April 5, 1997 – Memphis, Tennessee

My travels for my fraternity have brought me to the mid-south. This July, it wants to debut a new national rush video and I’m stepping up to help them. We’re on a weekend trip here to Memphis to shoot as many interviews and as much footage as we can of our chapters at The University of Memphis, Christian Brothers University and Rhodes College. My co-hort in all this is a Kappa Sigma brother from Carnegie-Mellon who is a newscast producer at KSNW in Wichita, Kansas. Jason Smith will take all this footage and turn it into video magic that will debut at our New Orleans conclave in July. We (there are four of us altogether) get a free trip out of it so we’re excited. Since I’m still paying off those editing machine that I bought last summer for the Atlanta Olympics, this helps my budget. To add to that financial stress, I have also purchased a Sony UVW-100 Beta-SP camera. It’s sweet and I’ve already picked up some free-lance work back in Orlando. There’s plenty to be had. It also shot some interviews with PGA players who were also Kappa Sigs like Billy Andrade, Lanny Watkins and Peter Jacobson when they came through town for the Bay Hill Invitational last month. Great fun. 

I love Memphis. What’s not to like? We’ll try to fit in as many sights and sounds as we can but we’re on a tight schedule. As much as I would love to visit Graceland with these guys, it’s not going happen. It’s a shame, too. Jason is a non-believer but I’m sure I could bring him around with a visit to Mediation Gardens. Perhaps seeing the jungle room, the porcelain monkey or the three TVs downstairs would make him reconsider. Anyway, it’s alway great to visit Elvis Presley’s mansion and grounds. It is a national treasure, testament to a true American icon who lived an extraordinary life and was taken too soon. But I’ll have to put it off visiting until the next time I’m in town. 

Saturday was our busiest day. We did sit-down Q&As with undergraduates and alumni from both schools and recorded footage of their houses. Interesting story about Rhodes College. It owns a quarry across the river in Arkansas. Every time there’s a new building on campus or expansion of an existing one, it must be built using the rock from that quarry to preserve the consistent appearance. Lotsa money there at Rhodes. 

That night, we wondered from our hotel to Beale street for some dinner, drinks and good clean entertainment. We found all three at B.B. Kings. Our group was being escorted to near the stage when I asked “Can you seat us near the Hammond B-3?” 

“Pffft. Musicians,” said the hostess. 

The next day was the highlight of the trip for me. We were on our way to interview one of Kappa Sigma’s biggest benefactors, Russel Weiner. Russel was a 1939 initiate of Rhodes (then called Southwestern Presbyterian University) and 1991 Kappa Sigma man of the year. Though having graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and trained as a dentist, he and his brother Don founded Donruss Trading cards in the mid 1950’s as well as Super Bubble Gum and other confectionaries just in time for an entire generation of baby boomers to rot their teeth and keep other dentists in business for years. Brilliant. They eventually sold that company to General Mills and Russel got into the hotel business, building, buying and selling them. All along, his wealth allowed him to donate to worthy causes throughout the area including the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park. 

Being so noteworthy, Kappa Sigma wanted to extend the honor to him of being interviewed for this prestigious effort. We drove to his house on Eastern Parkway, an old money enclave where Memphis’s prominent businessmen called home. Once we entered, we were taken in by the classic works of art that Russel had on display and the pride he took in giving them their due. Portraits, landscapes and still-lifes all illuminated by custom lighting from the ceiling. 

We set up shop in the music room off to the side of the living room. The older furniture was befitting of a house of this grandeur where decades of social events had been held. Dark mahogany wood seemed to dominate with floral patterns on display on chairs, sofas and tables. A giant mirror was mounted over the fireplace. It was a true step back in time. So much so that, as we uncrated our equipment and got to work, I had a hard time finding and three-prong outlet in the walls. It’s a good thing that I brought along an adapter for our lighting. Since I was worried that the house still used fuses rather that circuit breakers, I used a spare lighting set-up for fear of blowing one and messing things up really badly. Russel sat in a chair in the middle of the room and Jason interviewed him about Rhodes, our fraternity and the success the enjoyed in life through his association with both. He spoke of the men from his era at Rhodes and of new members of our chapter there with whom he enjoyed meeting. Russel was witty, articulate and appreciative for his success in life. It all went well. No surprises. No blown fuses.

When it was over, Russel offered to show us the rest of the house after we packed things up. Each room revealed more treasures. He showed us a painting he claimed to have paid five million dollars for. It was a flawless portrait of a woman and flawlessly displayed under perfect lighting. His basement was frozen in time much like the rest of the house. It had obviously been the center of social events at the house. Along one side was a bar decked out in art deco chrome compete with soda water dispensers and cocktail concocting accoutrements such as stainless steel shakers, jiggers and bar spoons all in place and ready for the next debutantes ball. A billiard table sat at the far end with chairs and game tables in between. Ol’ Russel could set up his own casino down here and possibly did with a house packed with guests over the years. The only thing missing was a roulette wheel. 

