By ELIZABETH STEHLIK
J Alumni News staff
Les Rose
It’s late on a Wednesday evening, and Les Rose is making the two-hour drive back to his home in Los Angeles. He shifts a little in his seat, stretching his shoulders, which are weary from 33 years of straining under a 28-pound camera.
It’s been another adventurous day for a Hawaiian shirt-clad Rose, who’s just finished shooting a news piece at a skate park in San Diego.
Being a CBS photojournalist often means 20-hour days and lots of driving, but Rose doesn’t mind. His job at CBS allows him to capture people’s stories on a digital disc and share them with the world. And for Rose, that’s worth the 20-hour days.
Because, in a word, Les Rose is a storyteller.
The May 2010 College of Journalism and Mass Communications master’s graduate seems eccentric enough to be a tall tale himself. He has a personality as large as his 6-foot-6 frame and a voice that crackles with electrical liveliness.
Every work day is different
There is no average day for Rose. His job at CBS has taken him to countless award shows, to Michael Jackson’s child molestation trial (and, some years after that, to 72 days covering Jackson’s death), to 12 days covering both O.J. Simpson trials, to spending a few days with Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Rose has seen his fair share of danger, too, covering the wars in Central America in the mid 1980s, but he says the most dangerous assignment he’s ever been on was covering the LA riots of 1992.
But Rose will be the first to point out that occasionally dangerous situations are just another part of the adventure. And adventure, he said, is where the stories are.
“I’m always finding an excellent adventure,” he said. “This is a job where you don’t know where you’re going to go, who you’re going to meet and what you’re going to learn on any given day.”
Expanding the adventure into higher education
It was that sense of adventure and curiosity for learning that drove Rose to earn a master’s degree. The degree, he said, will bring his education “full circle.”
“I cold called a lot of colleges, but I called Nebraska out of loyalty,” he said. “I was born in Lincoln, after all, and my brother and father went to school here.”
His cold call landed him in the experienced hands of professor Nancy Mitchell, who directed him to UNL’s online master’s program. Mitchell also headed his three-person thesis committee.
Rose’s thesis, a culmination of almost two years of work, is a piece on Edward R. Murrow, the “patron saint of CBS News” and a storyteller himself. But those two years of thesis writing and studying were hard-fought because once Rose decided on Nebraska, he had to find a way to bridge the gap between time for work and time for study. And to accommodate the time and distance gap between LA and Lincoln, Rose followed UNL’s online master’s program.
“Since a quarter of the class grade is participation, I had to be online and present at every single class. It was an interesting challenge because California time is two hours behind Nebraska time,” he said. “To make everything work, I’d find time between shooting footage to study in airports and hotel rooms at all hours of the day and night.”
He laughed a little. “I didn’t used to drink coffee, but I sure do now.”
Despite the hectic schedule, Rose still had time to make a positive impression on Mitchell.
“He’s one of those students you just never forget,” she said, glancing at a strange molten piece of metal that Rose sent her in the mail. It’s got a letter attached to that has a CBS header and Rose’s familiar scrawl explaining that it used to be part of a fancy car but was melted in a California fire.
“He found this one on one of his adventures.”
Professor Barney McCoy, another one of Rose’s thesis advisers and a former broadcast journalist himself, shares Mitchell’s enthusiastic view of Rose as a student.
“It’s been wonderful to have him as a graduate student because he’s always trying to add more to the equation,” he said. “Les has an infectious personality that’s driven by his curiosity. All those things make him a natural at what he does.”
Naturally, McCoy agrees, that’s storytelling.
And working in LA, that often means telling celebrity stories. But after nearly 40 award shows, Rose isn’t really interested in celebrities. He doesn’t get star struck anymore.
“Celebrities kind of bore me,” he said. “They’re always selling something, like a movie.” After a moment, he relented. “But I really did like Tom Hanks. He was nice.”
Everybody has a story
So after tiring of covering the celebrity scene, Rose and his CBS colleague Steve Hartman set out on a new adventure: to tell the stories of ordinary Americans.
Their adventure began some 12 years ago when Hartman had the idea of throwing a dart at a map of America and following wherever it landed. The series, originally called “Everybody Has a Story,” lasted six years.
Once they reached their destination, they would grab a phone book, flip to a page and start calling. One time, it took up to 44 calls before someone agreed to tell their story.
Currently, whenever New York-based Hartman is west of the Rockies, he and Rose work together on “Assignment America” which airs Monday nights on the CBS Evening News. Those pieces also are heartfelt and often humorous feature stories, but this time the people are not picked at random.
Hartman recently renamed “Everybody Has a Story” to “Everybody in the World Has a Story” for a three-part series on the CBS Evening News
“These are people without publicists,” Rose said. “They have these great stories to tell, but no one ever asks. When we say everybody has a story, we mean it.”
There’s Ken in Arthur, Neb., who proposed to his wife the day she learned she had terminal cancer. She died a year later.
And there’s Suzie in Pennsylvania, the woman who had a hysterectomy at the age of 25 and has since adopted six boys.
“How can you compare a story like that to a celebrity?” Rose said. “I would trade any celebrity story any day for an ‘Assignment America’ story.”
Born to tell stories
And telling those stories is what Rose believes he was made to do.
“I love story telling,” he said. “Stories are about people, and my goal is to make people feel comfortable, and so then they do what they do, and I just disappear and capture it all.”
His dedication to telling stories goes even beyond his job. If Rose ever parts from CBS, he says it’s been his dream to teach others all that he’s learned from the field.
“I would absolutely love to teach, but my day job is a little too awesome to give up,” he said. “I think I’ll just be satisfied with a master’s for a while now.”
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