How can you not, though? With their colorful matching prairie dresses and elaborately piled hair, the females in the group look exactly like the residents of Hildale and Colorado City that we’ve all seen in the news.

But it’s an interesting thing that despite how much they stand out, these folks seem to have blended comfortably into the local populace, and they are often out and about shopping, visiting parks and the like.

I never see anyone gawking at them, and I try not to do it myself, but I have noticed there is never a man in the group — only girls, usually accompanied by an adult woman. And since I am not gawking, I can’t say if it’s the same adult woman every time or even if it’s the same family every time. Maybe there are several such groups in the valley.

The journalist in me wants to do an article about this, but I honestly can’t summon the courage to approach any of them or visit the house in my neighborhood to request an interview. Or is it that I don’t want to be rude? Whatever the cause of this hesitancy, it’s also been the case with other Herald Journal staff members.

“Sure, I’ll interview them,” said one fresh reporting recruit I pitched the story idea to a couple of years ago. “Give me their name and phone number and I’ll give them a call.”

“Well, I don’t have their name and number, and that’s the challenge,” I responded. “You’re going to have to go knock on their door and ask if they’re open to an interview.”

That was the end of that.

Nerve is a valuable asset for a journalist. If you are shy about approaching people or reluctant to ask someone a potentially unwelcome question, you’re not going to produce much compelling news.

Impressive displays of nerve have led me on two occasions to hire reporter wannabes who had no experience or education in journalism, just a willingness to pursue “the story.” Both involved situations very much like the one I’m talking about here.

Early in my checkered newspaper career, I was the “city editor” at the Wyoming Eagle newspaper in Cheyenne. Living in town at the time was a very large Roma family, or what you might even call a clan, that I thought would be a good subject for a feature article, but neither I nor any of our reporters could bring ourselves to go knock on their door.

One day I casually mentioned this to a typesetter in the newspaper’s “backshop,” and she immediately declared, “I want to be a reporter. I’ll do it.”

She did indeed approach the family, and although they refused to talk to her, I let her try some other reporting assignments that eventually led to a spot on the news staff.

The other display of hutzpah came from a classified ad clerk at The Herald Journal some years ago who also wanted to try her hand at reporting. Illegal dog-fighting was in the news at that time, and one day I heard about a Cache Valley man who bred fighting dogs, which in itself is not illegal.

I dangled the story before our mighty reporting staff, which at that time was not only much larger than today but much more arrogant, but nobody would take it. The sales clerk, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate and wound up doing a fascinating piece about this man’s business of exporting fighting dogs to foreign countries — something not all readers approved of but were nevertheless interested to hear about.

The next time we had a reporter opening, I hired her for the spot, and after several years on the HJ staff, this uncredentialed journalist landed a job at the Salt Lake Tribune.

Why would a pitbull breeder, a Roma clan and a family of possible Mormon fundamentalists — all just minding their own business — deserve a reporter shoving a microphone in their face?

It’s all in the name of telling interesting stories, controversial or otherwise, that give readers a deeper understanding of their own community. If the subjects of these kinds of stories aren’t cooperative, reporters will shelve the idea. That is, unless a situation somehow becomes vital for the public to know about.

People have a right to privacy, but if their activities become part of the public record through court filings or official government action, those activities are reportable.

It’s opportune that this column has meandered to this particular place, because that’s exactly what happened with another story, coincidentally about polygamy, that the HJ reporting staff had neither the courage nor wherewithal to pursue.

In the late 1990s, we’d heard from a couple of sources that the infamous Kingston polygamist clan had a livestock operation just across the Wellsvilles near Washakie. I drove over there with another staff member to look around one day, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to speak with anyone, and we couldn’t figure out a way to verify the rumor or report on the clan’s presence.

Then one day a young woman showed up in the Brigham City police station saying she’d escaped from the ranch. She claimed her father had taken her there and whipped her for refusing to marry her uncle, who had 14 other wives.

The resulting criminal case opened the door for The Herald Journal and other news media to report on the Kingstons’ activities, and as many of you who follow the news know, that was not the last time Utahns would hear about the ranch and the people who operated it.

I just wish we could have done some daring and savvy journalism before all of that.