I’ve got another “booth announcer” story. If you know me you’ll get the punch line. I’ll try to keep it short for the rest of you.
Forty years ago next month, while still attending Michigan State, I went to work part-time for WOOD AM-FM-TV in Grand Rapids as a weekend news writer/producer. When I graduated in June of ’69 I went to work there full-time. It was an incredible stroke of good luck.
News Director Dick Cheverton (I’ve written about him here before, in “Man and Mentor” on April 12th of last year) had built a pioneering broadcast news operation at Channel 8. So good, so dominant, that in 1968 he started Michigan’s first (and for many years only) hour-long television newscast. I’ve also written here before that I produced America’s highest-rated news broadcasts while working for “Chev.” Heady times.
We were justifiably proud of our status, and it showed in our news open—read every night, live, by the booth announcer: “Compiled by the largest television news staff in Western Michigan, this is TV-8 News.”
But in 1974 it was time to move on. I accepted a job producing the 6:00 and 11:00 p.m. newscasts for WWJ-TV in Detroit. And on my final night, booth announcer Ed Kemp somberly intoned: “Compiled by the largest television newsman in Western Michigan…”
When I got to WABC in 1980, I was surprised that in this almost-brand-new, state-of-the-art building (7 Lincoln Square, on Columbus Avenue) they (we) still had live booth announcers. Surprising for those days.
When TV began, it seemed everything was always going wrong. Every station had someone sitting in a little audio booth for whatever emergency might arise: “We are experiencing technical difficulties: PLEASE STAND BY.” And, of course, commercials needed to be read, live. Programs needed to be opened and closed. At the top of each hour each station was required by the FCC to give a verbal "station identification." So every station had a staff of booth announcers rotating the chore so that the booth could be manned during station hours (back then usually 7:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m.). If you were a radio/TV combo, it was fairly easy: each DJ usually tacked a two or three hour booth shift ointo the end of his workday (and I said "his" because in those days no one trusted a "mere woman" to be THE VOICE for a TV station!).
But after awhile there were fewer technical glitches, fewer emergencies to cover, and it turned out to be easier to pre-record the announcer copy. You dubbed all your audio, including a variety of PLEASE STAND BY recordings, onto audio cartridges. Every master control room had stacks and stacks of prerecorded messages and commercials on audio carts.
Today it’s all digitized. Every station in America still employs a booth announcer—but sometimes he or she isn’t in the building, or even in the same state! The booth announcer does minutes of work a day or week for each station, reading emailed copy into a computer and sending back digital audio files. No muss, no fuss. That’s why the same BIG VOICES can be heard on TV stations all over the country and all around the globe.
Back in 1980, it wasn’t unheard of—but it was unusual—to see, to hear a live booth announcer in the #1 TV station in the #1 market in America.
When I got “the tour” and saw the booth announcer sitting in his little cubicle. Later, as the tour was ending, I mentioned to my guide that it was surprising to see a live booth announcer. “Oh,” he replied, “that’s Fred Foy.” It took a few seconds for the information to sink in. That’s FRED FOY!!!!!!
THE FRED FOY!!!!!!!
"Afiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty 'Hi-yo, Silver, away!' The Lone Ranger!”
THATFRED FOY!!!!!Doing booth work at WABC.
And then it all made sense. The Lone Ranger radio serial got its start in 1933 at the legendary radio station WXYZ in Detroit, and was fed all across America on the ABC radio network. In 1948 a young Fred Foy, not long back from WWII, became the announcer and a stand-by actor on the program. But it was his voice that announced the TV series when it on ABC in the 50s. So it was his voice that introduced the Masked Man and his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, to America’s baby boomers: that is, to me.
Fred Foy had also done voice work while at WXYZ for The Green Hornet and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Later he served as the studio announcer for Dick Cavett’s late-night talk show.
Are you old enough to remember?
Here’s a link to Fred Foy recreating the Lone Ranger intro for NPR a couple of years ago: William Tell Overture and all. Foy is in his late eighties now—but you can still hear a strong trace of the “pipes” that he’s been using to tell us about those thrilling days of yesteryear for 60 years!
I’m pacing. Back and forth, back and forth, out to the mailbox and back, out to the mailbox and back. I’m waiting for Amazon.com to deliver my copy of Eyewitness Newsman, the new book by Al Primo. It’s the story of his life and times, and of the birth of TV news as we know it today.
