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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, September 6, 2010 |
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| Browsing Local Television Section | 46 Items Found | ||
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Joe Holbrook: Live Weather Broadcaster -- Circa 1952
Jeannie Hoover did a daily Kindergarten kids show early in the morning. She was paired with me when I was Smokey the Cowboy. Jean and I made personal appearances including the famous Pumpkin Festival in Circleville.
Twin Rivers Drive
In A Word, Live Television Was Exhilarating
WBNS-TV Black & White Test Pattern circa 1949
Today, texting and telephone captured video are commonplace. Even high school students have the tools and skills to edit video and upload it to YouTUBE where it can be shared with the world. What I like about these new tools is their immediacy — for the comments and ideas we share with one another via the internet are live and in real time — just like television was before the people at Ampex invented the videotape recorder in 1956.
The early 2-inch tape machines were far too expensive for local stations ( about $500,000 in 2010 dollars ). While they became the standard for network television, where they were needed to accommodate transmission in four timezones, it would be nearly another decade, before they became standard equipment at local stations. In the early 1960s local stations also began to upgrade their studio facilities from black and white to color.
For one thing, this meant that local programming continued to be broadcast live well into the 1960s. Today, about the only live television we see is ( local ) news — but even then it is highly produced and augmented with technical resources largely unheard of until the onset of digital video systems in the late 1990s.
Not For The Faint Of Heart
Joe Holbrook, Sky Cam Chopper-Columbus Convention Center, circa 1996
My friend Joe Holbrook, our station’s premiere weather presenter for nearly 40 years, was the master of live on-camera skills whether he was working the ( announce ) booth, delivering a live commercial in our studio, or, as seen in the image above, inventing live weather presentation with little more than his imagination and magnetic symbols.
What it can be said that doing live television was not for the faint of heart, it is equally true that there was immense satisfaction in doing our jobs well. For one thing, live television demanded creativity, good work habits, steady nerves and teamwork, for it took a substantial number of people, and cumbersome equipment to air any program.
Joseph Holbrook
Joe started to work at WBNS-TV shortly after it went on the air. He was our teacher, our friend, our co-worker and one of the most trusted people in town.
We all aspired to be as good as Joe — something none of us would ever achieve, for Joe Holbrook was a master craftsman respected by his co-workers and loved by viewers who sensed his connection to them and our community.
Just to air a live commercial insert required product, placement equipment ( usually a roll table ), and set-up. Being on-air talent required that we hand write our script on a six foot high cue card. In the age before TelePrompter’s, the cue card was held alongside a bulky RCA camera mounted on a massive wheeled base by the floor director. Sometimes he did the job perfectly, sometimes he forgot, or dropped the card, or we found we had written our script in too small letters. Recovery, if there was to be any, was entirely up to us — so wits and inventiveness were prerequisite to keeping one’s job.
Off-Camera Mischief
One night, during prime-time network programming, one of our best announcers, Don Riggs, arrived in the studio for a one minute live commercial. Having long tired of changing into the sponsor’s full uniform, including shoes, for a commercial in which he remained concealed behind a roll table, Don started to dress only in the shirt, tie and jacket
One night, the production crew secretly planned a surprise for Don. Everyone had to be in on the secret if it was going to work. Shortly after the commercial started, Don Riggs discovered this was not to be an ordinary spot announcement.
While he read through his script, a 3-turret camera and our boom microphone ( a mike mounted on a long arm that was supposed to remain above the picture ) moved into position. Meanwhile, in the control room beyond the window at the end of our studio the director, video switcher, audio engineer and camera chain technicians were anxiously awaiting Rigg’s reaction.
Moments later, when the local station cut-away began, the floor director cued Don to begin. No more had he uttered the first line when things started to change. As Don Riggs watched in horror, the roll table was slowly pulled away. If Don was startled it did not show on camera, but moments later, when the cameraman started to truck backwards ( the equivalent of zooming out ) Riggs knew he was about to appear on live television without pants.
He did not break up. He finished the commercial still standing in his underwear. While everyone else in the control room and studio were falling down in laughter, Riggs kept his composure.
Anyone who couldn’t deal with the pressures and risks of live television, didn’t last long. Don was one of the very best — and soon off to new adventures at KDKA-TV, in Pittsburgh.
Night Operations
Share Your Story
No one is more surprised than I am at the email and comments I’ve received about the golden age of television ( 1950-1975 ).
Or, for that matter, how much of that interest is from outside the United States. The reason is, I suppose, that our experiences at WBNS-TV were not all that different from those at nearly 200 other network affiliates in the years before videotape, color and all the things we take for granted in television programming today.
So, if you’re from that era, whether network, affiliate or independent, and you’d like to add to our historical retrospective on 20th century broadcasting and journalism, contact me, or send Newsroom Magazine Editors your story.
During prime time, our CBS programming came into the station via coax cable from the AT&T video switching center downtown. In the control room, the signal from CBS was like having another camera. Push a button and network programming was routed upstairs to our primary RCA transmitter.
During network programming we were in operations mode meaning that all we did was take the network signal and once every hour, make a formal announcement about who and where we were — called a station ID. If we were on duty for the evening shift, we had to stay nearby the control room in case of problems — which were very rare. But, once an hour, at about 59 minutes and 50 seconds past the hour, we’d be waiting in the announce booth for the director to quietly say, “Cue announce.”
Then with a sonorous voice and great drama we delivered the exact words required by the FCC: “This is WBNS-TV, Channel Ten, Columbus.”
After that, our moment of glory over, we went back out into the lobby to wait 59 minutes before doing it all over again.
Meanwhile, In The Control Room
It didn’t take long for evening operations to become boring, if not painfully boring. But, from time to time, with programs sometimes originating from New York, and sometimes from Los Angeles, or even Chicago, errors were made in the manual patching at AT&T’s switching center. Sometimes the errors were at the point of program origination while at others they were simple errors in Columbus.
Whenever network feed errors happened, all hell would break loose in the control room. “Where the hell is CBS?,” someone would shout as soon as they figured out we were transmitting ABC or NBC programs, not CBS. I don’t think WLW-C, the NBC station was any happier finding our programming going out on their channel than we were theirs.
I was never on duty when this happened, but until the age of electronic switching and satellites in the 1980s, manual network transmission control room work consisted largely of endless hours of boredom occasionally interrupted by short periods of mass confusion, technical chaos, and blue language.