Beat the Heat Driver; Olympic Nostalgia

 

Bill and I liked looking at the thermometer on the pickup dashboard and seeing the temperature dip as we climbed higher into the mountains northwest of Bonners Ferry yesterday.

Seeing from numbers how hot it was definitely beat "feeling" the heat.  

At times, the temperature fell down into the 80s.  On our drive back via HWY 95, a "98" appeared on the dashboard panel. 

Upon seeing that, we were even happier that we had spent the heat of the day driving a mountain road up Trout Creek off the West Side Road with mountains on one side and the vast Kootenai Valley on the other. 

A fire had burned through the Trout Creek drainage two years ago, so Bill was interested in seeing the aftermath. 

We met just two rigs while driving up the mountain road:  two pickups pulling horse trailers. 

We stopped twice, once to walk with the dogs down to a pleasantly shaded area where Trout Creek is a crystal clear babbling brook of sorts.  

Down below in its drainage, one can see a series of waterfalls when the water flows that much faster. 

The dogs enjoyed the break; Bridie even got her feet wet while Foster sniffed every square inch possible.

We also stopped at the trail head leading into Pyramid Lake.  Several cars with both Idaho and Washington licences indicated that a number of hikers were up above. 

The trip was a doable afternoon drive, putting us back home around 5:30 p.m. where we saw, for the second time, that Mrs. Peacock has either a boy friend or a husband.  

The group has grown to five with one very colorful, handsome male hanging with Ma and her three kids.

After unloading dogs and stuff from the pickup, Bill  drove to a very busy Selle Valley Creamery for hamburgers.  

Meanwhile, I brought the horses up, and soon we were enjoying dinner while watching the news and later the Olympics. 

During one segment of last night's Olympic coverage, NBC anchor Lester Holt was interviewing Snoop Dog who has been ubiquitous, it seems, throughout the Olympic events, even trying his hand at commentating. 

As the interview moved on, my mind flashed back to a time 22 years ago when one of my former students, also my English aide, had gone on to college in Utah and landed the experience of lifetime. 

It was during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, when Lester Holt was just becoming well-known on the NBC network.  At the time, he was a major face in Olympic coverage. 

And, my student Morgan Potts' timing was just right as you'll see in the column below. 

At that time, I was writing monthly columns for the Spokesman-Review. That's when North Idaho coverage was amazing in comparison to what we see at the present time. 

The paper had an office and full-time staff in Coeur d'Alene.  Twas the "glory days" of area news coverage, I'd say. 

  

 Anyway, my freelance columns appeared in a feature called "Panhandle Pieces." 

So, check below for the rest of the story which includes that perennial "Sandpoint connection" with Morgan (now an RN in San Diego) and a reminder of Lester Holt's climb to his present position. 

Hope you enjoy the 22-year-old story. It was a fun one. 

Happy Friday. 

Morgan’s Excellent Olympic Adventure

By Marianne Love

For the Spokesman-Review, 2002

 

Shortly before Salt Lake’s Winter Olympics opened, Morgan Potts had to pack up her belongings, move from her Westminster College dorm room, and camp out with a family friend.  The first-year pre-vet major from Sandpoint didn’t mind.

She knew she’d pocket $300 for the inconvenience of being uprooted for Olympics security personnel.  She’d also enjoy a month off from classes. And she’d work 14-16-hour exhausting days in the midst of the Olympic flurry for the next three weeks. 

This 18-year-old is still pinching herself after serving as personal driver for MSNBC Olympics anchor Lester Holt and hobnobbing with famous Olympic athletes on a daily basis.  Her selection from a field of 500 applicants came after a job fair interview last fall revealed her North Idaho winter driving experiences and her strong people skills.

“A constant thought ran through my head,” she says,  “Here I am, driving a brand-new Tahoe, carting around Lester Holt, meeting famous athletes left and right, getting free tickets to places I would never otherwise be . . . how lucky am I?”

The perks continued.  She earned good money. She kept the Tahoe 24-7 and wore official NBC duds, including coat, pants, turtleneck and hat, throughout the games.  

One day she even appeared on national television from Park City when Holt, doing a live feed in heavy, wet snow said, “Come over here, Mo; this is what happens during the break.”  He summoned her to hold the umbrella over his head and wave.

“Ten minutes later, my mom called to tell me one of her clients saw,” Potts recalled. “So that was fun.” 

Holt gave Potts high marks for her contribution to the NBC team.

“I think the thing that struck me most about Morgan is that she did not seem ‘awestruck’ by her experience,” Holt said. “We work at a fast (New York) pace, speak an odd lingo of our own, and (we) hosted a number of celebrity guests from Jimmy Shea to Dorothy Hamill to the Canadian Pairs skaters . . . . Morgan kept her cool and certainly has an extraordinary level of sophistication for someone her age.

“That said, she WAS a willing accomplice in the occasional Lester Holt-led ‘play breaks,’ which included a few runs down the ski and snow tubing slopes between newscasts,” he added. 

Each day from dawn to dusk, Potts remained ready, at a moment’s notice, to transport NBC interview guests, through Olympic-proportion traffic jams to a variety of on-site venues. In one case, a 20-minute drive to pick up a guest for a 6:30 live interview took 68 minutes.  The guest arrived at the set with just two minutes to spare.

“The traffic was horrendous,” she said. “I guess a ton of people were in town to see concerts. To make it worse, this guest was booked by a guy named Greg in New Jersey.  He called three times throughout the day to make sure I remembered, four times on the way to get her and another three on the way back.  Talk about pressure!”

Potts shared her experiences with family, friends, and former teachers through daily email dispatches from Salt Lake City, Park City, or Deer Valley.  Adventures included an initial sighting of handsome American skater John Zimmerman and his partner, Kyoko Ina, followed by a two-hour visit with him at Starbuck’s and breakfast at McDonald’s.

“He’s really cool,” she wrote to friends, “We talked about majors and jobs . . . it turns out he worked at some vet’s offices too!”

Potts’ photo album features shots with Zimmerman and skier Picabo Street.  Her  passenger list included 1980 “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey goalie Jim Craig as well as  figure skaters Todd Eldridge and Michael Weiss.  

She won’t soon forget visits with skeleton gold medalist Tristan Gale, who’s “down-to-earth and sweet” or a three-hour news conference featuring the Russian gold medal pairs skaters. The NBC crew joined other media at a home surrounded by imposing KGB agents.  

 “It’s scary to be yelled at in a language you don’t understand.  All I can say is that the Russians were very intimidating . . . all very big and not very happy to see so much media there,” she observed. “The Russian pair skaters showed up and were practically mobbed by reporters and cameras.”

With the Olympics closing, Potts faced reality and the letdown by turning in her Tahoe and saying good-byes to her East Coast NBC friends who constantly teased their “laid-back North Idaho girl with the pet squirrel” and lovingly named her  “Morgan Clampett”  (from the Beverly Hillbillies).

“I remember one of the first times Lester was in my car, he asked, ‘So, do you have any interest in journalism?’ My answer was ‘no.’” Potts said. “After working for MSNBC, though, my outlook has changed. I hear all these stories from Lester about how he’ll be meeting the President or broadcasting out of some foreign country.   I think now I would actually enjoy a job in broadcast journalism.”