Roker delivering gifts to Utah kids today

Almost four months have passed since Christmas, but a jolly man was scheduled to descend on Utah this morning bearing gifts.

"Today Show" weatherman Al Roker made Utah one of the stops on his weeklong Lend-a-Hand Tour. He will appear live on the NBC morning show from Snowbird, where he'll dispense a truckload of gifts to the Wasatch Adaptive Sports program.

"Without being too cliche, it's kind of like being Santa or somebody's benevolent uncle who shows up bearing gifts," Roker told the Deseret Morning News. "In this case, these are really deserving kids that are getting this great stuff."

WAS provides affordable recreational and educational programs to children and adults with special needs. The charitable foundation provides such activities as skiing, snowshoeing, hockey, hiking, fishing, orienteering, bicycling, horseback riding and bowling.

Roker was to present the organization with a truckload of equipment on this morning's edition of "Today" (7-10 a.m., Ch. 5). "When you see these kids, it really makes you grateful for what you have."

Which makes this week's schedule worth all the travel — "five cities, five days, five charities": San Diego on Monday; Salt Lake City today; Fargo, N.D., on Wednesday; Nashville, Tenn., on Thursday; Wilmington, Del., on Friday.

"We do put some frequent-flier miles on," Roker said by phone on his way to the San Diego airport to fly to Salt Lake City. "The last time I had to travel was that Enterprise, Ala., tornado. That's pretty grim. And then you look at what happened in Virginia this morning, and that's just horrific.

"This is very life-affirming. It's very positive. You'd take a month of these, easy, over one day of doing the other."

It's pretty much all business on a trip like this. "You fly in, you check in to the hotel," Roker said. "The producers ... make sure everything is technically fine, we have dinner, we go to bed early — especially if it's in a different time zone. We get up, do the live shot and then head to the airport. So you rarely get to see anything of the town you're in."

He's certainly not complaining, however. "It's not like we're sleeping in tents and driven around in the back of a pickup. We're comfortable enough, and we eat well, and everybody we're with, we really enjoy each other," Roker said. "My dad drove a bus for eight hours a day in New York. That was work."

This is Roker's first visit to Utah since he was here for NBC's coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics. "My middle girl, Leila ... still has the (Olympic) mascots on her bed. And she was just talking a month ago, 'Can we go back to Salt Lake?' We had a great time while we were there."

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com