Bill Geist, the well-known, roving correspondent of CBS News Sunday Morning, recently talked to Car & Travel about his travels and the fascinating characters and odd and endearing things he has met and discovered along the way, many of which find pride of place in his latest book: Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America.

Car & Travel: How did you start chronicling the delightful eccentricities of small town USA?
Bill Geist: I was hired in 1987 by Charles Kuralt (who broadcasted more than 600 episodes of his radio show On the Road for CBS) to do pieces on Americana for CBS News Sunday Morning. In doing this book on my 20 years [in this job], I started writing my favorite stories, and after writing about eight, I realized they were all set in small towns. I hadn’t realized my attraction to small towns. As a newspaper reporter, I only wrote about New Yorkers and Chicago suburbanites.

C&T: Is there a state that hands down beats all others in the Eccentricity Stakes, and if so, which one, and why?
Geist: I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it’s Colorado. In the book, there are several chapters set in Colorado. One on Mike the Headless Chicken (www.miketheheadlesschicken.org), who lived for two years after his beheading; one on the Frozen Dead Guys Festival (www.nederlandchamber.org/FrozenDeadGuyDays), about a town that ices down a dead body kept in a tool shed, and one on the Prairie Dog Suckers, [a company that] removes problematic prairie dogs with a sewer vacuum truck. There also is a reference to Movie Manor Hotel (in fact, a three-diamond AAA-rated property, the Best Western Movie Manor Motel, in Monte Vista, Colo.; 719/852-5921—Editor), where you can watch drive-in movies from your room.

C&T: Are you optimistic about the health and survival of rural America?
Geist: There are vast rural areas, such as the entire Great Plains, that are totally emptying out. My hope is that in this computer age, when many people can work from anywhere, and with house prices in these rural towns plummeting, perhaps there will be a trend to repopulating these areas. But at this point that’s just a wish.

C&T: What is the most enjoyable part of your job?
Geist: The most enjoyable part is getting past the airports and long plane rides and meeting all of these fascinating people and attending extraordinary events—some would say bizarre people and events.

C&T: Is there one spot in New York or the Northeast that you heartily recommend Car & Travel readers going to? It does seem from Way Off the Road that this region has been neglected. There is a women mentioned from Old Lyme, Conn., who runs a museum on nuts (Her quote: “[Nuts] keep you occupied and the sound of cracking nuts spells party.”), but little else. Are we just more sane here, or will the area soon be the subject of a whole book of its own?
Geist: Interesting point. I don’t consciously neglect the Northeast. Maybe it is more difficult to be eccentric in a place that is easier to reach, rather than in, say, Beaver, Okla., where you fly to Denver, take a small plane to rural Kansas (its second stop) and then drive an hour or two. I’ve done pieces in every state in the Northeast—including Chester Greenwood, who invented earmuffs, in Maine; Fred Tuttle, the Vermont dairy farmer who ran for the U.S. Senate; fireworks manufacturers in New Hampshire, and the Dirt Museum in Massachusetts—but Northeasterners may actually be a bit more sane than others. (Sadly, the Nut Museum lady passed away.)

C&T: Do you do follow-ups to your reports? In particular, I’d like to know what is happening re: Illegal Porch Furniture in Wilson, N.C. (This North Carolina town featured in Geist’s book was trying to ban bad and ugly porch furniture, the main argument against, being, Who can judge what is bad and/or ugly?)
Geist: Wilson has contained the growing illegal porch-furniture epidemic and remains constantly vigilant.
 
C&T: How do you research your stories? Do they initially come from word-of-mouth, with one or two of them tickling you sufficiently that further research is called for?
Geist: I get my best stories from viewers—real humans, as opposed to public relations firms. Like the man who wrote that his mother lived in Hanlontown, Iowa, where they celebrate the day the sun sets in the middle of the railroad tracks. We also “borrow” stories we see in newspapers and magazines.

C&T: Have you, since publication, looked more scared (your smile in the book’s photograph section does not fool me) than you appeared as a passenger on Hal Wright’s Sierra Booster paper round? [Hal Wright, who died in 2000, was the publisher and editor of the Loyalton, Calif.-based Sierra Booster newspaper, which he started in 1949. So spread out were subscribers, that Wright delivered all his newspapers by plane, flinging them out of the cockpit in the general direction of doorsteps.]
Geist: No. Flying with the oldest pilot in America, who bragged how he’d beaten the Federal Aviation Administration, mentioned several heart by-pass operations, had to call a tow truck to jump-start his old plane and steered his plane with his knees while folding and dropping newspapers, was the most heroic/stupid assignment I can recall. That, and riding a horse 2,500 feet down the wall of the Grand Canyon with a mailman.

C&T: How many miles do you estimate that you have logged traveling around the 50 states?
Geist: I can’t even guess. Well over a million, including a 5,600-mile cross-country adventure in an RV.

C&T: One eccentric find Car & Travel has been to is the hamlet of Hot Coffee, Miss., where they always keep a pot of coffee on the boil. Have you been there?
Geist: No, but I love it. I’m heading out the door right now.