The Dream Begins
When I was a kid growing up in the late 60′s and 70′s, I loved television. I watched a lot of it, needless to say. I remember watching the Ed Sullivan Show, Gunsmoke, Carol Burnett, Dean Martin Roasts, the Banana Splits, Shazam, the whole enchilada. I loved news as much as entertainment (duh, have you read my other blog?). I watched the moon shots, live news, sports, amazing sights from all over the world. I was fascinated by the magic brought to you live in your house. I had to be a part of that.
When I was about 10, my Dad got me into a school called the Pinellas Vocational Technical Institue (PVTI). He was a recruiter for the Naval Reserve and one of the guys he worked with was an instructor at PVTI. I was able to spend a few hours a day over the summer of ’73 sitting in on some classes. I got to work with all the latest equipment – in 1973.
As I got older, I had other opportunities to expand my love of TV. I played around with some Super 8 film when I was in Elementary School. A friend of mine in high school was an amateur filmmaker and I did some stuff with him. But TV was what I was fascinated by. The sheer electronic-ness of it.
In the summer before my senior year in high school, my Dad was retiring from the Navy and needed to find a job. He told me he was going to that new TV station in Clearwater, Channel 22, WCLF. It was a Christian station and they were just starting out. He thought he might be able to find something to do there. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I had just started working at a local Wendy’s and I hated it. So sure, I could go along and see what happened. Much to my surprise, I got a job and he didn’t!
I started at Channel 22 with no real experience. They started me in master control. This is the room which controls what goes on the air. At this station, the programs were the typical preaching shows and usually ran for half an hour or an hour. They were one reel and the only break you had was at the end of the program (an end break). My job was to load all the programs and end breaks then run them at the right time. Sounds simple enough right?
Well, I was 17 years old starting my first job in television and literally my first job ever (I’m not counting the two weeks at Wendy’s). I had great support and I think I caught on pretty quick. However, as I mentioned, this was a new station and the equipment we had was old even by 1980 standards. So as long as everything was working, I didn’t have many problems. That wasn’t very often.
After spending the summer working there, I was assigned the weekends so it wouldn’t interfere with my school and band responsibilities. That was great, except that on the weekends, there was no one to help me when things started to go wrong. At this time I should mention that I was not alone as the “high school student working weekends.” My friend Tim (who you know as anamericanidiot) was working there at the same time. We became fast friends. His dad was the general manager of the station and he had apparently grown up around this stuff. He knew a LOT more about it than I did. I relied on him numerous times and he always helped. That was almost thirty years ago.
So Tim and I were weekend warriors at this station. One would do mornings and the other would do nights. Sometimes we switched off according to our scheduling needs. One particular weekend, I was alone at the station while the entire station had their retreat in Sarasota, over 50 miles away! Oh sure, there were supposed to be some “on call” people, but that never materialized. So, here I am, all alone on a Saturday morning, everything seemed to be humming along. Then, one of my machines went down. I don’t remember the specific problem, but I couldn’t air my programs off of it. So I simply switched it to another machine and called the beeper of one of the “on call” engineers. No problem. The engineer never called back by the way. I can’t load my next program on the broken machine so I load it on my only other machine. About 10 minutes into that show, THAT machine goes down! So I moved that show back to the only other machine that was working. Anyway, you start to sense a pattern. I’m not in full-fledged panic mode yet, but I’m getting there. I start calling everyone I know to call. Finally I call Tim. He reminds me that everyone is in Sarasota. Thanks Tim! Call your dad, call somebody, I’m freaking out!
So then I go to the next show which is on a different format machine. Thank God! I won’t have to worry about that for a half hour. So this show is in spanish. As the show starts, there’s no open, no music, just two guys sitting in a studio talking. About what, I have no idea. About 15 minutes later, as I’m frantically trying to clean the machines (since I don’t know how to do anything else), I hear the spanish guy say, “Adios!” And then the show faded to black. . . .do you feel the panic yet? I waited for a few seconds for the show to come back up, but it went to hash (which is what you see when there’s NOTHING ON THE TAPE!!!)
So now what do I do? I sat in a slide which said,”We’re having some technical difficulties”. . .FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES! I had no other programming to go to and literally no working machines either. Guess what? The phone started ringing. It was people in Sarasota wondering what was going on. “WHAT’S GOING ON?!?!? I’VE BEEN CALLING FOR TWO HOURS!” About that time, in walks Tim with his girlfriend. He was supposed to have the day off, but he decided to come in and help me. Can you figure out why we’re still friends? Tim knew how to fix one of the machines which helped me immensely and I was able to get back on the air. Eventually, other help arrived and I was carried off to the emergency room.
There’s nothing like the total feeling of helplessness. I was standing in the middle of master control looking at my beautiful trouble slide which had been on the air for several minutes, looking back at my broken machines, and just realizing there was nothing I could do.
I was hooked on show business forever!
