The Compelling Edge

On perhaps one of the cleanest and most well-organized desks I’ve ever seen sits a pile of visitor comment cards.

“It’s good to keep up on what people think of the museum,” she said, straightening the stack. “It keeps us sharp.”

She fidgets a little. She’s normally not on this side of an interview.

“It’s weird for me to be on this end. My role has always been as an observer. I don’t like being on the other end,” she said with a laugh. “I tell other people’s stories.”

It’s been just four months since Sandy Cummings has been the Director of Communications for the High Desert Museum, and though she’s new to the job, she’s not new to the museum or Central Oregon.

“I’ve been living in Bend for eight years,” said Cummings. “My husband retired, and we decided to move here.

“We were living in California, and thinking about retiring in a few years, but could not imagine retiring and staying in L.A. We were driving through Oregon and loved it. We came back to Bend when the weather was bad and cold and still loved it.”

Cummings loves snowshoeing in the winter and hiking in the summer.

“I’m also a really bad cross-country skier,” she said, “and I keep telling myself it’s about time to buy a kayak.”

But even as a longtime Bendite, much of Cummings work was on the road.

Before her transition to the museum, Cummings was a Senior West Coast Producer with NBC News, working for the news agency for 23 years, the lion’s share with “Dateline NBC.” An Emmy Award-winning producer, Cummings was responsible, end-to-end, for her “Dateline NBC” assignments, from coming up with ideas, to conducting interviews, to writing and editing as well as overseeing the program’s coverage of the West.

“Everything, from start to finish, you’re trying to figure out what the story is, how to make it compelling, is it compelling, and how to make it understandable,” she said.

Much of her year was spent away from home and her husband Bruce, a retired senior producer of “NBC Nightly News.”

“We joked that I was always in a place that started with A: Alaska, Australia … but I’d be up somewhere to do a story and find another, and it got harder and harder to be far from home. It wasn’t so much the frequency with which I was gone, but the duration. I never knew how long I was going to be away.”

In her work for NBC, Cummings was present in operating rooms during awake brain surgery and the separation of conjoined twins. She traipsed around Australia with Steve Irwin. She was present for the O.J. Simpson verdict and was there during both Michael Jackson’s 1993 child sexual abuse trial and the 2007 announcement of his death. And then there was Sept. 11, 2001 and its aftermath.

“It’s all about storytelling,” continued Cummings, which is the message she brings to the museum. “I’ve been coming [to the museum] since before we moved to Bend. It’s such an incredible place. This museum could be found in any major city. The work done here is great, and seeing these,” she said, indicating the stack of comment cards on her desk, “I get to see the impact of what this place does. That’s the story of this place, and it makes me want to keep the museum about the people, about sharing its story with visitors.”

So in June, Cummings became a part of the museum’s team.

“I’ve always been a fan of the museum, and it’s been refreshing to do something different and in some ways be in town more,” she said.

She’s spent a lot of her life sharing the stories of people across the country and now, in many ways, advocates for the history of Central Oregon by telling its own special story.

“The High Desert Museum’s mission is to tell compelling stories about our region,” said Dana Whitelaw, the museum’s president. “Sandy’s storytelling background is a perfect fit from creating a new tagline to video that captures the spirit of learning that is created every day at the museum.”

Cummings’ national experience makes her a truly local asset and has primed her to bring a focused professionalism and fresh creativity to everything from TV commercials to print media to visitor orientation.

“Her skill set is exactly what the Director of Communications requires,” continued Whitelaw, “and she was ready to jump in with both feet.”

But even with her new local focus, she also does work for TV Storyteller, her production company that has produced feature documentaries such as “Lost and Found,” a story about how two retired teachers from Bend changed the lives of displaced African orphans with the help of a group of prison inmates in eastern Oregon.

“As a teenager, I thought I wanted to be a travel agent or an archaeologist,” said Cummings, “but I really fell in love with [storytelling] in high school when an English teacher invited me to join the school newspaper.”

NBC News correspondent Keith Morrison called Cummings “one of the most accomplished storytellers on TV,” and when the former president of NBC News retired — the famed Neil Shapiro — he gave everyone on his team handwritten cards as his farewell.

Cummings’ read: “It’s great to see a nice person succeed.”

In a world where so many people feel the need to push and climb their way to the top, Cummings has reached her own definitions of success by being true to who she is.

“NBC was completely competitive, but I didn’t think I ever needed to be pushy to open doors,” she said. “The goal was always people, real people. The goal is to inform people and to share their stories, going into that with an open mind.”

And yes, while her resume includes a plethora of the who’s who of cultural zeitgeist, it’s the quieter everyday moments that more readily come to mind when she talks about her career — catfishing in Georgia with Stone Phillips, sitting in Carly Simon’s Martha’s Vineyard home, finding coffee at 1 a.m. for an exhausted Mike Myers during an interview.

“I think stories will always reveal themselves if you start doing the hard work of telling them,” she said.

And Cummings’ story is continually revealing itself. She keeps showing more and more compelling layers: kind observation, hard work, and a passion for people. She’s helped grant wishes for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, volunteers with Saving Grace, a local Bend organization that serves domestic violence victims, and assists the homeless through The Shepherd’s House. She also serves on the community advisory committee for the St. Charles Cancer Center.

These traits have always been a part of who she is, and as she continues to go the extra mile for the museum, it’s the visitors and residents of Central Oregon who get to experience her story.