Clessie Cummins was driven to innovation — and a new PBS documentary coming in late August will show plenty of that.
Brent Molnar, station operations and content director for Bloomington-based WTIU-TV, delivered that message at the close of last week’s annual meeting of the Columbus Area Visitors Center at the agency’s building on Fifth Street downtown.
The station leader showed the promotional trailer for the program, “Clessie Cummins: Hoosier Inventor,” to air on WTIU and other Indiana PBS channels. The documentary still is being pieced together, Molnar said.
“He is one of Indiana’s brilliant innovators,” Molnar said.
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In fact, his gift for innovation led him to be the first person to put a diesel engine in a car in 1929 and drove it to an auto show in New York City amid great publicity, fanfare and also criticism that he was mostly a showman.
The documentary focuses chiefly on Cummins’ early life, skipping much of his well-documented road with launching what is now Columbus-based Cummins Inc. in 1919 with backing from W.G. Irwin.
Among those interviewed is Mark Watson, a retired Ball State University historian.
“He (Cummins) understood an environment intuitively not unlike the way Michael Jordan once understood the basketball court intuitively,” Watson says in part of the work as he details Cummins’ boyhood in his tiny hometown of Sulphur Springs, southeast of Anderson.
Watson theorizes the fact that Cummins lived in 12 different places in short order could have influenced what the historian called a “let’s try something different” approach to much of what he faced.
A couple of brief, quick cuts of old video footage in the trailer show him as a smiling, high-energy person. He is said to have built his own steam engine at age 11.
WTIU also has produced other shows about Columbus. They include the architecture-oriented “Columbus Indiana: Different By Design” in 2002, for which it earned a regional Emmy nomination, and the small-town-to-multicultural-mecca presentation of “Our Town: Columbus” in 2012.
Producer Andie Redwine of By the Glass Productions proposed the Cummins documentary about six months ago, Molnar said.
“Independent producers tend to bring a fresh voice,” Molnar said. “And when you can get a fresh voice and a fresh set of eyes on something, it can change the way you tell stories.”
