Ken Burns documentary previewed in Bellows Falls
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By Josh O'Gorman STAFF WRITER - Published: July 4, 2009
BELLOWS FALLS — Wednesday night, a few hundred people got a glimpse of Ken Burns' new documentary and helped raise money for some good causes.
It was a standing-room-only crowd inside the 553-seat Bellows Falls Opera House for a taste of "National Parks: America's Best Idea," a six-part, 12-hour documentary debuting on PBS in September. The $20-a-seat event was a fundraiser for the Student Conservation Association and Walpole Historical Society of Walpole, N.H.
Burns and co-producer Dayton Duncan, whose previous documentaries tackled baseball, jazz and the Civil War, were on-hand to both introduce the hourlong collection of clips from the series and to field questions afterward.
"We've always tried to find a way to say thank you," said Burns, who relocated to Walpole from New York 30 years ago.
Duncan noted before the start of the show that he has the greatest job in the world, and as an example noted how the new documentary brought him to all 58 of the national parks.
It was the love of this country's parks that motivated Liz Putnam of Shaftsbury to found SCA in 1955 as part of her senior thesis at Vassar College. Putnam modeled the SCA after the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put people to work on environmental projects during the Great Depression.
The organization sends young people to parks to perform work such as trail maintenance, and this summer about 4,300 youths will work in the country's national and urban parks.
"If our young people can get their eyes opened, they can realize they have a vital role in protecting the world for the future," Putnam said.
The documentary will likely serve as a good recruiting tool for groups such as the Charlestown, N.H-based SCA. Wednesday's clips teased episodes that show the birth of the National Park System — author Wallace Stegner was the one who called them America's best idea — as well as interviews with park rangers and photographs of President Theodore Roosevelt's trip to Yellowstone National Park.
While answering questions, Burns told a story of visiting Gettysburg National Military Park after the release of his Civil War documentary. A park superintendent picked up a Popsicle wrapper and waved it at him, saying it — and the increased traffic in the park — was his fault.
"There's nothing we'd want more than to have every park superintendent upset with us," he said.
For more information on the documentary, visit www.pbs.org/nationalparks. For more information on SCA, visit www.thesca.org/.
josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com
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