“Do you gentlemen enjoy Shakespeare?” he whispered to us as if to keep a secret. Russel was up to something. We leaned in. “Yes,” we said. Okay, for the purposes of entertaining Russel, we said yes. I barely passed the portion of high school English having to do with Shakespeare. I’m sure Jason and the others were better. So, yeah, sure, Russel. Whatcha got? 

“Follow me,” he intoned as we would our way upstairs, past several works of incredible art, and into a bedroom. We then went through a door at the far end of that bedroom and into another room. By my sense of direction, we were above the music room where we had just been 20 minutes before. Russel was enjoying this.

“Here it is,” he said proudly. “Shakespeare’s bed.”

It was a massive solid wood canopy edifice. It took up nearly the whole room. Thick dark four-poster wood ran from the floor to the ceiling and from one end to the massive other. It had to be eight feet long and six feet wide, draped in a fabric of undetermined make and origin. He claimed it was the bed that his wife Anne Hathaway seduced him in. I didn’t hear much after that. What in God’s name is it doing here? Russel was a big Shakespeare fanatic and certainly had the means to collect an artifact here or there but this was unexplainable. The surviving beds from his life are both on display in England, the so-called “Second Best Bed” (the couple’s main bed) at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Shottery and the “Great Bad of Ware” (for guests) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Both have elaborate carvings in their posts, headboards and panels. This was rather plain with dark planks, presumably of oak, creating a curved canopy. Not carvings. There is no record that I could find of any bed of his in America. If what he is saying is true, this is the most substantial piece of the bard’s personal collection to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. Being of engineering lineage, my overriding question was: how’d he get this in here? We just stood and stared. Russel’s was smiling, his face beaming with pride. 

While entertaining us with other stories of gatherings at the house (as if you could top having Shakespeare’s bed on the second floor), Russel’s wife returned from being out and set the mood for the rest of the day. 

Here comes another jaw-dropper. 

Joy Brown Weiner was a child prodigy who grew up to become one of the most noted classical musicians, man or woman, of her era. Her mother noticed that at the age of four she had perfect pitch. That wasn’t necessarily a surprise. She was from a family of musicians here in Memphis. She learned violin early and began competing throughout Tennessee. After she turned professional at the age of ten, she began to be noticed outside the mid-south. At age 15, she became the youngest member of the St. Louis Symphony. She took classes at Washington University and soon moved on to Julliard in New York City. She performed at Carnegie Hall and in Central Park with the New York Symphony Orchestra. After travels through Europe, she eventually found her way back to Memphis and became concertmaster during the inaugural season of the Memphis Symphony in 1953. It was around this time that Russel was returning from Korea were he had served as a Navy dentist. They married in 1956 and had two daughters. 

We were all still in the basement as Joy (she insisted us calling her by her first name) joined us and introductions were made. With her arrival, the topic turns to lunch and Russel suggests that we all travel to the museum of which he is so fond. It has a nice restaurant on a large deck overlooking Overton Park which is a short drive away. 

“Are you boys getting to see some of the sights here in Memphis?” she asked. 

The others politely answered and I spoke up and mentioned how, being the proverbial tourist, I always look forward to visiting Graceland. 

That’s when Russel gave us that mischievous smile again. 

“Did you know that Joy’s family sold it Elvis?” 

BOOM! What!?!?! What did I just hear? 

I tucked my chin and and looked at her, my eyes wide open and my eyebrows up in my hairline. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Your family? Sold Graceland? To Elvis!?!?!” I asked astonishingly. 

“Oh, yes,” she said, “We had that land in our family for years and uncle T.D. built the house. It was a grand place.” 

“When we get to the museum, I want to sit next to you and hear all about it,” I said. She agreed. 

Sure enough, after Russel called the museum to let them know we were coming, we were on our way. I’m not sure if the museum’s staff hustled to get it in there or if it’s always there but when we arrived and were warmly greeted by the staff, a portrait of Russel was positioned on a table in the lobby. One of these days, I’ll have to go by there again and see if it’s a permanent fixture. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was. He was their chairman for a number of years. His other accolades throughout Memphis and Tennessee are too numerous to mention here. 

After our group was being swiftly guided to our table and ordered drinks, I again mentioned Graceland and asked if it had had that name when her family lived there.

“Yes, it did.” She told me how her great-grandfather, S.C. (Steven Cummings) Toof, was a prominent businessman in Memphis and even owned The Daily Appeal, the city’s predominant newspaper. Along with his daughter Grace Toof, they purchased nearly 500 acres of land in the rural countryside five miles south of Memphis shortly after the Civil War which became a cattle ranch. As Grace never married, she willed the land to her niece and two nephews (one of whom was Joy’s father, Richard). Joy’s aunt Ruth Brown was that niece. Ruth married Dr. Thomas D. Moore, a prominent Urologist in western Tennessee and himself a breeder of cattle. The two of them eventually acquired a portion from her brother and sold off part of it following the Great Depression which became a shopping center and subdivision. Their 18-room country home in what was then called the Whitehaven area was built in 1939. 

