank you card and a private acknowledgement that I was not the focus of any probe, but through it all not one person at the Gaston Rural Fire District had the courtesy to simply publicly thank us for years of dedicated service and large financial contributions. Far from it.

Within days there were innuendos that I had created the media controversy, and worse yet that I was doing so to sell books and make money. Soon the volunteers chimed in with a news release refuting some of my allegations. It even was signed by volunteers who hadn’t set foot in the station for many, many months, but who showed up to damage my reputation in a news release. Once again, there was not a word acknowledging any contribution that I might have made to the district or the volunteers, financially or otherwise.

Through it all I’ve been bombarded with calls from the media, suspicious about my role in all this. I’ve shared some minor concerns, but true to my word have not shared what I see as major problems at the department. Those problems were addressed, at least in theory, by a consultant from the district’s lobbying group, Special Districts Association of Oregon. By nature of the organization’s purpose I expected the investigation to be cursory, expecting only recommendations for a plan of action to address surface issues. I was not prepared for the complete whitewash it turned out to be. After a thorough investigation, the consultant couldn’t find even a nit to pick with the way the district is run.

Soon we’ll release our book to a local community that has been told that I am dishonest, unqualified to speak on the subject of the book, and possibly still under investigation for nefarious activity. With my motives and credibility publicly questioned by those who supposedly should know, instead of celebrating the launch of what Kris calls a “love letter to Gaston Fire,” I’ll be on the defensive. Their attacks were intended to be pre-emptive, but we still hold out hope that they will backfire.

Ultimately, the book will speak for itself. The community will see that I am not the person the district has portrayed me to be and that the book is the result of years of research by both me and Kris. We know that while current management of the district can’t find a nit to pick with their organization, it will find plenty to pick in our book.

The book remains a “love letter to Gaston Fire.” Current management berates the current and previous volunteers who built the department, but they deserve nothing but honor and respect. If nothing else, I hope the book will help stop the systematic destruction of their legacy.

We contributed $3,500 to the Gaston Volunteer Fire Department to retire the volunteers’ debt on a used Rescue vehicle recently purchased from a neighboring fire department. By coincidence, that figure also represented what we thought at the time was a generous estimate of the royalties we would receive from local sales of the book. In a final bout of frustration and humiliation, it took weeks to have the money allocated to the purpose we had stated in writing. Including the $3,500 donation, we contributed something close to $10,000 to the department in the five years I was there. Some of it was in cash, some in such things as webhosting, some in supplies, and some in repairs and replacements for personal camera equipment broken while covering fires.

Ironically, every penny was spent promoting the very people who have turned against us. We weathered the early innuendos and insults pretty well, but the news release from the volunteers was a body blow.

We’re not well off like the highly paid, double-dipping chief bent on destroying our reputation. He’ll be just fine no matter what happens. The future for me and Kris is far less certain. She quit her job to devote full time to this and future books. We knew when she did so that it was an enormous risk, because writing books is a precarious occupation in the best of circumstances. We didn’t anticipate having to sell a book while under attack from the people we sought to portray. Those attacks were intended to be preemptive, but we still hold out hope that they ultimately will backfire. In the meantime we’re working on a plan to cushion the blow for the local retailers who stand behind us. Both Creek With No Name and Fire in a Small Town were written and marketed to benefit the entire community, not just us. We remain committed to that goal.

I am not an angry person, and my sweet Kris is the antithesis. But there are words and phrases in this post that intentionally sound angry. Not as angry as some of the words uttered recently in the privacy of our home, but angry nonetheless.

Here’s an example: I have not received a word of public thanks for my years promoting the people of Gaston Fire. Yet here’s the counterpoint: I still want to say thanks to those people who gave me the opportunity to enjoy five of the most exciting and rewarding years of my life and, ironically, the chance to write a book of which I am immensely proud.

Having spent my adult life in newspapers, volunteer fire service and book publishing, I’ve spotted a trend.

A couple trends, really, such as my proclivity to embrace industries in decline. More importantly, in each vocation I find that most people see their fate as determined by forces too great to influence. “This is happening everywhere,” even the loftiest experts sigh, and they accept what they see as inevitable decay and decline.

