Leelanau’s Storyteller Scott Craig is laughing
By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
Great storytellers are born and made. Scott Craig of Leland exemplifies this maxim. “I grew up in the home of a professor of speech and drama,” Scott remembers about his father. “He was an excellent actor and fine director who graduated college in 1929 in the dark days of the Great Depression. He acted in summer stock with the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, and directed at the Phoenix Theater in New York City. So our home was a mecca for theater people.” As a teenager Scott remembers coming home from school one day to change into his baseball togs only to find the famous British stage and film actor Charles Laughton there reading to his brother. Scott’s father brought Thornton Wilder to Wooster College and directed him in Our Town. “Performance and storytelling permeated our home,” Scott continues. “Dad was a popular after-dinner speaker at things like Rotary Club meetings and annual dinners. He had his canned speeches, one of which was called Why We Laugh! He had a string of jokes.”
So does Scott Craig. His new collection of local humor entitled Laughing in Leelanau or I Swear It’s True is the result of hours of research in parlors and porches, in coffee clubs and barber shops, in taverns and bars, and in the archives of the Leelanau Enterprise. This fits the arc of a man who started paying his way by performing pantomime over 70 years ago. “When I was a junior in high school, my friend Carl and I did a show where we pantomimed popular records, like Spike Jones’s “You Always Hurt the One You Love” or Mel Blanc’s “I Taught I Taw a Puddy Tat”. Or some Sylvester and Tweety Bird bits. We did a 15-minute act maybe two or three times a week around Ohio at VFW halls and Rotary Clubs.” Scott continued to make money this way throughout his four years of college at Wooster, and his pantomime partner there ended up being the president of the University of Colorado. “That act paid for all of my clothes and all of my dates,” Scott laughs. “In 1950 we’d get $25 a performance plus dinner. When I was almost 18, four of us went to Alaska to fight forest fires. We had read Jack London and wanted some adventure. We worked 8 hours on, 8 hours off for a $1 an hour. We couldn’t spend it, so it piled up. Then I did pantomime at two nightclubs in Fairbanks as part of the floorshow. For that I got $40 a night plus all I could eat or drink! I didn’t drink much, but I’d end up having breakfast at 4:30 in the morning with the band, the chorus girls, and the emcee. I came home from there with $2,000 in my pocket, a lot of money in 1952.”
After majoring in theater at Wooster, Scott went on to the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana to pursue his masters and PhD. He worked for the CBS affiliate there on a kid’s show five days/wk. creating skits with puppets that filled the spaces between the cartoons. In one skit Scott, also an amateur magician, played a bungling magician who cuts up a caterpillar’s necktie but then can’t restore it. The poor caterpillar cries at the loss. “We got hundreds of neckties sent through the mail to Calvin the Caterpillar,” Scott chuckles. He also filled in as a weatherman. “You didn’t need to be a meteorologist, just an actor.”
One day the station manager announced that they were starting a documentary unit and he wanted Scott to head it up. Scott was skeptical, but the boss said, “You know a story has a beginning, middle, and end, right? You’ll do.” Thus began a career of making documentaries that spanned 45 years. (Scott Craig worked for CBS, NBC, PBS, Turner Broadcasting, HGTV, and founded his own production company that ran for 25 years.) Scott went to the public library to study how documentaries were made, including the influential Canadian documentary City of Gold chronicling Dawson Creek during the Klondike Gold Rush. Scott produced Spoon River Anthology as a documentary three years before it became a Broadway play. His success landed him at CBS in Chicago, where he experimented with the new verite’ method of using hand-held cameras to free the filmmakers from their fixed tripods. The World of Zoe Hood, about a blind elementary school girl, is one Scott remembers fondly. When he was 26, during his second summer at CBS in Chicago, Scott was assigned to do a film about Ernie Banks, the famous Chicago Cubs first baseman. (Let’s play two!) “It was thrilling to spend the latter part of that summer at Wrigley Field and hang out in the clubhouse and in the dugout. One day when the Dodgers were in town I saw Sandy Koufax in the Cubs clubhouse drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. He wasn’t pitching that day, so he felt like hanging out with the enemy.”
“I discovered that you could best communicate complicated issues through personal, human interest stories,” Scott concludes. His PBS documentary Lost in Middle America is narrated by Hal Holbrook and lets the people of Lima, Ohio, tell the story of how an executive in London shut down a BP refinery there with catastrophic consequences for Lima. “I learned that in storytelling, after you research, you figure out the ending first, the punch line, what you want the audience to get out of it. That works even in documentaries that aren’t funny, and that’s the case with this book.” The liner notes at the end of Laughing in Leelanau or I Swear It’s True summarize what Scott has been up to. “After retiring, for the fun of it, he created a radio feature, “The Story Next Door,” which aired on two northern Michigan stations for 12 years. In 2013 he turned his radio series into a popular book.”
Laughing in Leelanau or I Swear It’s True is also a family affair. His daughter Amy Coleman was the producer of the Oprah Winfrey Show for 17 years in Chicago. and now produces the CBS reality show “Survivor” in Hollywood. (Scott’s proudest picture on his wall is of Amy flanked by Oprah on one side and Nelson Mandela on the other.) Her son Henry Coleman, Scott’s grandson, is the illustrator for this new book. Henry graduated from the Wildwood School in L.A., and is now headed to the Parsons School of Design in N.Y.C. He spends part of every summer in Leland. Henry includes several cartoons of a pair of old geezers sitting on a bench. One says, “Most days I don’t do anything, and I don’t get to that ‘til around noon.” Or, “Glad to see the Fudgies are back, I haven’t snarled at anybody for months.” Or, “I’ve often wondered what happened to the people I’ve given directions to.”
“I’m never happier than when I’m working on a creative project,” admits the 86-year-old Scott Craig. “I’ve only been bored a half a day since I retired 16 years ago because I’ve always found something creative to do.” Scott got to swap stories with lots of locals for Laughing in Leelanau or I Swear It’s True, including Dave Taghon, Phil Deering, Tim Barr, Bill and Mark Carlson, David Grath, Rich Bahle, Lois Bahle and Larry Mawby, and many others. Scott Craig brilliantly weaves in old humorous anecdotes and quotes from late nineteenth and early 20th century issues of the Leelanau Enterprise as he chuckles, guffaws, groans, snickers, and belly laughs his way through every town and classical character in the bygone days of Leelanau County. Be sure to check the local bookstores to get a copy. As Scott says, “He who laughs, lasts!”