“Our entire home is centered around music,” Mrs. Moore had told The Commercial Appeal in 1940. Great care was thus taken to provide superior acoustics through much of the house, especially in what became the house’s living room and attached parlor located to the right as you’re entered through the front door. In its early years, it was nicknamed the music room where members of the extended family would often gather for recitals.  . 

“We went particularly on Sundays and special holidays and ate on a dining room table large enough to seat 24 people. After those wonderful meals, we adjourned into the living room,” where the musicians amongst them would entertain those who had gathered “because of music being such an important part of life to the Browns and the Moores.” Many members of those two families played instruments. 

“My mother was a concert pianist, and my grandfather Brown was the harmonica player. The rest of the family listened and then they would sing hymns and familiar songs until late in the afternoon, accompanied by us. 

“T.D. and Ruth’s daughter Ruth Marie (Joy’s cousin) was a harpist for the Memphis Symphony,” Russel interjected. “Joy’s uncle had some personal touches built into the house.” Russel told us about the custom-built bathtub and trays built into the counter tops to hold his dentures. But one of the most unique things about the house is that it had the first picture window in Memphis, facing north from the dining room.

Joy also reminisced about the fields of flowers through the 18-acres of land and how their aroma would fill the air. 

Her aunt, uncle and cousin continued living in Graceland well into the 1950s but the divorce of the Moores prompted Ruth Marie’s mother to put the house up for sale. 

The rest is history. The parents of Elvis Presley, Gladys and Vernon, were scouting the area for a larger home for their family while their son was in Hollywood shooting the movie Loving You. Vernon wanted the family to relocate to Los Angeles, but Elvis wanted to stay grounded in Memphis. The story goes that when Elvis was first shown the house, he gave no outward hint at how immediately attached be became to it. He was pleased that music played a major role in the lives of the family that put it on the market. When he came to the parlor, he sat down and began playing Mrs. Moore’s piano which was said to be out of tune at the time. Something clicked, however, because shortly after the tour, he made a $102,500 offer for it — outbidding the Memphis YMCA by more than $65,000.

Thus, in March of 1957, the 22 year-old Elvis purchased the grand, two-story country home with earnings from his chart-topping song Heartbreak Hotel. As part of the deal, Joy’s aunt Ruth took over ownership of the Presley’s old house in the Audubon section of Memphis. The mansion’s famous wrought-iron Music Gates (a significant, symbolic part of Elvis lore) were added later that year and he also erected a pink Alabama fieldstone wall around the property. Graceland remained his primary residence until his death in 1977. He and members of his family (mother, father, grandmother) are buried on the grounds, in the Meditation Garden. Graceland opened to the public as a museum in 1982, and it is now second only to the White House as the most visited home in the United States.”

Joy had obviously not been back since Elvis bought it. During our lunch, she asked me about changes Elvis made to the home and I told her about the carport, swimming pool, racquetball court, Jungle Room, Trophy Room out back and Serenity Garden. When I asked her if she had ever visited the grounds since her family sold it, she replied no. She said that she wanted to remember the home as it was when her family owned it.

The day continued on and conversation drifted on to other subjects. What I had just heard, as well as seen upstairs at Casa Wiener, was remarkable. Sometimes you hear about people with these deep collections to the past but only when you meet them do you really find yourself in the presence of living history. This was that day. 

I reintroduced myself to Russel and Dr. Weiner at subsequent Kappa Sigma gatherings and we enjoyed reliving that auspicious day on the veranda of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. I’m not sure if she ever got asked that often about her connection to Graceland but she seemed to enjoy sharing that family history with a visitor and recalling a memory so steeped in what can only be described as true American lore. 

November 19, 1999 – Gainesville, Florida

You should have seen my eyes!!! They were as wide as could be!!! Massively!!! Craig Eicher was there. He was laughing so hard I thought he would pass out.

First things first.

There’s a reason they call Florida Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium The Swamp. Simply put, it stinks. It’s in a bowl and there’s no air circulation. The pungent smell of decaying organic manner mixes with the stench of an outdoor locker room and a heaping whiff of cow field effluvium after a late autumn harvest. Throw the mephitis of a recycling plant, a festering mulch fire and the sunshine state’s famous humidity and you get the smell of the grass and dirt which can make your eyes water. And that’s on a good day. If it’s raining at game time, especially under a relentless tropical sun, the experience will make you reconsider your career choices and make you wish you studied harder in school. It never sufficiently drains so there’s always puddles and mush. It might look big on TV but the sidelines on the visitors’ side (where you’re restricted to) are narrower than most high school football stadiums I’ve traversed and there’s a bizarre labyrinth of chain-link fences through which only a few can pass in the opposite direction at a time. They hate you being here. As such, most photographers set up for games in the end zones. That’s why it always looks so crowded. There isn’t enough space at those ends either. But we make do.