First and foremost, that attitude is an abdication of responsibility, but I also think it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. When you think that you know all that you need to know, you probably have gone as far as you’re ever going to go.

I choose to remain naïve and humble. As long as I do, I find that my path always leads onward and upward.

I looked outside today between rain showers and saw an old woman and her dog standing in our driveway, next to the fire department Jeep I use to respond to calls in. The Jeep is emblazoned with the words “Public Information Officer.”

I recognized the little dog, who sometimes visits our chickens. He’s a little flopsy-mopsy breed, on the surface not much more than curly fur and big bright eyes. The little dog knew where he was, but the woman he was protecting did not. When I opened the garage door, the little dog stiffened in protective defiance.

When I went outside to check on things, the woman said “I don’t think I’m going where I want to go.”

“That all depends,” I said helpfully. “Where do you want to go?”

“Home,” she said. “I want to go home.”

By now the little dog recognized me. I kneeled down to greet him, and he eagerly wagged his stubby tail and licked my hand. “My goodness,” the woman said. “Do you know my dog?”

I explained that on occasion he visits our chickens, which he considers to be quite exotic. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the old woman said.

“That’s OK,” I said, pointing southwest. “I think your home is right there.”

By now the flopsy-mopsy dog already had turned down the driveway toward home, looking up at the old woman with his big, bright eyes. She looked at him, and he looked toward home, then back at her.

“Sometimes I get so confused,” she said. “I think I need to be over there.”

“I think so, too,” I said. “Do you need help?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I just get lost so easily.”

“Don’t we all?” I said, but by then her little flopsy-mopsy dog was leading her home.

Back in 1978, I was a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern at Newsday in New York. I worked 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. A tough shift. On one of my first shifts, I had to pose a question to a bitter old NYPD sergeant with a flask in the desk drawer of his Brooklyn precinct. My question involved a senseless murder, one of a nightly spree of such crimes.

He gave me a gruff answer, and I asked for clarification of some jargon that he used to describe the murder weapon, a particular type of handgun. His response? “Are you some kind of retard?”

I grew up in a home with a paranoid-schizophrenic father who called me much worse than “retard,” so this question didn’t faze me. When this intimidating old cuss asked “Are you some kind of retard?,” I answered honestly. “Probably,” I said.

With that, he softened, but he still didn’t have any real answers. And almost 35 years later, I’m still some kind of retard.

I still don’t understand all this.

Today, 12-12-12, is my birthday.

That odd bit of synchronicity is cool, but it pales in comparison to another that I experienced back in 1978. That long-ago moment spurred an interest in statistics I never would have guessed I possess.

It happened in a mathematics classroom at the University of Dayton, during a discussion of statistical probability. I know; you’re hooked already, but the story somehow gets even better than that.

There were, in this classroom, about 35 or 40 glassy eyed students. In an attempt to engage us, the professor issued a challenge. He asked if we thought it was likely in such a small sample size that there was a better than 50-50 chance that two of us shared the same birth date. Most in the room said absolutely not. I, being math-challenged, said something like “Duh, 7 divided by 2, carry the 1 … I don’t know …”
He suggested we go around the room to test the theory. As usual, I was sitting in the front row, because I had long ago figured out the statistical odds of a prof trying to surprise an eager beaver in the front row with a surprise question vs. a hungover slob trying to hide in the back corner; I could have written a master’s thesis on that one.

I was second from the professor’s left, sitting next to a young woman I had never noticed. He picked on our corner to start his survey. “What’s your birthday?” he asked the young woman to my right, “Just the month and day.”

“December 12, 1955,” she responded, adding the year in flagrant disregard of the rules he had laid down. Then he pointed to me, who by this point had a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. “Um, well, December 12, 1955,” I mumbled, so flummoxed that I, too, illicitly added the year to my answer.

The year itself was significant, because I was older than most of the students in the class, because I had failed to properly calculate the odds of getting a good job without a college degree and had taken a couple of years off to, umm, find myself. Not only that, but this was a lower-division class that I had put off until the last term of my senior year because, as I mentioned, I was math-challenged. That seemed like a reasonable strategy, except that it meant I now had to take multiple math classes all at once. Point is, my fellow 12-12er and I were older than almost anyone else in the class, making the synchronicity just that much more pronounced.

