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FEATURE
Bob Phillips Has Seen Miles and Miles of Texas
(And Taken Millions of Viewers Along for the Ride)
By Sheryl Smith-Rodgers
Everyone’s quiet as trainer Lynn Rorke Reardon gently urges Sonny, a retired
thoroughbred racehorse, to trot faster around the pen. Leaning against the metal
fence, photographer Dan Stricklin balances a bulky black Betacam on his shoulder
and shoots the action.
Behind him, Bob Phillips—host of television’s long-running, folksy
“Texas Country Reporter”—waits to chat with Reardon about
her efforts to find homes for retired Texas racehorses. Since 2003, she’s
placed more than 500 horses with new owners through her adoption ranch near
Austin called LOPE (short for LoneStar Outreach to Place Ex-Racers).
From inspirational people such as Reardon to offbeat stops, country cafés
and even a few amazing animals, Phillips finds all kinds of stories as he explores
the state’s highways and back roads. “Hop in and travel with me,”
he warmly invites viewers each week as he takes off on yet another installment
of “Texas Country Reporter.” On the air since 1972, Phillips so
far has logged some 2 million miles and produced more than 2,700 half-hour shows.
At the moment, though, it’s his turn to distract Richie Cee, an overly
friendly chestnut gelding at LOPE who insists on poking his nose into Stricklin’s
camera. “You got yourself a horse there, Bob,” Reardon quips as
Phillips rubs Richie’s long, brown mane.
Phillips is perfectly relaxed with the pushy horse. He’s been in front
of the camera long enough to know a few things: expect the unexpected, go with
the flow, and—oh, yeah—don’t ever be shy.
Guts—that’s what landed Phillips in the business in the first place.
Fresh out of high school, encouraged by a journalism teacher to keep writing,
the Dallas native enrolled in a local junior college in 1969. One day, Eddie
Barker—the respected Dallas news anchor who announced the death of President
Kennedy shortly before Walter Cronkite—visited Phillips’ journalism
class.
Following the lecture, Phillips, then 18, walked up to Barker and asked him
for a job at his television station. Barker gruffly agreed. “He told me
later that he hired me ‘cause I had the guts to ask for a job,”
Phillips recalls. “I said, no, it was ‘cause I’d needed a
job!” At the CBS-affiliate station, Phillips worked his way up from gofer
to news cameraman and then reporter. While still working full time, he earned
his bachelor’s in journalism and broadcast-film-art, and a master’s
of liberal arts at Southern Methodist University.
In 1972, he worked as photographer with “4 Country Reporter” and
soon became host. Similar in format to Charles Kuralt’s popular “On
the Road” series, Phillips traveled the region’s rural roads in
search of unique stories.
“I did small-town features, but they had to have a newsy side, too,”
he says during an off-camera break at Reardon’s horse ranch. “Gradually,
though, I started asking less hard news questions. Finally, in Forney (east
of Dallas), I asked two ranchers, ‘How does a cow stand up? With its front
legs first or its back legs?’ Those two guys got into an argument right
there. Viewers wrote in and called the station, saying how much they loved it.
After that show, the bosses let me go and do whatever I wanted.”
Fun and upbeat, “4 Country Reporter” aired twice weekly until 1986,
when new management canceled the show. However, the station agreed to give Phillips
the program’s copyright, which allowed him to keep the same name and format.
Later that year, he started Phillips Productions and syndicated “Texas
Country Reporter.”
NOWADAYS
“Texas Country Reporter” airs on 24 Texas stations and the RFD-TV
network. “Our ratings indicate that we reach 1.3 million people a week
on Texas broadcast stations and a million nationwide on RFD,” Phillips
says.
Unbeknownst to most viewers, a lot of behind-the-scenes work and time goes
into producing just one of a half-hour show’s three stories, such as today’s
visit with Reardon and her horses at LOPE.
“Typically, we don’t do a lot of research,” Phillips explains
while Stricklin—along with producer Ryan Britt and production assistant
Mike Synder—film Reardon riding a horse across a grassy meadow. “We’ll
look at someone’s website ahead of time, but a lot of people don’t
have one. So we talk to them on the phone. Viewers don’t know these other
people are here spending 18 hours with one person to get a six-minute story.
They think I drive around and talk to people all by myself.”
On this spring morning at LOPE, gray skies threaten overhead. Phillips just
shrugs.
“We always hope for beautiful skies,” he says, “but we shoot
in everything. We shoot people’s lives, and that’s sometimes in
the rain.”