And today, it’s extra packed. The Florida State University Seminoles are in town and there’s a lot riding on this game. 

Throughout the 1990’s it went like this: CBS Sports carried the big annual matchup on odd years when it was in Gainesville (and thus an SEC home game) and ABC Sports on even years when it was in Tallahassee (an ACC home game). Whoever aired it (either us because we were a CBS affiliate or WFTV because they were an ABC affiliate) would have massive ratings because of the intense interest in the two schools and their football team throughout central Florida. But it’s extra important today. Florida State University, behind quarterback Chris Wienke, has been ranked #1 since the start of the season and is still undefeated. This is both teams’ final regular season game. So far this season, Florida has only lost to Alabama and are ranked #3. A win today COULD keep them in the hunt for a championship for head coach Steve Spurrier and QBs Jesse Palmer and Doug Johnson. 

Since it’s our turn this year, we’ve sent a massive crew to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on the Friday beforehand. Massive means five people: me, reporter Craig, a sports anchor, his photographer and someone to run the satellite truck. Once there, Craig and I found ourselves surrounded by thousands of both Gators and Seminoles fans who were parked, camping or simply hanging out. Seminoles fan can get obnoxious. Gators fan are. They are among the worst. Even when they’re losing. They could be down 59-3 and 4th & 37 to go in the 4th quarter and they’ll still do that annoying chomp thing in the stands. Currently they are all getting primed (drunk) for their big event tomorrow and looking for TV people with whom they could share their most intimate thoughts and nuanced opinions of this auspicious occasion. Just kidding. They wanted to scream, yell and talk trash. On camera. That actually makes my job easy. Get all that, the FSU tomahawk chops, the UF gator chomps and whatever else they could do to embarrass their respective institutions of higher learning. Fish in a barrel. Craig and I got enough right away to make a 5:30 story out of. 

After that, we got some more footage for a live special scheduled airing at 7:30. 

Here’s where the fun begins. 

It’s about 7:15 and we’re getting ready to go live. Dude comes by us rolling a road case. It has a vinyl cover over it with a Sears logo on it. He looks up at us.

“Who are you guys with?”

“Channel 6 in Orlando, the CBS station there. We’re doing a live special in about ten minutes.”

“Cool,” he says, “Would you like to use the championship trophy in it?”

Craig and I simultaneously looked at each other with corresponding looks of disbelief. 

“Well, yes,” one of us said. It might have been Craig. “I think we would.”

Dude gets busy. First he jots our station call-letters down on a pad that already has a bunch of other stations listed on it. Then muscle memory kicks in and he gets to work. He carefully removes the cover, releases the latches on the road case, lifts the cover, takes out a display stand and starts assembling it. After he sets it down, he uncovers and pulls out the centerpiece of the whole thing: a full-size $30,000 custom Waterford crystal football. It’s the trophy that’s awarded by the American Football Coaches Association to the school that wins the coaches poll at the end of the season and thus the national championship since 1986. For both this and a corresponding one for the college basketball championship, it is simply called the Sears Trophy. The image of a legendary coach holding it over his head in victory after that final career-defining win at the end of the season is sports iconography. Many aspire. Few achieve. 

And now, while we watch him, this guy is uncovering it and slowly, deftly pulling it out of the road case. It seems to have its own glow as the lights from our live set-up bounce off of it. He is about to place the trophy on top on the display stand that goes on top of the case for us to use in our little sports special being beamed back to Orlando. Then he stops. He has forgotten an important step in the process. He looks around. 

“Here, hold this,” he says to me as he’s holding out this invaluable treasure of sports. 

I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I simply held out my arms. The next thing I knew was I was holding this in my arms, the long sleeves of my sweater cushioning it as I looked up at Craig with my eyes as wide open as I believe they’ve ever been and my facial expression a cross between “OMG!!!” before that acronym ever emerged and “Please, dear God, don’t let me drop this!!!!” Craig saw me and burst out laughing. After about five seconds of shear fright and amazement (“I holding the national college football trophy!!!), dude gets the display stand put together and asks for it back.

I thought seriously  – SERIOUSLY – for a split second of looking at him and slowly shaking my head. You gave it to me. I’m keeping it. Perhaps even tucking it and running an outside route through a zone-defense seam. But it would not end well. I wish we had those cameras back then on our cell-phones like we do today (without the ring lights, selfie sticks and other useless implements of self-absorption and superficiality). I would have urgently implored Craig to take a photo. But dude might have gotten in trouble if it came out and no one wants this nice guy to lose his job. He’s helping us out tremendously. So I G-E-N-T-L-Y handed it back to him and sighed in relief that it hadn’t dropped and shattered into a million pieces and that my name thusly won’t be mentioned alongside Steve Bartman and that German who stabbed Monica Seles. I don’t need any of that. 