After class we chatted and discovered that we had been born on the same day about 10 miles apart, but a couple hundred miles from the University of Dayton. Whoa, dude, you know, like my mind was totally blown.

So of course the professor gave us some homework assignment to calculate the odds of that happening. “Umm,” I offered, “It’s 100 percent; it just happened.” That glib remark got him to laugh, but not to cancel the homework assignment.

I muddled through the assignment and got an A. I went on to pass that class, and my other math classes that semester, all with straight A’s. Something about that off-hand moment made anything seem possible … even the chances of a dumbshit like me acing college math classes and developing a lifelong interest in statistics.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I have retained little of the knowledge I acquired back then, but I do know that the odds of me ever celebrating a birthday again on 12-12-12 are about … 7 divided by 2, carry the 1 … umm … probably not good.

Probably wouldn’t happen again for, damn, like 100 years or something.

The following is an excerpt from Wheels on the Bus: Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Life in 1974. All Rights reserved.

The sun was just coming up on a humid morning as we pulled into Lakeland, Florida. Lakeland was the first city I really wanted to see, because it was the Spring Training home of the Detroit Tigers. Actually it was much more than that, thanks to the calm, soothing voice of Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell. Listening to Harwell on my little plastic transistor radio in Detroit, his voice always created vivid images in my young mind. Wherever he was broadcasting from sounded like Heaven on Earth. He would talk about the clouds and the breeze and the happy families and dads catching foul balls in the stands for their adoring sons. Harwell was the calm voice of reason during the riots and assassinations of the late 1960s. In the ’60s and ’70s, the Tigers had a couple of young black players named Gates Brown and Ron LeFlore who had been discovered in reform schools or prisons. Today, Brown and LeFlore would be criticized endlessly on talk radio, but to Harwell they were just good human beings, like everyone else who crossed his path. My father never saw anything but the bad in people. Harwell was his happy antithesis, and I hung on his every word.

Ernie Harwell’s voice was most magical in the early Spring. While back in Detroit we still were sloshing through the black crusty snow of late winter, Harwell was in Lakeland for Spring training. Late winter for me meant huddling in the basement away from school bullies and my father. Harwell’s voice, beamed to my little transistor radio from Lakeland, always was the first harbinger of better days ahead. Lakeland sounded magical. Sometimes still shoveling snow, I would listen as the warm breezes through the palm trees cooled the families sitting in the stands enjoying Tiger squads that were destined to have great seasons in warm, happy summers at Tiger Stadium. Lakeland sounded more magical than anyplace Harwell broadcast from, except perhaps the golden cities of California. When he was broadcasting from the Golden State I couldn’t listen to the whole game because of the time difference, but I was amazed to think that as I huddled under the covers of my bed with Bandit, the sun was shining brightly on California.

I don’t think I blamed Ernie Harwell when I stepped off the bus that overcast morning and saw the real Lakeland. At least in the 1970s, the town looked less like a wonderland than like one of the wooden-block towns on the train table of my youth. It looked a lot like suburban Detroit in March, only greener and with no crusty black snow. Still, walking around the Spring Training facilities in the early morning humidity was a thrill. I found a little diner near the stadium and went in for breakfast. As I sat at the counter the farmer next to me struck up a conversation. He seemed to fit another stereotype of the 1970s, that of the Southern redneck you might find in a “Smokey and the Bandit” movie. He had a big, flat face with jowls. He wore a checkered flannel shirt and bib overalls. He was wearing one of those 1970s baseball caps with the tall front that served as a billboard for either redneck sayings or the local tractor-supply store. His was more of the local tractor store variety. He looked at me as I ate with the little duffel bag holding all my belongings balanced on my lap. “Where you from?” he asked. “Detroit,” I said.

“You trying out for the Tigers?” he asked. The question startled me. As much as I loved the Tigers, I was painfully aware that my 6-foot-4-inch, 150-pound frame didn’t make me look like a potential professional athlete. I was polite, but I really just wanted to eat my breakfast. He kept asking questions, however, and told me how much he wished he had gotten to travel before the old lady and kids and everything conspired to keep him here in dull old Lakeland. Except for some time in the Army, he had been here all his life.