I’ve written here before about Al Primo, the man who invented (Created? Founded? Shaped? Fashioned? Formed? Molded? Planned? Instituted?) Eyewitness News. I know I’ve credited him with being the genius behind the kind of story-telling that’s being used in every TV station and cable news operation in the country and on every web site that uses moving pictures and words to tell stories.
Forget the EWN title for a second: it was Al Primo who first said, Let’s stop trying to write newspaper stories and hope we have some pictures that might fit. Let’s use the unique tools available to us to take our viewers by the hand and transport them to the scenes of stories. Let’s work on their behalf, so that through us they can be “eyewitnesses” to the day’s stories. Long before Fox said “We Report, You Decide” Al Primo was determined to give viewers more than just a recitation of the facts, he wanted them to feel the story—or rather, to come away from the TV set with the same feeling they’d have had if they had been at the event themselves.
Al Primo thought that watching TV news should be an experience. It could move you—and anger you—and tickle you—and inform you—and make you indignant, all in the space of a half-hour. And it should be delivered by a recognizable cast of “real people” characters, not by deep-voiced announcers floating above it all.
When he started Eyewitness, first at KYW in Philadelphia, then at WABC in New York, he was mocked as the creator of “Happy Talk” television. Yet today every compelling story you see on TV, from the highest network perch to the lowliest small-market one-man band operation, uses the tools he thought up.
I guess you could say I’m his disciple. Or is that “apostle”, I can never keep the two straight. Doesn’t one word represent the original twelve, while the other refers to followers and teachers? Dunno. Put me down as an acolyte—once removed.
That’s because although I walk, talk, sleep, eat and breathe Eyewitness, and although I worked at WABC, I’ve yet to meet the man.
Although he's been incredibly busy with his syndidcated news program Teen Kids News—go to http://www.teenkids.news.com/--he has been kind enough to answer some of my emails to clarify a point or two about the early days of EWN for my blog.
In response to some of my questions, some months ago Al was kind enough to forward me a draft of some early chapters. I look at this as “before the beginning," because this goes back before KYW and WABC—back to the start of his career.
In the first chapters (again, an early draft) we read how a fresh-faced Pittsburgh kid, a C+ student, accidentally got into TV 55 years ago, told by his high school guidance counselor (and metal shop teacher) Mr. Berry to forget about college and get a job: "Help out your family and don't take the place of someone who should really go to college."
So he started looking for a job—any job—and wound up, literally by accident, working in the mailroom at Dumont Television’s WDTV. Who knew that WDTV would later become KDKA, Pittsburgh’s juggernaut TV station, and that Al would help invent TV news for Pittsburgh? Or that he would do it alongside another soon-to-be-legendary television personality, Bill Burns.
But I’ll let Al take it from there. He’s a much better story-teller than I am. Remember, this is an early draft—but if this doesn’t send you to the bookstore or Amazon.com, I can’t help you.
This is long for a blog post, but it’s fascinating.
The news department consisted of just three people, News Director/Anchor Burns, News Editor George Thomas and Cameraman Chuck Boyle.I had by now grown comfortable with the thrill and excitement of television and decided to enter the University of Pittsburgh.I had set my sights on journalism and knew in my heart I would commit the rest of my life to it.
I learned the way most reporters do, by making mistakes. Once assigned to get the facts on a bank robbery, I proudly presented Burns with a story that detailed the incident, the suspects, the getaway car, and the ensuing manhunt. The anchor got to the end of the copy, furrowed his brow and gave me a puzzled look. "So, Al… how much did they get?" I sheepishly headed back to the telephone to find out how much money the bank robbers had taken. The errors were silly, rookie mishaps; but once I learned the lessons I never repeated the mistakes.
In the days that followed, I got to go on my first news story, and it was a big one. I had just arrived from my day of classes at Pitt and was casually crossing the lobby when Burns and cameraman Chuck Boyle rushed out. "Come on, kid, we've got a news story, and we need you," Burns said. I was thrilled, but only until we got to a waiting helicopter. There had been a coalmine disaster in Steubenville, Ohio, and this was the quickest way to get there.
I had never been in an airplane before and had never even seen a helicopter.This particular model had a plastic cockpit that allowed you to see the full vista of earth beneath you and watch it grow small and flit in and out of the clouds in front of your very own eyes. The excitement I'd felt about my first story had been rudely shoved to the back burner by heart-pounding fear. My pulse seemed to be keeping pace with the beating rotors of the chopper.