Once my heart rate returned to near-normal, the half-hour special went well (the boys in the control room back in Orlando were over the moon about getting the trophy in the special. High-fiving each other as if THEY had anything to do with it) as did our 2:30 pre-game special the next day and the post-game special we pulled out of our butts after the game was over and U.F. lost. They would go on to lose again two weeks later to the University of Alabama for the S.E.C. championship. 

But the Seminoles would go on to beat QB Michael Vick and the Virginia Tech Hokies in the 2000 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and claim the trophy I had so carefully cradled in my arms. As I watched the post game, I nearly shed a tear knowing that I had protected that crystal football that FSU head coach Bobby Bowden was holding up. It seemed like Bobby was holding up a piece of me. I felt like a proud foster parent passing along a wayward offspring that had been entrusted to him for safekeeping into adulthood and a chance at a good life. So proud. So hopeful. So fulfilled. The circle was complete. 

So you can understand how enraged I was when that football trophy, along with another one that FSU had won for its 1993 championship, had been stolen from a locked glass-and-wooden case in Bowden’s office in 2004. I was livid. That’s MY football!!! I haven’t been that angry since Saving Private Ryan lost out to Shakespeare in Love. Still pissed about that!!!! 

Moving on.

The university offered a $2,500 reward for their returns and the scumbags who did it were eventually caught. One was a staff attorney for the state’s Public Service Commission and the Associated Press reported that the other was a 25-year-old self-described boat captain from Fort Walton Beach where one of the trophies had been stored in a cardboard box wrapped in wadded-up newspaper at a commercial storage facility. The lawyer, who was placed on administrative leave once they were charged but in Florida tradition continued to be paid, kept the one in his possession in his home wrapped in a white plastic garbage bag. Both were U.F. grads. 

Today the Waterford Crystal footballs are back in their rightful place, U.F. fans battle annually with University of Miami fans to see who can be the more obnoxious and I expect Jimmy Hoffa’s decayed corpse to someday be extracted from Florida Field. The odor from the ground there, however, will never go away.

August 8, 1975 

Living in Albany is bad enough.

Having a job in a dreary downtown surrounded by a polluted river, empty potholed streets and slums is even worse. 

Having an office overlooking North Pearl Street and Clinton Avenue giving you a grand view of all of it probably sucks most of all. 

Even the storied Palace Theater across the street can’t escape the blight. Like many grand urban venues of yesteryear, it has been left to decay as downtown residents slowly realized that living at the heart of a growing garbage heap masquerading as a state capital is no longer as attractive as it used to be. No one even wanted to pressure-wash it. You might loosen an exterior wall and the whole thing would come crashing down resulting in another pile of rubble that someone else would have to haul away and dump next to the remains of the Ten Eyck Hotel and the Maiden Lane Bridge. Thus the circle of life in the 1970’s capitol district continues. But I digress.

The Palace still had a use for the occasional community theater group, classical music field trip and off-broadway production that couldn’t get booked into the Colonie Coliseum. The musty smell, dreary paint and chipped walls resounded with an air of resignation that hung like once elegant light fixtures now having been ceaselessly painted over until robbed of any vestige of regalness or relevance. Elvis, if he had ever even walked in, had left the building. The curtains were faded, the carpet was worn and the lobby floor was missing half its tiles. Or maybe that was just part of its charm. Nevertheless, it persisted. Whoever owned it was going to get every last dime out of it before locking the doors, standing aside long enough for William Kennedy to deliver a eulogy and then signaling the bulldozers to do God’s long overdue work. 

So leave it to a group of struggling young musicians from the metro New York area to book a gig here and in doing so catching my father’s attention. 

Chuck Sr. is up on the 7th floor of the Leo O’Brien Federal Building built on what must have been the remains of Haudenosaunee sacrificial grounds owing to its high ground and proximity to something called ‘The Gut’, its 1970’s brutality blending in with the architecture of nearby parking garages and state office complexes. Like me, he’s counting the days until he can pack things up and leave. He’s eyeing a 32-foot sailboat to be taken from Massachusetts down to the British Virgin Islands and chartered out until it’s paid for. Can you blame him? But for now, his days as one of America’s most respected bridge engineers are consumed by disputes with conniving contractors, erratic Washington budgeting and meetings with state transportation officials looking for new ways to waste federal funding on bridges to nowhere. The boys on Swan Street are waiting dad out before they move forward with their plans to not build an exit on the Northway to Albany County Airport, not connect interstate highways 87 and 787 south of town and not extend the new Hudson River Bridge/South Mall Expressway past either the Hudson River or the South Mall. Robert Moses would be so proud.

While gritting his teeth, clenching his jaw and looking stoically out the window of his office this Friday afternoon, his gaze is cast upon a line of tractor trailers along Pearl Street. There’s nothing written on them and he assumes they’re part of some grand production at the Palace over the weekend for which someone overpaid to stage a show. Could be a musical. Perhaps a popular drama. Maybe Shakespeare In The Dump. The mind reels at the possibilities. But it’s big and dad doesn’t often see much activity on this corner that doesn’t involve cars on fire, a police takedown or someone urinating on the sidewalk. He makes a mental note and prepares to spend a weekend of telling me to get off the sofa and go mow the lawn for $2.00. 