When I finished my breakfast he said “Let me get that for you.” I protested a little, but I also wanted to save as much money as I could for the rest of the trip, so I relented. We walked outside together and I said goodbye. “You sure you ain’t going to try out for the Tigers while you’re here?” he asked. “You got the build of a fine pitcher.” With that he reached out and grabbed the biceps on my right arm with a grip that felt a little too eager. While telling me I had the muscles to throw a fastball he went on about how he knew people in the Tigers’ organization and if I wanted to get into his pick-up he could show me around town and later in the day when the Tiger scouts got to work he could introduce me to them. That, he said, was how a lot of great players got discovered. He groped my shoulder and biceps while he talked as if to guide me to his pick-up truck, squeezing hard with his beefy hands.

I knew I had to get out of there fast. He was a big beefy guy who outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, but I wasn’t afraid of him for some reason. I wasn’t even sure why he was creeping me out so much. I just found him to be pathetic. Homosexuality back then was nothing more to me than a taunt. I never even thought about what it actually meant. It wasn’t until several years later that I suddenly thought “So that’s what that guy in the tractor-supply cap meant!” By the time I came to that realization I had made gay friends and didn’t fear homosexuality. I chastised myself for shuddering when I thought about that free meal years earlier, telling myself I shouldn’t think he was creepy because he was gay. More to the point, I don’t think he really was gay; just a bully whose weapon of choice was his penis. In his younger days, I imagine him beating up kids like me with taunts of “homo!” or whatever the 1950s equivalent of that epithet was.

I would confront homosexuality a few more times on the trip without realizing what I was really confronting. By the time I embarked on my trip I had muddled my way through a few heterosexual encounters. Those encounters were pretty clinical in nature, probably because my knowledge of sex had come from my mother’s dusty old clinical physical therapy textbooks I found in the basement. As a child, I would flip through any book I could find, even a decades old physical therapy text. So it was that I found a chapter about human sexuality, complete with explicit drawings. I had seen pictures of breasts in National Geographic, so I wasn’t interested in scientific cutaway drawings of them. Ditto with penises. I had one of those, even if I had no idea what to do with it. At least not until I carefully studied a particular diagram of a part of the female anatomy I had never seen before. The diagram had to do with conception, and it featured what appeared to be an erect penis inside the unfamiliar female body part. I stared in disbelief at the diagram. The diagram was a close-up illustration, omitting any context of how such a situation had developed (in fact the penis was the only part of the male anatomy shown so it appeared to have become detached from the rest of the body). Still, now I had a general idea what heterosexual sex looked like. Unfortunately the textbook didn’t include any diagrams of detached penises engaged in homosexual sex, so as I rode the bus back in 1974 I remained blissfully ignorant of any physical component to the chants of “homo.” I didn’t know that my blissful ignorance about homosexual sex, like my ignorance about so many other things, would be rectified in the next few weeks on a Greyhound bus.

Ernie Harwell might have exaggerated Lakeland’s charms a little bit, but I still had California ahead of me. I couldn’t hold it against old Ernie. After all, even Detroit sounded wonderful when he talked about it. I didn’t stay to see that night’s Spring Training game. I hopped the next bus to Miami.

Awards don’t matter, I told myself throughout my 30-some years in newspapers. Then again, keep in mind that in a career stretching from high school, through college and on through various dailies, I never won a contest. Nope, not one.

Never took second, third or honorable mention, either. It’s not an exaggeration to say that nearly every one of my colleagues over those years won something; many of them won or placed in multiple categories in contest after contest. But not me. Nope, but that was OK, because contests don’t matter. Or, as one cynical copy editor (as if there’s any other kind) was fond of saying, “All that counts is that the paycheck doesn’t bounce.”

Now I’m an author, a career that doesn’t come with a regular paycheck, so standing out from the crowd becomes important. With that in mind, I quietly entered my first book, Wheels on the Bus, in a handful of competitions. I was so sure of inevitable disappoint that I didn’t even tell my wife.

