Residents of Springfield, Missouri, last week welcomed a film crew from C-SPAN that will feature the city during the cable network’s C-SPAN Cities Tour of several medium-sized cities.
Among the segments the nonprofit cable network featured were about Wild West figure Wild Bill Hickok, the Trail of Tears, Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield of the Civil War, NRA Sporting Arms Museum, a driving tour of Springfield and the history of Route 66 in the city, reported KSMU radio and other Springfield news outlets.
The station reported:
The C-SPAN Cities Tour was created in 2011, according to Coordinating Producer Debbie Lamb, who spoke at a kickoff reception in Springfield Monday.
“The goal of the Cities Tour is really to embed ourselves in a city and the city gets to tell its story to our national audience,” says Lamb.
She added, “Those that we interview are telling your story, it’s not us. So we think that’s really valuable for our national audience. So we stay out of the way, just like C-SPAN does.”
The Cities Tour programming is a weekend compliment to the hours of political coverage C-SPAN offers during the week.
One local historian told KOLR-TV:
“Overall, it’s just a very historically rich region that covers partly mid-west, partly west, partly southern history. It’s kind of the intersection of those three zones of that national story,” says Thomas Peters, Dean of MSU Library Services.
The C-SPAN Cities Tour will air the Springfield segments Jan. 6-7, according to its webpage
Other Route 66 cities that have been featured on the C-SPAN Cities Tour are Albuquerque, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and San Bernardino, California. All of the video segments will be archived on C-SPAN Cities Tour’s website.
The main C-SPAN website also contains hundreds of thousands of archived video. A cursory search of “Route 66” reveals interviews with Bob Boze Bell, Johnny Meier, Michael Wallis, David Dunaway and Tom Teague.
(Image of downtown Springfield, Missouri, by Tony Hisgett via Flickr)