On this evening, as the family, some of whom are home for the summer from college, gathers for dinner he recounts what he saw overlooking Clinton Street. It kind of sort of went like this:

“All these big rigs lined up along Pearl Street. Looked like a big production for such a small theater. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that. What could that be?”

“What did the marquee say, dad?” I asked.

“I could only make out one word. Kiss. What is Kiss?”

“It’s a band, dad. A few kids from school like them. Say they’re really great.”

“What kind of a name is that for a band? What kind of music do they play. Why do they need all those trucks?”

“Don’t know. I guess they have a lot of gear. I’m guessing it’s not blue grass.” 

It wasn’t. Didn’t see the show the next day. $2.00 doesn’t get you in the door at very many concerts. 

This summer, like Albany, sucks.

August 25, 1975

Why Roy Orbison? Maybe he was overdue.

After all, by 1975 we were in full-blown nostalgia mode in America. 

How did we get here? We’d finally gotten our ass kicked out of Vietnam once and for all, our president resigned in disgrace and OPEC has us by the short-hairs. The fall-out from all that and more is unavoidable.  Inflation, unemployment and fear have gripped us. Our institutions are crumbling. Our schools are failing. Our leaders are liars. Our money is worthless. Our moms have to get jobs. Crime is rising. We’re waiting in line on odd-numbered days for three gallons of gas. Cadillac’s barely hanging on and won’t build convertible El Dorados anymore. The railroad my grandfather helped build has been wiped off the map. Some loudmouth Ohio shipbuilder just bought the moribund Yankees for next-to-nothing. AMF owns Harley. CBS owns Fender. The Beatles will never get back together, the Stones are strung out, Jimi’s dead and Elvis is not far behind him.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Nostalgia now seems to be a commodity. It might have started with Archie Bunker. Or George Lucas’s second movie: American Graffiti. Somehow, he hit on something. Eleven years removed from the time and place portrayed, it harkens back to a simpler time. If it wasn’t for the fact that he helmed the 2nd greatest franchise in movie history (Sorry, but James Bond defined 60’s cool), this would be his masterpiece. The movie’s soundtrack of oldies music actually helped re-boot the careers of Chuck Berry, Del Shannon and Bill Haley & The Comets. A new generation of grindhouse directors would restate his coming-of-age conflict and resolution.

His work has inspired TV to go the same direction: Ron Howard, has emerged from Mayberry and now stars in the 1950’s-set Happy Days. Ironically, the pilot for the series is an episode of ABC’s Love, American Style in which the social life of Howard’s teenage character drastically changes when his family buys a television set. Along with a spinoff series, it goes on to be the centerpiece of that network’s emergence from CBS and NBC’s shadows to be a true equal in broadcasting. 

The music has also regressed. “I remember when rock was young,” starts Elton John’s 1972 song Crocodile Rock. Buddy Holly might be a distant memory but Don McLean has recast him as a hero of a simpler, cleaner time. David Essex and the Eagles have brought James Dean back into vogue. A hidden gem inside a Paul ‘Rhymin’ Simon song Was A Sunny Day refers to Speed-O. All Chuck’s children are there. The father of rock and roll even scored his biggest hit in 1973 with My Dingaling. Another veteran of that period weighed in on the pop-charts as well. Rick Nelson’s Garden Party chronicles an oldies concert he played at Madison Square Garden that he found anything BUT wistful of the good old days. “If you gotta play a Garden Party, I wish you a lot of luck.” No, nostalgia wasn’t what it used to be. 

Roy Orbison? The movement seemed to have passed him by. He was a long-shot anyway. He never projected the 50’s era image of a defiant rock & roller. He wasn’t very edgy. He wore glasses and dark suits. He never moved much onstage. Some said he was blind. Compared to him, Gene Vincent was Mick Jagger.  But his multi-octave voice was amazing, almost operatic. When you combine that with with songs of yearning, pain and loss, a generation in the doldrums of post-fall-of-Saigon self-doubt finally saw him placed in perfect context.

The screen door slams

Mary’s dress waves.

Like a vision she dances across the porch

as the radio plays.

Roy Orbison singing for the lonely……..

Slow and simple, a New Jersey singer/songwriter began painting a 3-D canvas: disappointment, doubt and discontent. He wasn’t the first. One of my first memories of hearing real music was Eric Burden sing We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Others copied. This was no copy. 

Spend your summer praying in vain

for a savior to rise from these streets.

No one around Albany had heard of Bruce Springsteen. Seriously. I checked. Midland Records at Colonie Center. Record Bar at Latham Corners Shopping Center. Blue Note Record Shop on Central. The record department at Korvettes in Northway Mall. When I wasn’t mowing lawns in my neighborhood over the summer for $5.00 a pop, I hit my bike or the CDTA in search of life outside suburbia. Those stores might have had his album, as well as its two cut-out bin predecessors, but no one knew his story. Yet. 

