Sending Postcards From Home
11/28/2010 6:32 PM
Dr. Bob Jacobs uses a simple formula for producing his award-winning television series Postcards from Home: find people doing good things and tell their stories.
Jacobs produces the three-minute Postcards series for Peoria’s WEEK-TV that recently won two international Telly Awards. The award honors the best local, regional, and cable commercials, programs, and video and film productions. More than 13,000 entries were submitted to the international contest, which is judged by television producers and directors from across the country.
“I’m blessed with natural curiosity,” Jacobs says. “I ride my motorcycle everywhere and I just open my eyes and look around and talk to a lot of people.” During the summer, Jacobs travels around the country and produces Postcards from the Road.
One of the winning postcards, entitled “The Blue Knight,” showcased a former police officer from Belleville, who was shot in the face while on duty. The officer, an avid motorcycle rider, lost his vision and could no longer ride. But local members of the Blue Knights, a national law enforcement motorcycle club, bought their brother officer a new three-wheeled motorcycle for him to ride on while either his wife or a member of the Blue Knights drives.
The other winning segment was about a man who won a motorcycle race in Daytona in 1959 and returned to the track 50 years later to race on the same bike. Jacobs also captured a Telly in 2009 and won an Emmy in 2000 for Postcards. He has been producing the series in the Peoria area for 18 years, including the past 11 at WEEK. He began Postcards in Bangor, Maine, in 1987 for the NBC affiliate there.
Postcards airs on WEEK the second and fourth Friday of every month on the 6 p.m. news and re-airs the following Monday at noon.