Kansas filmmaker Dave Kendall developed and produced 27 seasons of Sunflower Journeys for KTWU in Topeka, Kansas. Through Mellon Foundation funding, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) recently preserved the show’s first seven seasons which capture the history, environment, and cultural life of Kansas. Sunflower Journeys is exemplary of the rich, regional, public broadcast programming the AAPB seeks to preserve and make widely accessible.
AAPB Archives Project Manager, Rochelle Miller, spoke with Kendall to discuss the show, its preservation, and his thoughts on public broadcasting.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
How did you come to develop Sunflower Journeys?
Back in the fall of ‘86, I was hired by the station specifically to put together a series like this. I was finishing up graduate school at the University of Kansas where I was studying broadcasting and journalism combined with anthropology. While there, I taught this one course, “Anthropology Through Films,” and I used a lot of programs from the PBS Faces of Culture series.
It was a global series of cultural stories so I got the idea from that of how to tell a story about local culture. I was intent on looking at Kansas as a culture that has stories to tell in various dimensions, like any other exotic culture.
How did you come up with the format for the show?
When I got the job, the main task was figuring out how to make a series. The magazine television format was prevalent at the time, so a series with multiple stories in a half-hour program was common. We divvied up the stories for the first season among the three of us in the production department. We discovered we could produce a series weekly but needed more help, so I wrote a grant proposal to hire another producer.
The format with shorter stories encouraged viewers to stay tuned, and we aimed to tie each program around themes. The show filled a gap in Kansas history education, coinciding with an initiative to teach more Kansas history in schools.
In the first season, we covered various topics like locales, cities, wildlife, art, and history. Later seasons sometimes had overarching themes, like focusing on the physiographic regions of Kansas in the third season.
The show has a clear environmentalist slant to it, which feels quite prescient in its address of issues such as drought and climate change.
I guess that was my own personal interest, bleeding over a little bit. I was interested more in environmental issues and making sure that the show wasn’t just a travelogue. In the fifth season, we did a story with William Least Heat Moon, who had written a book called Blue Highways that I found influential. This book was about traveling on the backroads of the United States.
After that book came out and was pretty successful, Least Heat Moon then focused on one county in the Flint Hills of Kansas and did what he called a “deep map” approach where you’re not just visiting a site and seeing how it is today, but thinking about how it’s been over time. For me, I’ve been interested in the idea of how our culture is evolving. How our life systems here change over time, and I try to give a sense that there is a process that we’re all engaged with.
What aspects of the Sunflower Journeys are you most proud of?
I feel good that we’ve helped people not only to learn more about the place where we live but also to make connections with each other. People would see something on the show and then get to know somebody with the same interests. So in that sense, we were helping people connect with each other. I felt good about that. I felt good about the fact that it was useful to school systems, and teaching kids about Kansas and it’s cool that several libraries still have complete collections of the series.
What do you think a wider national audience, and scholars might take away from Sunflower Journeys now that it’s available for viewing on the AAPB?
Well, there are a lot of different stories in there that relate to individuals that had a national or international impact. We have stories about Carrie Nation, Dwight Eisenhower, Amelia Earhart, and various other individuals who had an impact on American history and came from Kansas. So you can look through the collection and find stories that apply well beyond Kansas.
On the other hand, if you’re interested in getting a sense of what’s going on in the heart of America, just tuning in to some of these small-town stories gives you a sense of what people’s attitudes are and what the local life is like. It’s a snippet of life from the Heartland.
I could look through and pull out a lot of segments that I think would be relevant environmentally right now. We did a whole season of stories about water in Kansas. I just saw that one of the titles of the programs was on the Ogallala Aquifer. It’s an aquifer that runs, not only through Kansas, but Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas. This is a big, big topic right now. What’s happening to this part of the country as the level of the aquifer declines has national significance, if not international significance, as far as the food that is produced there. That’s something that I feel people studying environmental change would be interested in.
Do you have any special memories from making any particular show, or any episodes that you would point users of the AAPB to?
It was in the third season that I interviewed Jim Lehrer. He came to town and here’s this guy, you know, the quintessential journalist. I wasn’t all that experienced in interviewing at that point but he was such a down-to-earth guy and he was so easy to talk with. It was an interesting story and it was an opportunity to hear more about his connection to Kansas, which I didn’t know much about at the time. You see this guy on PBS NewsHour and you think, oh, he’s from Kansas, that’s kind of cool, we got a local boy on the national news. But then he comes back to Kansas and you find out how it shaped his early years and how he could still rattle off all the small towns that were on his dad’s bus line.
A lot of stories come back to this area where I grew up called the Flint Hills, which is one area of Kansas that everybody has a sense of reverence for. A lot of people think of Kansas as flat as a pancake but there is an area in eastern Kansas with more rolling prairie and bigger hills with broad open vistas. This part of Kansas is the Flint Hills, and it’s a little bit unusual. It’s the last 4% of Tallgrass Prairie in the world, so it’s really a special place and people are really interested in preserving it and protecting it. It’s a space where you can feel connected to nature in a way that you don’t anywhere else. And so a lot of these images that I have relate to this part of the state, which is where I still live and I’m a little bit biased about it.
Can you talk a little about your current work?
Well, I left the TV station KTWU in 2014, I think. I started my own little company– it’s really just me and my wife– and it’s called Prairie Hollow Productions. We’ve been fortunate to be able to raise some funding so we just finished our fourth full-length documentary. The Flint Hills Discovery Center Foundation has served as our sponsored organization, so all of these documentaries have some connection to the Flint Hills.
I thought I wanted to do something about climate change because that’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room that’s really coming down hard on all of us, and it’s like, “How do you address that in a way that has any significance?” And I thought, “I’ll just focus locally on what’s being done in this part of the world to respond to what’s going on, what the impact is on us locally, and how are people dealing with it,” just as a way of helping educate people about what is happening and why and who’s doing something about it.
[Kendall’s Film: Hot Times in the Heartland (2024)]
As a producer, you’ve made shows and documentaries only for public broadcasting. What are your thoughts on public broadcasting?
I really value public broadcasting for the role it plays. Public broadcasting can go in-depth with the subject matter and is not interrupted by commercials. I see it as a service that’s not a money-making entity, it’s something there to help and educate people in this nation and beyond. And I still see an educated populace as being the key to democracy. Right now, I think that’s our biggest threat to democracy, that people are getting really confused about what’s fact and what’s not and what’s really going on, but I don’t see that happening on public broadcasting. I see public broadcasting as the one place where you go to be informed. You can rely on what you hear and learn on public broadcasting, and I think keeping people informed and educated is even more important than ever.
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