Comment: In memory of Bob Anderson

(Comment by decorahnews.com's Paul Scott):

I once attended a wedding in Huntington, Indiana.  You probably don't know this, but Huntington is the home of the "Dan Quayle Museum."   Dan Quayle used to be Vice President of the United States.  But most people--including my nieces and nephews who attended the wedding--remember him as "The Guy Who Couldn't Spell "potato."

It's funny how fickle fate is.  Not everyone gets to be famous--and not everyone who gets famous controls how they get famous.

Which brings me to Bob Anderson, whose vision created the Decorah bald eagle webcam way back in 2007.   By today's standards, the hook-up in those days was fairly primitive.  Almost any time decorahnews.com would post a news story about the eaglecam, their website would crash because the number of visitors exceeded the limited capacity of the website to handle them.  But Bob was patient with us and with the early limitations of the webcam.

Four years later, everything changed.  When UStream took over the hosting, the Decorah Eagles became the most viewed live-stream of all time.  There were 250 million views of the webcam that year.  Since then there have been a few challenges.  The eagles moved to a different nest in the 2013 season, so there was no webcam feed.  New cameras were installed in the new nest for the 2014 season, but problems this year resulted in the webcam being shut down again.

But here's why Bob Anderson will remain one of my favorite people: He was the same in 2011 as he was in 2007 and the same he was in 2015.  Bob didn't care personally about being famous for his work with the bald eagles--in fact, he probably would have preferred to have been known for his work with peregrine falcons.  Instead, he worked on his passion in life--protecting all kinds of raptors and educating the public about the challenges they faced.

This passion brought fame to him late in his life.  But he was able to handle that fame and keep a calm head.  That's a pretty good legacy for a man who also could correctly spell "potato."