Dean Peterson: Day to Day, Strange & Unusual

It was a pleasure to talk with fellow podcaster Dean Petersen. His love for history and storytelling is truly apparent. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks Dean!

About Dean:

Dean Petersen's fascination with history and stories started at an early age with his love of documentaries and making horror movies in his backyard. After completing a BA in film studies in 2004, he took his passion for storytelling back to Wyoming, where he makes documentaries and promotional videos. In 2020 he launched the podcast That Doesn't Happen Everyday in which he does his best to share interesting and unusual occurrences with his listeners. "I love being told a story, especially a true one," he says, "my whole goal with the podcast is to get people to tell their true stories, or stories that they're experts about, in a format more like an audio documentary than a talk show." Stories on his podcast range from the the unusual such as When Your Landlord Becomes and American Legend in which he interviews his own family members about renting a house from a then unknown painter named Bob Ross, to darker incidents such as the episode titled, When You Find a Dead Body in Your Yard... about a Cheyenne resident who found the grave of a little boy in her yard while putting in a sewer main. "Anybody can share their story with the show, but it has to be true, and it has to be interesting. I try very hard to get an interview with a person who actually experienced an event, because I want people to not only hear what happened, but feel what they felt, and see it happen in their heads." In some cases when first hand witnesses cannot be interviewed, especially for historical events, Petersen interviews historians and experts. This was the case for When You Skip School And Shoot A Bank Robber in which he interviewed an author who wrote about Earl Durand's 1939 rampage across north western Wyoming that ended when a teenage boy shot him in self defense in Powell. Petersen also uses a great deal of found audio from archives to tell stories such as in the episode Crash of Flight 409 Near Laramie, WY in which he pieced together old interviews of people who helped recover bodies from the crash site. "I really hope people enjoy the show and get more involved with preserving their own histories and those of their communities."

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