Huell Howser Says Howdy to California

California, here he comes!

Actually, Huell Howser has been in Los Angeles for more than a decade, the last six years chronicling the city’s life in his uniquely charming and populistic “Videolog” segments on KCET. Tennessean Howser is one of those rare countrified boys who gives corn a good name, and his low-key folksy pieces inevitably teach Angelenos surprising things about their urban sprawl by finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

But now Howser is a traveling man.

Supported by a $500,000 grant from Wells Fargo Bank, he is transporting his video archeology statewide, excavating the hidden treasures of California culture with the same passion he has heretofore directed at Los Angeles.

His monthly “California’s Gold” premieres Sunday on the state’s 13 PBS stations (7:30 p.m. on KCET and KLCS, 4:30 p.m. on KOCE, 7 p.m. on KTBS and 10 p.m. on KVCR). And like “Videolog,” it’s a grand ole opry in La La Land.

As Howser likes to say, “Here’s the deal.” He’s been California dreaming:

“This is gonna be my ticket. I want to do this for at least the next 10 years, and by the end of the ‘90s have 120 programs that tell the story of what California was like in the last decade of the 20th Century as a people, as a state, as a society.”

You’d think that local stations--with enormous news blocs to fill each evening--would have the same dream. But instead they dream only in minibites, continuing to define the city and state through a narrow lens while leaving the vision and passion to others.

Howser will continue to do “Videolog” for KCET while exploring California for this new series for his own production company. And if ever a guy loved his job--acting like an enthralled kid locked inside a toy store--this is the guy.

“We’re just hitting the road and discovering what’s out there,” he said about himself and cameraman Luis Fuerte, wondrously, as if they were Captain Kirk and Spock about to explore the vastness of uncharted space.

Howser is exuberant, animated, impassioned, unstoppable: “California is a country, a microcosm of the United States. It’s full of diversity and ethnicity, but the size of the state keeps us from knowing each other.”

It’s Howser’s belief that everyone--everyone!--should get to know one another.

On Sunday’s program, he gets to know the citizens of Locke, a rural speck in the Sacramento River delta that he says is the nation’s only town founded and settled by Chinese. You’d figure that a grinnin’ and Southern-talkin’ guy like Howser would be a trespassing UFO with green skin and glowing red eyes in Al’s Place, the town’s unimposing diner and local hangout. But no--the regulars like him, and it goes without saying that he likes them.

Howser asks a resident artist about living in Locke. “Well, it’s slow and it’s busy,” he’s told. “It’s anything you like.”

This is uncharted space, exceptionally swell stuff that’s awesomely simple and honest.

Next stop: Banning in Riverside County, where members of the Cahuilla tribe sing the songs and dance the dances of their ancestors. And the half-hour concludes with Howser in San Diego County for the Vista threshing bee and antique engine show.

In Vista, the machines are whirring Howser’s song.

He asks: “What are you doin’ over there?”

The reply: “Shellin’ corn.”

On next month’s show, Howser is in San Luis Obispo, at the site of what he says was the nation’s first motel. There’s also a segment recalling a group of artists, poets and writers--labeled Dunites--who lived in the dunes at Pismo Beach during the Great Depression.

“I found the last living member of the colony,” Howser said. “He’s an 85-year-old man in flowing white hair, a headband and a tie-dyed T-shirt.”

It would be easy to dismiss Howser as just another junior Charles Kuralt. Whereas Kuralt’s forte is the eloquent, richly crafted narration that gets you teary, however, Howser’s is the one-on-one chat. The chemistry is just great. In an era when local TV reporters seem shielded by a transparent plexiglass screen from the people and communities they report on, Howser is refreshingly intimate in the way he connects with his subjects. His affection for them--and for people in general--brightens the screen.

Closer to Mr. Rogers than Mr. Rather, he is the antithesis of TV gloss, and given his friendliness, it’s no wonder that stories find him as often as he finds them.

“While we were in a Basque restaurant in the old Sante Fe Hotel in Fresno, sitting at the bar and having a cold beer while waiting to have lunch, we met a bunch of farmers from Camden,” he said. “They told me I should come to their town, which has two buildings, one of which is a local restaurant where there has been a continuous pinochle game for 56 years. They’re now on the third generation of players, and these four guys meet every afternoon for four hours.”

Farmers in Camden? Deal him in. Howser is just that cornball.

“But if my corny ‘Videolog’ pieces could succeed in Los Angeles,” he thought to himself last year, “there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t succeed in other markets.”

He took his idea for “California’s Gold” to a friend at Wells Fargo Bank, who arranged a meeting with bank officials in San Francisco, and just like that, Howser had a done deal without even putting a printed proposal on the table: The bank would finance 12 months of “California’s Gold” provided Howser could sign up the state’s 13 public TV stations.

“So I took a week off, got in my car and drove to all 13 stations,” Howser said.

“California’s Gold” will be as diverse as the state, Howser vows. “It has to be urban, too. It has to be Little Saigon in Santa Ana. It has to be Watts. And it can’t just be a nostalgic look back. It’s a clean page.”

Howser says his series will be distributed to California schools as part of instructional TV starting next fall. He also hopes to market it abroad and persuade foreign airlines to show it to their passengers traveling to California.

“We have to negate the stereotype that all we are is Disneyland and Venice Beach,” he said. “I think that we in the state have been fed the same bill of goods about who we are, that we’re a pop culture that doesn’t care about anything of substance.” Instead, as “California’s Gold” affirms, we’re slow, we’re busy, we’re anything you like.

That’s the deal.