Stories of America — Season 1, Episode 19: Gretchen Goes West
Kids • 15 min • 1 season, 32 episodes
Episode synopsis
This episode follows Gretchen, a young girl who joins her family on their journey into the American West. Through simple narration and reenactments, children see the challenges and discoveries that come with traveling across unfamiliar land—long days on the trail, new landscapes, and the teamwork needed to keep a wagon moving. The program highlights Gretchen’s curiosity and courage as she adapts to frontier life, offering young viewers a relatable look at what westward expansion felt like for children.
About Stories of America
The interconnectedness of all things is a fundamental part of reading motivation projects. Although GPN's Reading Rainbow claims to have invented that idea, Stories of America with host Ann McGregor got there first. It was 1976, America's bicentennial year, and WVIZ-TV of Cleveland wanted something more out of a series aimed at delivering American history, They decided to combine history with reading. The result was Stories of America. Hosting was the familiar face of Ann McGregor, who had enlivened Picture Book Park and Tilson's Bookshop some two years earlier. Stories of America resembled more of a story reading than a history lesson, but it also introduced other elements that became standard Reading Rainbow procedure. There were occasional film sequences, dramatizations, and even an animation. All told, the 32-part Stories of America series ran some 14 years on WVIZ-TV. The station brought the shows back in 1998, and it would be the only WVIZ instructional telev