Months went by with no awards. I got so discouraged I stopped even checking who won. Then one day while browsing the Huffington Post, I saw a reference to a book that won an award a few weeks before at the 2011 New York Book Festival. I followed the link, only to be shocked when my name was in the story, as winner of honorable mention. This had to be a mistake, I figured, because no one had called or emailed me the news. But sure enough, there I was, with an honorable mention at the New York Book Festival, and suddenly I caught a wave of publicity for a book no one had cared about for many, many months.

So, not that awards matter, but Kris and I decided to enter the next book, Creek With No Name, into every contest with the word “book” anywhere in its title. I knew that the Redbook Beauty Award was a stretch, but I thought I might have a crack at another honorable mention somewhere else. Months went by with loss after loss, and then suddenly there it was: Honorable mention at San Francisco.

Contests don’t matter, but it did feel like validation that the other honorable mention wasn’t a complete fluke. In fact, Kris was excited about the prospect of a repeat in the 2012 New York festival, while I tried to dampen her expectations. When the awards were announced, Creek was first runner-up for the history prize.

Suddenly prizes began to matter to me. I didn’t realize how much until the agent of the only author who beat us started buying ads and promoting the importance of the prize. What made this perversely sweet for me is that this same agent had completely ignored my submission, robbing her of the chance to brag about representing the top two books (I still was, at that point, pretty cynical).

Then we got honorable mention in Hollywood, and the dry spell resumed for many more months, until Wheels on the Bus snagged another honorable mention, this time in Southern California … and Creek With No Name won the regional literature category. Didn’t take second, or third, or honorable mention; it won.

So now I still don’t know how much awards really matter, but as a marketer I tell anyone who will listen that they matter immensely.

As someone who waited 40 years for his first professional prize, I’m inclined to believe my own hype. Awards do matter to me, if for no other reason than that paychecks seem to follow.

Yet I guess I’m still as cynical as my old copy editor friend, because what counts even more is that those checks don’t bounce … after all, it costs a lot to enter all those damned contests.

The Columbian endorses Mitt Romney, because the nation “requires a president with a profound comprehension of business, the economy and job creation.”

First, a disclosure: I worked at The Columbian for 24 years, and I still have a few very good friends there. I would have many more, except for the many layoffs and cutbacks at the paper before and after its recent bankruptcy.

In short, I could point out that The Columbian is on thin ice when it comes to lecturing us about what constitutes “a profound comprehension of business, the economy and job creation.” To do so, however, would be a cheap shot, because The Columbian is not alone in its downward spiral of debt and downsizing. Just ask anyone at many of the companies that Mitt Romney has operated. Nor is it fair to single out Mitt Romney; so many corporations are facing this death spiral that business schools have had to create entirely new metrics and new definitions of what it means to be “successful” in business today, much as Romney and Paul Ryan are trying to redefine what a successful economy looks like.

Nor is it fair to suggest that Columbian editorialists gave only one reason to endorse Romney. The other they offered is what they see as Barack Obama’s failure to bring about the changes The Columbian itself supported when it endorsed Obama four years ago. The editors acknowledge that Republicans in Congress have blocked those changes, but insist that the only way to bring about the changes Obama wants is do dump him and elect more of the people who have fought those changes. This argument is tortured logic to be sure, but it’s a type of logic newspaper executives have been honing for years.

So, although the endorsement might appear to be nothing more than a series of logical fallacies, there are reasons that it made perfect sense to the people who wrote it.

Take the redefinition of “profound comprehension of business.” Many years ago, newspapers defined success by measuring “household penetration,” which is the percentage of homes in a newspaper’s market that subscribe to the product; the ultimate, elusive, goal was what’s known as total market coverage. But starting decades ago, newspapers saw a problem with that metric: The population was growing much faster than the number of papers sold each day. Newspapers nimbly redefined success to include only circulation, or the raw number of copies sold. Problem solved.

