C-SPAN to spotlight Santa Rosa history on ‘Cities Tour’

Santa Rosa is getting its 15 minutes of fame - and a whole lot more - next weekend.

A crew of interviewers and videographers from C-SPAN’s Washington, D.C., headquarters spent a recent week here filming and interviewing your friends and neighbors.

The resulting report on Sonoma County’s capital city and environs will be seen next weekend (Oct. 3-4) on Comcast’s C-SPAN channels 109 (Book TV) and 110 (American History TV).

The multifaceted approach is a different sort of television production that C-SPAN calls the “Cities Tour.”

“Cities Tour” airs every other weekend on these offspring channels of the old, familiar C-SPAN, with programming less intense (some would say “happier”) than the station’s standard fare that captures every magic moment in the Congress.

Starting in 2012, “Cities Tour” crews have filmed and broadcast (by my calculations, never dependable) from 80 cities, with a dozen more scheduled between now and April.

With so many well-known cities already “in the can,” as movie people say, how in the world did Santa Rosa get on the list with big cities out there like Austin, Texas? Last week’s tour was of Cincinnati, which is a whole different thing from Santa Rosa. How did this happen?

Purposefully, says Mark Farkas, executive producer of the C-SPAN specials. He says there has been a concerted effort to stay away from big cities. “We’re looking for interesting places and trying to be diverse. There is so much history from region to region … and every city has a unique story to tell.”

The list has been light on California so far. Only Bakersfield and Palm Springs (an interesting pairing!) made the first 80. But California will have just about every other one in the new list - after Santa Rosa comes Sacramento, then Berkeley, Monterey, Anaheim and San Bernardino, interspersed with such cities as New York’s Buffalo and Syracuse and Alabama’s Tuscaloosa and Montgomery.

The programming is different from the other offerings on these channels, such as C-SPAN3’s current series on presidential “First Ladies” or the upcoming one on “Landmark Supreme Court Decisions.”

“The ‘Cities Tour’ is not event coverage,” Farkas points out. “It’s more visual and highly edited, reaching an audience that may not be interested in three hours of history.”

So the stories from Santa Rosa and Sonoma County will, like the others, be presented in short segments - “blocks,” producer Ashley Hill calls them - filmed here by three different interviewers, including Hill.

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I WOULDN’T WANT to give away too much of the plot, but here’s what to look for starting at 9 a.m. Saturday on C-SPAN2 Book TV (109) and 11 a.m. Sunday on C-SPAN3 American History TV (110).

On 110, I expect you’ll hear about Luther Burbank and get a camera tour of his gardens; about how Santa Rosa’s downtown fell flat in the 1906 earthquake; and the story of how this came to be Wine Country with capital letters, as told by former dairyman John Bucher at his Westside Road vineyard and at St. Francis Winery with the vineyards and our beautiful Hood Mountain as backdrop.

You’ll see Lynn Prime, the special collections librarian at Sonoma State, showing the letters Ernest Hemingway wrote to former Press Democrat reporter Denne Petitclerc, now the subject of the movie “Papa”; the Schulz library’s colorful Jack London memorabilia (a crew also visited Jack London State Historic Park); and the archive of information about the Dust Bowl migration of the Depression era.

On 109, expect to meet Corry Kanzenberg, curator of Santa Rosa’s Charles M. Schulz Museum, and Graton authors Susan Hagen and Mary Carouba, talking about their book, “Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion.” Watch also for a conversation with one of Sonoma County’s most prolific writers, Jonah Raskin, who was interviewed at Treehorn Books in downtown Santa Rosa about his “American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation.”

If you don’t have DVR capabilities, you could spend your whole weekend on this. But the good news is that these “blocks” won’t go away, according to producer Hill, who assures us, “The entirety of programming from each city we feature can be found on our website at www.c-span.org/citiestour, where they will be housed indefinitely.”

Hill, whose job titles include “community relations representative” as well as “producer,” ran up a substantial phone bill before leaving the nation’s capital. At City Hall it was Suzanne Sheppard, executive assistant to the city manager, and in the Sonoma County Library, Katherine Rinehart of the history and genealogy annex, who were able to provide the kind of “insider” knowledge she sought. She had a list of people to interview and a time schedule before she ever left her Washington office.

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THIS OUTPOURING of hometown interests will be introduced by Mayor John Sawyer on C-SPAN’s Friday morning flagship program, “Washington Journal.” Sawyer’s segment was filmed in the lovingly restored DeTurk Round Barn in Santa Rosa’s West End neighborhood.

You know, this TV adventure may well be a first look at this unique building, not only for folks in Augusta, Maine, and Yuma, Ariz., but for many viewers right here at home. C-SPAN is offering us a valuable learning experience, an opportunity to see and hear things about our corner of the world that we have never heard before.