What else can we do now?

except roll down the windows and 

let the wind blow back your hair

My hair? Hell, my face was melting when the rest of the band kicked in. Where did that come from? Piano AND organ! Layers of guitars and a rhythm section that could turn on a dime. Phil Spector in overdrive. What happened to the harmonica at the beginning? It had been replaced by blinding, bellowing saxophone. That dude on the cover, the one Bruce is leaning on. It’s all starting to make sense. 

Mary, climb in.

What followed was an sonic blast of an urban decay crumbling down around us. A broken promise to the perennial next generation that things would be better this time. Guess what. They aren’t. Look around. It’s all coming apart at the seams. And we’re tired. And frustrated. 

It’s a town full of losers. And I’m pulling out of here to win.

Nailed it.

Teardrops on the city.

This funky second tune is the perfect counter-balance to the first. A protean figure cast amid the city, hustling for what he can: a buck, a girl, a song. Scorsese meets Across 110th Street. With a full horn section this time. 

“I’ll tell ya something,” Saxophone legend David Sanborn once told me, “That’s always listed in every article or bio on me and the truth of the matter is this: I was in the horn section. I played baritone sax in the horn section.  There were a lot of other people also. Somehow, there’s this false illusion that’s created that I played with Bruce Springsteen when, I guess… to stretch a point…I have. I did the session and he was there. I know him. I’ve known him for a long time but it’s kind of misleading in a way.”

All I know, David, is that its the only song on the album that’ll put people on the dance floor.

Get up every morning to the sound of the bell.

Talk about blasting out of the gate!!!  Where does this energy come from? The guy on the covers of Time and Newsweek is depicting life of escape and who can blame him. New Jersey. Don’t know it it well. Don’t want to. Like me, anywhere else is fine. Just drive, dammit!!!!

Hidin’ on the backstreets

Hidin’ on the backstreets

Hidin’ on the backstreets

Hidin’ on the backstreets

I had never heard anyone let out a primal scream like this before in a song. Not Little Richard. Not John Lennon. Not John Fogerty. Not Robert Plant. Not even Roger Daltry. And I still haven’t.  This was pain and loss and anger and desperation all rolled into one huge cathartic outburst. One minute, this cat is up. The next, he’s down. Really down. You start to worry about him. Will he make it out in one piece? Am I the only one in this shit-town who hears this? Are you people deaf? This is YOU he’s talking about.  

You’re already exhausted. This might be the end of side 1. But you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Sprung from cages on Highway 9, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected…stepping out over the line!!!!!

WOAH-OHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it’s a death-trap. It’s a suicide-rap. We gotta get out while we’re young…..!!!!

They say the future is not certain. At this moment, for me, it was.

Woah, Oh. She’s The One. 

This is the one that I couldn’t really wrap my almost-15-year-old brain around at first. A love song? No. And yes. Sort of. It would take years before I finally understood it.

The concept is simple and not all that new. He’s drawn to someone who he knows is bad for him. She has a heart of stone. He wants to believe her but she just keeps lying to him. He can’t help himself. He can’t quite seem to break free and he knows he probably never will. It’s a theme he will repeat in other songs like Trapped, I’m On Fire and Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I feel sorry for that guy. Really sorry.

Side note: This was Bruce’s third album and the one that tested Columbia Records patience. He was swinging for the fences after the disappointing sales of Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Holed up in a car shop-turning-recording studio north of New York City, Bruce was not going to let it all slip away. When new manager Jon Landau moved him to The Record Plant in the city, he had only recorded the title track. The rest came slowly and painfully. Bruce was not content until it sounded just right. I’ve known that feeling to this day.

By the time Meeting Across the River begins its jazzy lead-in, you wonder what more this Jersey kid has yet to say. This might be the quietest song on the album but its the edgiest. He’s finally had enough. He’s leaning on his friend. He’s got business to conclude. Born to Run might actually all lead up to this last encounter with Cherry before the sun comes up and it’s time to leave. For good. 

Then I’m gonna go out walking. Walking.

This is the end of the album’s narrative. Why? Read on.

The album’s coda of Jungleland is perhaps the most complex work in this piece, both thematically and technically, as well it should be. How do you bring all of this to a close? The textures and tapestries, the characters and conflicts, the promise and the pain. It is the only song on the album sung entirely in 3rd-person. No I, you, us or we. The Rangers, the magic rat, barefoot girl, maximum lawmen, midnight gang, poets down here. Bruce is describing the streetscape as it rolls by him. Perhaps from a car window. It’s over. Bye.

Roy’s piano dissolves.

Danny’s Hammond B-3 gently fades out.

There hasn’t been anything like this. Not Sgt. Pepper. Not Exile. Not Who’s Next. Not Zeppelin-4. It’s only been 43 minutes but it feels like a lifetime. 

You tilt your head back and close your eyes but nothing will ever be the same.

That’s me.

I’m him.

And it IS a town full of losers.