But then circulation began to fall. This presented a huge problem for newspapers, which they solved by dropping the word “circulation” from their vocabularies, replacing it with something called “readership,” or the total number of people who read each copy, multiplied by the number of copies sold. No longer did salespeople have to tell real estate brokers that circulation had fallen from 50,000 to 45,000 but that the price of ads was rising anyway. Now they could say “Last year circulation was 50,000, but this year 90,000 people read our paper! Can you believe how fast we’re growing?” Of course the next year they didn’t want to admit that readership had fallen from 90,000 to 85,000, so they invented cumulative readership over the course of a week, then month, then year …

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan play the same game with the definition of economic success. When Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were running up enormous deficits, those deficits didn’t matter, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney. Now Romney wants us to believe that Obama’s deficits are inherently evil, especially when the trajectory was upward. But now, deficits are falling, so a new definition is necessary, one that forbids using downward trajectory as a metric. In fact, any historical perspective is deemed irrelevant; pointing out that unemployment is down since Obama took office, for example, is nothing more than “blaming Bush,” not a reasonable gauge of economic success. We don’t even know how much money to spend on national defense in these days of lone-wolf terrorists, so the Romney-Ryan ticket wants to create a new metric, making Pentagon spending a percentage of gross domestic product; henceforth, our military needs will be determined by McDonald’s cheeseburger sales. It’s easy to see why this line of logic resonates with a roomful of newspaper executives. It’s almost straight out of “Newspaper Economics 101.”

The Columbian‘s second argument is a textbook example of “Newspaper Human Resources 101.” The implosion of newspaper markets didn’t happen overnight. It developed over decades of societal and technological advances. Marshall McLuhan, for example, described and predicted those changes back in the 1960s, analyzing how a medium affects a message by changing how a consumer interacts with it. That’s the Cliff Notes version; McLuhan’s work is truly understood only by reading it under a black light while a Jimi Hendrix 8-track plays in the background.

In fact, the surreal quality of McLuhan’s vision motivated me to become a journalist, but it scared the bejeezus out of me when I became a newspaper executive and I realized that he was right. I fought hard to change both the medium and the message, writing a paper back in 1991 that predicted how nascent fax and interactive voice response systems were but precursors to a day when people on home computers could tailor their news to fit their personality. The owner of The Columbian registered the paper with the Library of Congress and made it required reading around the paper. I thought I was a star, until I realized that I scared the bejeezus out of most of my colleagues, who knew that such developments would doom newspapers that refused to change.

The reaction at The Columbian mirrored the response of executives at most newspapers. The more I pushed for the changes the other executives voted for when I wrote that paper, the more most of them dug in their heels to thwart the inevitable. The newspaper’s owner supported the changes, but eventually wearied of the gridlock. Replacing a building full of obstructionists seemed too daunting, and soon I realized that the necessary progress, along with my career, would be sacrificed in the name of harmony.

I was, in effect, voted out of office, and the other managers went back to peaceful harmony, creating new metrics and redefining success to create the illusion that the newspaper might hold back progress and even return to an idyllic past that had not existed in the lifetimes of its current executives, if in fact it ever did. To those who still harbor these illusions, a Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan miracle seems entirely plausible. Hence the editorial endorsement.
Finally, I have a few disclosures to make. First, I was not really fired from The Columbian; in fact, the paper’s owner (and someone I always will consider a friend), Scott Campbell, asked me to stay, but I had no fight left in me. Second, I think I have proved my own business acumen by transitioning from the dying newspaper industry to the thriving book-publishing industry.

If that doesn’t work out, there’s always stand-up comedy …

I am not on the Today Show every day, so when the show’s producers started hounding me to be on, I was apprehensive.

In fact, I’m such an ordinary guy, I had never been on the Today Show until those producers started hounding me. Yet suddenly I found myself taking phone calls from producers in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle and scrambling to organize a taping for the show, even though I knew there was a very good chance my face wouldn’t actually appear on TV screens across North America.

After all, this story wasn’t about an ordinary guy like me. This extraordinary story was about an ordinary family that had rescued another ordinary family from the tragedy of watching eight of their children drown. The only reason I was involved is that I volunteer my time as Public Information Officer of the Gaston Rural Fire District, which responded to the near drowning and amazing rescue.

I was helping the family of rescuers navigate the somewhat daunting task of dealing with the media, because while I’m too ordinary to have been on the Today Show, my life is extraordinary enough that I have spent many days in front of the local media in my role as PIO and as author of a couple of books. In my ordinary town of Gaston, Oregon, I’m about as close as you’re going to get to being a media celebrity, which isn’t really very close at all.

