Airing about the same time as “Tougher in Alaska” is the Discovery Channel’s “The Alaska Experiment,” a seven episode series which the network describes as “Four groups of ordinary people attempt to live in the Alaskan wilderness for three months.” The media have already begun describing it as a “Survivors” knock-off. Beach doesn’t discount that show—“”history, Alaska is one big experiment—people coming here to make it,” he says. But, he contrasts “Tougher in Alaska” with “Man vs. Wild,” a Reality TV show that also airs on the Discovery Channel. Host Bear Gryllis, after appearing to be surviving harsh winters and desert summers, hypothermia and dehydration, actually “survived” in luxurious hotels when the day’s filming was over, according to the Times of London. Even some of the situations he faced while on camera were set-up and orchestrated for television.
Beach also swipes at “adventurers” who come to Alaska, lured by Reality TV series. “Alaskans will risk their lives to help others,” says Beach, “but it’s really stupid, and just plain impolite for people to come up here, not know what they’re getting into, and senselessly put others in a position to lose their own lives.” Some of the “adventurers” are journalists, looking for a “good story,” but not prepared for the genuine Alaska. “These are the Parachute Journalists,” says Beach, who points out, “They drop into an area, do a story, go home, and never understand the people of their circumstances.” Beach is unimpressed with national news coverage of issues, peoples, and cultures. “Igloos and Penguins” is his term, based upon an NBC-TV news show about the North Pole that included file footage of penguins, the closest of which, except for those in zoos, are about 12,000 miles to the south.
Geo Beach grew up in New England—“I’m a Swamp Yankee,” he says proudly. His mother became a counselor after graduating from Bennington College in 1953, a time when not many women went to college. His father graduated with honors from Western Reserve University (now Case-Western), and later completed a second bachelor’s degree in sacred theology from the Harvard Divinity School, and became an ordained Unitarian minister. He was a newspaper reporter (Boston Sunday Advertiser, Boston Record-American, Cleveland Press, Columbus Citizen-Journal), a radio news anchor (WEEI-AM, the CBS-owned station in Boston), and a syndicated columnist—“Saints and Sinners” was published by more than 200 newspapers over a 32 year period.
“I grew up in a house with a lot of books and discussions,” says Beach. Although encouraged to speak out, to challenge others and be challenged by them, he “had to show facts to back up his opinions,” something today’s media pundits and prognosticators often forget or deliberately sidestep.
Geo Beach’s own formal education stopped with graduation from the elite Phillips Exeter prep school in New Hampshire, where he was on the school newspaper and radio station, planning for a career in writing. He graduated early, and with honors, and accepted early admission to Brown, but never attended. “My brother and a hundred or so of my friends from Exeter were at Yale,” he says, “and that’s where I ended up.” But, because of Ivy League rules, he was forbidden to enroll at Yale for two years, so he became a “drop-in.” He became involved in theatre and writing, including regular publication in the Yale Daily News Magazine. After two years, he “just took off,” on a never-ending quest to experience lufe in order to find stories worth telling. His first stop was a year driving land rovers in the Sahara. “When I came back,” he recalls, “I was working enough on my writing that I just never enrolled.”
Over the next few years, he wrote poetry, fiction, newspaper and magazine articles—“anything and everything.” In his early-20s, he went to West Virginia, and began working on “Mountain Stage,” a new music show that would become the longest-running music show on public broadcast history. He later worked in Atlanta before exploring the Last Frontier.
In 1983, then in his mid-20s, he went to Alaska when a friend asked him to visit. “I was always attracted to the mountains,” he says, “and I missed the ocean when I was away from it too long.” But, when he got to Alaska, during the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, he found himself near Homer, at the southern end of Alaska Route 1. Around him were the Kenai Mountains. The Japanese currents that flow into Kachemak Bay give the area a warmth that is similar to that of New England. He had the water and mountains he so loved. “I thought I’d be up here a year,” he recalls, “but time spins around a little different at the top of the planet.”
During the past 25 years, Geo Beach, like his father became a columnist. The Alaska Press Club honored him as the state’s Best Columnist for his weekly “Top O’ the Planet” column in the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper. “It’s sorta on hiatus right now,” he says, noting the demands of his work on “Tougher in Alaska,” including a heavy demand to promote the series. But, he continues to write magazine articles and do the popular “Uncommontaries” for public radio, which earned him the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi medal from the Society of Professional Journalists. His commentaries have aired on National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth” and “All Things Considered,” and Public Radio International’s “Savvy Traveler” and “Marketplace.” He has also won an Atlantic Monthly poetry prize, top awards from the Pacific Northwest Press Association, and the Mencken Award for “independence of mind, fearlessness in reporting, excellence of style, and above all, intellectual liberty.”
But awards aren’t what drives him. “It’s journalism,” he says. “It’s telling the stories of people; it’s helping others see the world around them.”
Whatever Geo Beach’s next project is, readers, listeners, and viewers can be assured it’ll be real and, most assuredly, not Reality TV.
[“Tougher in Alaska” is seen 10 p.m., Thursdays, on the History Channel.](Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