We landed on top of a mountain above the coal mine.Chuck and I dragged the huge camera box down the hill while Burns slowly maneuvered down the mountain with his bad leg.
It was a devastating scene at the coalmine pit.It looked exactly like every old movie about mine disasters and also brought my mother's stories to life.Only this story was staring me in the face.
Because I was there to see it.
I was an eyewitness.
The families gathered just inside the gates. A specific number of men were trapped in the mine, but at that moment I realized there was a life behind every number. The numbers all had names; they were sons and fathers and brothers and best friends who each had a life that touched the people holding vigil. The mothers and wives and children stood silently with quivering lips and the look of despair on their faces.There were priests in attendance and a numbing quiet broken only by the whirl of the fans and elevators. I realized television news gave me the opportunity to weave a tapestry of emotion through the facts by showing and telling the viewer what people felt, not just what I saw.
The press corps, mostly newspaper reporters, were kept behind police lines.One enterprising reporter from the Associated Press, who had obviously covered these kinds of stories before, had ordered up a telephone line from Bell Telephone.He was in constant communication with his office.Something told me that I should be very nice to this guy. I was and it turned out to be very beneficial.
After many, many hours there was a break in the story. Burns and cameraman Boyle had been recording interviews with family members and were in the right place at the right time. They had managed to get close enough to the mineshaft to hear first that rescue workers had reached the trapped miners and they were coming up.Burns was running up the hill toward me, signaling the AP man to come down.I, of course, volunteered to hold his telephone since he obviously had to go down the hill to get the story. As soon as he was out of sight I hung up and called the scoop into KDKA just minutes before the 11 o’clock news.Burns then recorded an on the scene radio report. I went down to "help" the AP man as I saw him heading up the mountain, actually falling on top of him to give Burns a few more minutes to finish his feed.
The miners had all been found, and emerged safely one by one. The dam of emotion burst as the families rushed forward to meet them. As the photographer captured the moment, I realized that film and sound could convey what words couldn't. The footage of a sobbing woman burying her head in the chest of her coal dust covered husband, hanging on for dear life as a tears rolled down her face was an image that burned into my brain. The viewers didn't need to hear a reporter for this part of the story. Words could add nothing more.
That very night I saw the future of the medium and I wanted to be a part of that future. Television news could take the marriage of pictures, sound, copy and reporter involvement and bring story coverage to a new level.
Because television could make the viewer an eyewitness as well.
That night I also learned another valuable lesson. When I had called the station on the AP phone line to pass on the news of the rescue, the producer apparently didn't want to re-write the entire newscast. He simply broadcast the first ten minutes as originally scripted, telling western Pennsylvania that the miners were still trapped when they weren't. He finally went to Bill Burns' taped report at ten minutes past the hour.
The producer was fired. He'd broadcast a story that wasn't true. And in my mind, he'd committed a horrible affront to the people who were hanging on every word for news from the mine. He'd let those people believe their loved ones were trapped or dead when in fact they'd been safe for nearly a half hour. Letting viewers endure the sheer agony of thinking their loved ones were dead for ten gut-wrenching minutes was an unconscionable sin.
What a remarkable story. What a remarkable man. And that's just "before the beginning." I can hardly wait to get my hands on the book, to read about Eyewitness, and about Beutel and Grimsby and Geraldo Rivera and Milton Lewis and John Johnson and all the rest.
Bless you, Al Primo. Thanks for the excerpt. Thanks for Eyewitness. Thanks for my career. Thanks for everything.
September 11, 2001. Was that seven years ago, or a million?
Who were we on that perfect September morning? As I write this, where I write this, it's another perfect, cloudless, crisp September morning. Who are we today?
So it really was a million years ago, and a million indelible images ago.
Here's one. Maybe the most famous picture taken that day, certainly the most controversial, taken by AP photographer Richard Drew. It came to be known as "The Falling Man."
The picture produced a firestorm of protest when it was printed. It was just too real, too human, too intrusive for many. The picture and the controversy produced a remarkable piece of journalism in Esquire magazine, written by Tom Junod. One "trick" of journalism is to find one story, one moment, one person and use it to represent many. Junod went in search of the identity of "The Falling Man." He came to the conclusion that the man in the picture was most likely Jonathan Briley.
And the article, in turn, produced this remarkable documentary:
I'm rarely at a loss for words. On this September 11th, I have none that compare with the final words of Tom Junod's article.
Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn't jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn't jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.
Oh, no. You have to fall.
Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky -- falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame -- the Falling Man -- became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