The Today Show hired a local camera crew to tape the segment. While setting up an interview with our fire chief, one member of the crew was on the phone with a California producer, while I was on the phone with a Seattle producer, helping to arrange an interview with the heroic family in their ordinary neighborhood. The Seattle producer was racing down to Portland to arrange for a satellite truck to sit in the family’s front yard, streaming the interview live to Burbank for editing and evaluation. This was no ordinary day for a guy like me.

Nor was the next day, when my Today Show premier was scheduled to air. Being the media veteran that I am, I warned the family that news events could preempt the segment. For example, my last shot at national TV stardom was 11 years ago, almost to the day. I had taped an interview for broadcast on PBS stations and waited weeks for it to appear. Finally a broadcast date was set: September 11, 2001. Extraordinary news that day bumped an ordinary guy like me to the cutting-room floor, where I’ve remained to this day.

Still, as we all awoke on September 18, 2012, it was obvious that there had been no Earth-shattering news. In fact, it appeared to be an extremely slow news day, seemingly a perfect opportunity for the Today Show to showcase an ordinary family that did an extraordinary thing. At least that’s how it seemed to me.

Not so for the sophisticated producers of the Today Show, who found themselves with a major breaking news story on their hands: an exclusive interview with Justin Bieber’s mother. In the half hour or so that the show devoted to breathless interviews, Justin Bieber’s mother came across as a pleasant and very ordinary woman. She was so ordinary, in fact, that the producers devoted another 20 minutes or so to breathless promos reminding us that this seemingly ordinary woman was in fact Justin Bieber’s mother.

As she recounted the very ordinary details of her life, the reporter interjected many times to remind viewers, and perhaps the woman herself, that she was Justin Bieber’s mother, and that therefore she, and her seemingly ordinary life, were in fact extraordinary; perhaps even extraordinarily so.

Seen through the prism of today’s millionaire national media stars, today’s many societal problems and personal triumphs become truly newsworthy only when they somehow involve a millionaire celebrity coached by a millionaire publicist. Otherwise, everyday pathos and achievement is just so … well, just so ordinary.

So ordinary folks like me and the heroic family don’t get on the Today Show every day, and this turned out to be another day that we didn’t. We would have to wait until the next day, which, as luck would have it, was an even slower news day than the one before. There wasn’t even a new interview with Justin Bieber’s mother to bump us that day.

The day was so slow, in fact, that the Today Show producers were nearly desperate to fill time. So they replayed a segment from the day before; the interview with Justin Bieber’s mother. They did so, they told us repeatedly, due to popular demand from their audience. This would be another day that ordinary folks like me were not on the Today Show.

There might well have been popular demand for more of Justin Bieber’s mother and her extraordinarily ordinary life story, but demand from the Today Show’s audience is becoming less popular almost every day. The show’s incredible shrinking audience is due to many factors, including lifestyle changes and media fragmentation. Yet those changes have been occurring for decades, and the show’s rating decline has been steep and sudden. Almost as steep and sudden as the rise of the show’s obsession with celebrities such as the Kardashians’ mother (who prattled on while other networks observed the anniversary of September 11) or with the aforementioned mother of Justin Bieber.

The rest of the week produced more of the same. Most of the show was devoted to celebrities, or at least to people who had been celebrities five, 10, 20 years ago. I empathized with the producers, because after all, you can’t score an interview with a current celebrity’s mother every day of the week.

So I find myself, along with this ordinary family that did an extraordinary thing, once again on the cutting room floor, at least for now. The amazing rescue is old news. We’ve moved on to new bickering between the presidential candidates, who will fight it out with the new judges on “American Idol” for the hearts and minds of the American people.

No, ordinary folks like me aren’t on the Today Show every day. It seems, in fact, like we’re not going to be on any day from here on out.

Ken Bilderback is the author of Creek With No Name: How the West Was Won (and Lost) in Gaston, Oregon, first runner-up for the History Prize at the 2012 New York Book Festival, and Wheels on the Bus: Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Life in 1974.