48 Hours: “Everybody Has A Story” [ ]

Tonight on WCBS/Ch. 2 at 10

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REPORTER Steve Hartman and cameraman Les Rose have without a doubt, the best jobs in America (except for this one, God knows).

Hartman and Rose travel around the country, picking people totally at random to prove that “everybody has a story.”

Yes, CBS pays them to do this – and with good reason. Everybody does have a story.

Their random subjects are picked very scientifically. Hartman turns backwards and throws a dart at a map of the United States. He and Rose then travel to whatever town the dart has hit and open the local phone book. They pick a name out of the book – also with eyes closed -and call that house.

Whoever answers (and doesn’t hang up on them) becomes the subject of a national CBS news story about their lives. The premise being that it’s not just Mariah Carey, the Clintons and Gary Condit who have intertesting stories to tell.

Mysteriously, however, Hartman never seems to trip on the kind of people who find their way onto Jerry Springer.

No one is a crackhead with 15 kids all under the age of five, no one is a hooker, a pimp, or an unemployed pot dealer. His “finds” are always out of Norman Rockwell paintings, and the towns he visits are all clean and look like they should have a big band shell on the village green. They are never rife with trailer parks, strip malls and topless joints.

This is hardly the American most of us see when car tripping through the U.S., but maybe he’s just lucky to find the America that came and went one spring in 1965.

Based on a newspaper column by David Johnson in Idaho, the idea that “everybody has a story” makes very good TV. And Hartman is personable enough to pull it off.

Tonight on “48 Hours,” he takes the best of the segments he’s done for the “CBS Evening News With Dan Rather” and makes an hour-long program. The stories are touching and lovely.

There’s the family that considers itself “really boring” and are sure they have no story. Meantime, they have taken in four foster kids – and managed to adopt three so far, who break your heart with their new-found joy. Two brothers had been so neglected before the Izat family adopted them that they clawed at people, and didn’t even know how to use silverware. Says one little brother, “They love us and snuggle us.”

OK, after I picked myself off the floor and tried to get a grip, there were the people whose son ran away at 17 – even after his father got down on his knees and begged him to stay – who returned 30 years later as a successful man, and is now a devoted son who has lunch with his parents every day.

For levity, there’s the funeral director in North Carolina, whose family has been in the biz for years. Seems 60 years ago, a traveling carnival worker was murdered. His father paid the funeral director a small upfront fee, but never came back.

They embalmed the body and waited – for 30 years. Then they put the mummy in the garage and waited some more.

All in all, the carnie, known as “Spaghetti” because he was Italian, stood upright in the family’s garage for another 30 years, until Mario Biaggi (yes, our Mario Biaggi) heard about it. The then-congressman was so appalled at the fate of an Italian-American that he paid to have “Spaghetti” buried properly.

Yes, everyone does have a story.

Good watching.