Annually, Phillips and his staff produce 78 stories.
“Most come from viewers,” he says. “We get hundreds of e-mails
every day. We also get ideas from traveling around; people will tell us about
someone else. Plus we read lots of Texas magazines and newspapers. Dan found
this story [LOPE] in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. We’re pretty blatant
about reading something in a publication and then doing the story, but we give
it a different twist.”
After 35 years on the road, Phillips instinctively recognizes stories worth
telling.
“Lynn’s got so much passion for her horses that that makes this
story,” Phillips says. “We don’t care about what they’re
doing as much as why they’re doing it. If people care, it’s a good
story. Our stories range from deeply moving, passionate stories about people’s
lives to places where people can go to visit or eat. We do ‘ain’t
that neat’ stories, too, like a cemetery in Paris, Texas, where there’s
a statute of Jesus wearing cowboy boots. Oh, yeah, we got a lot of responses
on that one!”
So did a story on Skidboot, a blue heeler trained and loved by Quinlin farrier
David Hartwig. The dog’s amazing ability to perform intricate tricks wowed
such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno and David Letterman. Sadly, Skidboot
died at age 14 last March. (See Phillips’ video on Skidboot online at
www.youtube.com/texascountryreporter.)
Needless to say, Phillips knows Texas well. When the town of Clark changed
its name to DISH, Phillips headed to North Texas and asked why (folks now have
a decade’s worth of free satellite TV service). In Colleyville, he watched
as Bob Wilder flew rubber-band airplanes in a school gym with his cronies. In
Amarillo, he rubbed elbows with Bob Flesher, who makes (and plays) upright bass
instruments from washtubs, and, in Corpus Christi, he shared a table with Bill
and Lois Patillo, who serve delicious “dishes”—scrambled eggs,
hamburgers, yams, key lime pie and more—made entirely from rocks.
On the personal side, Phillips, 56, says little—he’s been single
since 40, no children. When not on the road or teaching at private Amberton
University in Dallas, he relaxes at either his Dallas home, another in Beaumont
or his Hill Country resort called Escondida (which is served by Bandera Electric
Cooperative).
“I think I’m hard to live with,” he reflects. “I mean,
this is what I want to do so I’m on the road a lot. Charles Kuralt and
I were friends; we met when I was very young. We’d share story ideas and
chicken-fried steak. He told me once that he missed a lot of birthday parties.”
Back on camera with Reardon, Phillips asks a few more questions, then hops
into his black Expedition and heads west. Stricklin, Britt and Synder—who
drive the show’s red-white-and-blue “flag” truck—stay
a few more hours to wrap up the interview. In a few days, they’ll edit,
write and produce the story at the production studio in Dallas.
“I have to say I’m happy with how my life turned out,” Phillips
says before leaving. “I do for a living what most people do for vacation.
And, hey, I’m not gonna gripe about that!”
EPILOGUE
Phillips got himself a horse, all right. Actually, make that two. Shortly after
his interview with Reardon, he adopted Richie and Deemed Ready, another chestnut
gelding. The pair now reside at Escondida.
SIDEBAR
Festival
In the fall, Bob Phillips hosts the “Texas Country Reporter” Festival
in Waxahachie. Next year’s 13th annual bash—set for Saturday, Oct.
25—will feature artists, chefs, live music, food, games, autographs and
“everything Texas Country.”
For more information, call the Waxahachie Chamber of Commerce at (972) 938-9617
or visit www.texascountryreporter.com
or www.waxahachiechamber.com.
Escondida
Tucked away in the hills near Kerrville, Phillips’ resort offers 10 guest
suites, a state-of-the-art spa, swimming pool, hot tub, hiking trails, gourmet
meals and lots of solitude. For rates and information, call 1-888-589-7507;
www.escondidaresort.com.
DQ Dude
“Texas Country Reporter” was syndicated in 1986, thanks to its
first statewide sponsor—Dairy Queen. In return, Phillips touted burgers
and ice cream for 13 years in numerous DQ commercials. One featured him in a
parka, yelling into a snowstorm.
“I introduced the Blizzard to people when it was new,” he says.
To demonstrate how, he cups his hands over his mouth and hollers, “Blizzzzzard!”
To this day, people still ask him to “do the Blizzard thing!”
And he does.
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Sheryl Smith-Rodgers, who lives in Blanco, is a frequent contributor to
Texas Co-op Power.
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