Politics, without the politics

A TV anchor’s ambition to break the political mold

Jeff Willis

The Roseburg Beacon

Rick Dancer sat calmly on a couch in a Roseburg radio station last week, about to go on the air — like he’d done countless times before. But this time, he wasn’t a television news anchor telling someone else’s story on “KEZI 9 News at Six.” This time, the story was Rick Dancer.

This is a man who wants to be Oregon’s secretary of state. He wants your vote and he believes Oregon can be a better place if people catch his vision. It’s a vision of government, literally, by the people and for the people, he says. It’s the tale of an office with an open door where he does the work and we, the people, make the difference.

If a sincere voice and a determined look in the eye is any measure, he may actually be serious.

“It’s the office — the secretary of state’s office in the executive branch — that really works for the people. My boss is not the governor, it’s not the legislature — it’s the people of Oregon,” Dancer says enthusiastically. “I want to go in there to provide a place where people can use their own voice and get involved in government.”

Now, getting ready to walk into the KQEN sound booth, most people would expect him to begin showing some tension. The spotlight is on you Rick Dancer, secretary of state candidate. You’re a man with a reputation for telling a good story.  What have you got to say that is of any interest to listeners in Douglas County?

“Just a minute,” the radio announcer cautions and then heads back to check things in the studio.

Dancer looks ready to go. Suddenly, the announcer breaks the flow and the tension that Rick Dancer doesn’t seem to be feeling.

“Sorry, we’ve got breaking news,” the radio announcer says. “You’ll have to wait.”

“Oh, that’s O.K.”, Dancer replies. “I know about breaking news.”

Creating a monster — in the best sense of the word

Looking at him today, it’s hard to believe the story that Rick Dancer has to tell about his younger years. The man who can  talk in emotive detail at a figurative 50 mph – and then stop to soak in everything you are saying the next minute – was very, very shy.

That hadn’t changed after he left high school in Hillsboro and moved on to college at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. The shy, young man earned a bachelor’s degree in communications while working his way through school as an employee of Copeland Lumber. That’s where he learned, “the secret.”

His boss, Harold, noticed the trouble he was having with customers and told him like it is.

“He said, ‘Rick. When people come into the lumber yard, they want a 2-by-4, some nails and some B.S.,” Dancer narrates. “You’re not giving them enough B.S.”

Eight years later, when Dancer was heading off to his first news assignment at a Coquille radio station, something had changed forever.

“Harold looked at me, he smiled, and then he said, ‘I think we created a monster,’” Dancer says with a smile of his own. “He knew I didn’t B.S. people, but he understood that I got it. I understood it was all about relationship, relationship, relationship.”

At the lumber yard, Dancer said he learned how important it was to really get to know people as you were loading cement, fence posts and dimension lumber.

“You had twenty minutes with each person where you had a conversation with them,” he said. “You knew who they were and what they did. It was great. Harold showed me how to not be afraid of people, how to disarm them and find out what they really mean.”

By letting people laugh with him and at him, he freed them to tell their story at the same time that he freed himself to learn about them very quickly.

“At the time, who would ever think I’d go into TV,” he adds thoughtfully. “I was such a quiet kid, but I had a story to tell and I wanted to tell it.”

Family milestones

Rick and Kathy Dancer have been married for 25 years and Rick describes each rung up the ladder of success in direct connection to family milestones like the birth of a son, the family 4-H goats, a pig they raised or a barn dance. Five-year reunions, celebrated by Dancer’s extended family on a century-farm in Haines, Ore., keep the large clan on his mother’s side connected to their rural Oregon roots. Betty Dancer, Rick’s mother, has farming-ranching credentials and has passed a big part of those values on to her son, Rick says.

Now that he is in the middle of a political campaign  his wife does not stand behind him, but beside him. It seems like one of his more effective campaign trail clichés, but he insists it’s true. Kathy keeps him grounded and tells him when he is losing track of who he really is.

The couple moved to the Oregon Coast in 1985 where Rick began his broadcasting career inside the bomb-shelter studio of KSHR, a low-budget radio station in Coquille.

“I did that for about six months. I was the news director. I did all their news,” Rick said. “Those were 14-hour days. I’d go home pulling my hair out at night and saying, “Oh my gosh, I can’t do this anymore.”

Soon after, there was a donut-shop interview with KCBY TV in Coos Bay and and a quonset hut studio where he worked until 1987. It was his big break into television.

“It was the best day of my life,” Dancer said. “I couldn’t stop thinking, we did it!”

That success was followed by a move to Eugene’s KVAL TV — a sister station to KCBY — only five days after his first son, Jake, was born.

Jake, 20, works at Best Buy. Another son, Jess, is now 18 and graduating from high school.

“Everything fits in a timeline with my boys.  I went to KEZI in August, 1989 – because Jesse was born in January of 1990,” Dancer said. “I just wanted a job and wanted to work at KEZI as a reporter. I did that six months, until their anchor job came open. I did that for what seems like the rest of my life.”

And now for something completely different

January 2008 came and Rick Dancer’s father, Roy Dancer, died. Before his death, his father – a lifelong democrat, Oregon Education Association contract negotiator and campaign activist – was supportive and expressed regret he couldn’t be there for the campaign.

Rick likes to say, being a republican is in his genes. His twin sister is a republican, too, but something must have skipped a generation. Rick Dancer admits that he and his father didn’t always see eye-to-eye on things.

“My dad ran everybody’s campaigns in Beaverton,” Dancer said. “He’d have been a big help, but I think this is one of those things I had to do on my own.  It has to be done the way I have to do it.”

When challenged about his political experience in the political machine, Dancer has an answer. He points out that, despite her political experience, his opponent, Kate Brown, has never served as a secretary of state. He points out that an examination of history will show there have been communications majors and journalists who have served in this office. He has the credentials. He has the skills. There is no one with a home court, incumbent’s advantage.

“I didn’t know the mechanics of how news and television journalism operated either,” he said. “Everybody has to go through this process once. My opponent is an experienced politician, but she has no more experience in the job than I do.”

When people ask Rick Dancer if he’s a conservative or moderate republican, its the only time he seems partly at a loss for words. He doesn’t see the point in labels. He only sees the point in the relationships that are needed to make government work for citizens.

“What I’m really into is people. Whatever helps people. If that means being moderate so I can hear what they are saying and what they are doing, I want to be sure I’m serving them,” Dancer said. “I think we label people too much. I’m a republican. I’m a former newscaster and I want to be your secretary of state.”