[BC] A question for Rich Wood

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

My two-cents,
When I was the chief engineer and janitor at WATR-TV in Waterbury,
we tried to operate the station like it was real. However, all of the
network and all of the film and commercials were transmitted from
the transmitter site where we had somebody on-duty full-time.

However, we had a local newscast presented by a damn good
newsman whose family lived on Long Island and he used to
be employed in New York Radio. This was his "entry" into
television. Again, he was one of the best newsmen I ever
had the privilege of working with --and I don't even remember
his name.

One day, the STL failed. It was a Raytheon rig that used a
reflex klystron for the transmitter and the same tube as a
local oscillator in the receiver. It chose the time to fail about
10 minutes before air-time. I was at the studio running the
only camera and I dropped everything when the transmitter
guy announced that the link was down. I grabbed a ladder
to get up to the roof. The newsman said, "Do you have
another camera at the transmitter?" I said we have a small
one for our film chain plus a spare. He said, "Okay. Let's
go..." and he called his contact at the police department
to get a high-speed escort to the transmitter. In the meantime
I had the on-duty engineer fire up the spare vidicon at the
transmitter site.

He did the local newscast sitting in front of the building,
claiming, that he was celebrating a beautiful Autumn day,
because the inside of the transmitter building was way
too noisy. He got many accolades from local sponsors
who thought it was a great idea to have a newscast
from out of doors! That was TRUE talent.

--
Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Read about my book
http://www.LymanSchool.org


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Gary Peterson" <kzerocx at rap.midco.net>
> This reminded me of something that used to really annoy me. 

 [Snipped...]