These aren’t songs.

This isn’t an album.

It’s an instruction manual

And, kid, you better get the picture.

February 23, 2012 – Orlando

“How many OPD cops does it take to write a parking ticket?” 

THAT got their attention, possibly more than my big giant live-truck parked on the concrete island between Church Street and Bob Snow Lane. For years, it’s where farmers markets, pop-up vendors and street musicians set up at various times. Not today. Not this weekend. Nope. The NBA is in town, has taken over and has deemed this area off limits for the locals. Those people are really getting on my nerves. I don’t remember Orlando being such a circus the last time the All-Star Game was in Orlando but it was certainly nothing like this. Streets are closed, parking is a nightmare and sidewalks are packed with out-of-towners who I wish would all just leave. 

“One, two, three, four…” I started counting. Another Orlando Police officer soon walked around from behind my truck after probably hearing me and insisted being included in this ersatz show of force. “Five”

“This area was closed off last night. We sent word out to everyone.”

“The NBA doesn’t tell me what I can and can’t do in my town,” I said as I removed the dark green envelope from under my windshield wiper blade. “Where were you guys three weeks ago when my friend’s truck got broken into on Orange and Amelia?”

That seemed to silence them as I unlocked my van opened the side door and placed my camera inside. I stuffed the ticket in my shirt pocket, letting part of it stick out like a badge of honor. Reporter Chris Trenkmann decided not to participate in this discussion and silently got into the passenger seat. We had just finished doing a live report for our noon newscast and shooting video of fences going up on Church Street along Hughey Street outside of the Amway Center where a full weekend slate of activities was happening this weekend concluding with the All-Star game Sunday night. This was all part of crowd control. 

“How much longer do you plan to be here?”

“We’re leaving now,” I told them. Yep, that’s how my day started. But not before I looked at one of the officers, standing maybe 5-foot-3 and easily weighing 200-plus pounds. I pau8sed just long enough for him to notice I was looking right at him.

“When was the last time you did a sit-up?” I asked him.

And that’s why cops hate me.

After lunch and securing more acceptable parking, Chris and I went into an NBA event inside the Amway Center called Jam Session. I have no memory of what it was about. Probably a lot of noise, chaotic activities and a ton of NBA self-promotion. One-stop shopping for a filler-story for our story at 5:00. For our 7:00 newscast, Chris and I packaged the weekend’s opening ceremonies complete with Q&A from NBA commissioner David Stern and Orlando Magic chief Alex Martins. Alex is all aglow with the attention that he and the city of Orlando are getting out of all this. The crown jewel of the event is of course the team’s new home on Church Street. Alex loves to talk about it. What he didn’t enjoy talking about was the future of star player Dwight Howard and head coach Stan Van Gundy. Both would be gone by the time training camp started in the fall. 

With our 7:00 story put together and fed back to the station, It’s time for one of us to go home. And it isn’t me. No, I’ve volunteered for some easy overtime money tonight. Our president wants to have a presence at the weekend’s festivities but the event he’ll be attending will naturally be centered open him. Daytona Beach native and current Dallas Mavericks guard Vince Carter is hosting a fundraiser for Barak Obama’s reelection campaign at his house in the swanky gated community of Isleworth located in well-heeled southwest Orange County. It’s best known for being the epicenter of the Tiger Woods scandal almost two and a half years ago. Crews were parked outside the development’s gates for days waiting for FHP cars to come and go and the story got bigger. I was not initially part of that scrum as it unfolded over the Thanksgiving holiday as I was thankfully off that weekend. I did do some time on the waiting line along Windermere Road in the days that followed but nothing much happened. As such, it is not on my resume. 

But that same spot outside Isleworth’s manned and fortified gates is where I’m headed to now and I’m meeting the cream of Orlando’s other nightside photographers. We’ll meet, talk and commiserate over how the NBA making life miserable for everyone for the next few days. We all also have crews at Orlando International Airport covering the president’s arrival on Air Force One (a Boeing 757 this time instead of the larger 747) so that we know when to expect Obama’s motorcade. As always, we’ll all hear it before we see it. Already inside is Stern, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and about 70 other guests who have each shelled out $30,000 to be here. The actual event is being held in a gym adjacent to Carter’s house. They’re enjoying the finest catered cuisine that comes with dining with the president. I’m enjoying Taco Bell in a live-truck that was ticketed only hours earlier for being where the NBA doesn’t want us. 

After a while, we’re told that Air Force One has touched down, the president and his entourage have left the airport and are on their way to us. About twenty minutes after that, we heard the first sirens and saw the first lights heading our way from Apopka-Vineland Road. Behind the phalanx of Orange County Sheriff’s Office motorcycles came a fleet of large SUVs. It’s generally accepted that CINC is in the first one and that’s the one I follow past the gates and behind the walls. Dozens of other vehicles follow behind until they’re all swallowed up behind the walls of central Florida’s elite and overpaid. 

My desk wants me to stay until they all leave again but since I don’t know when that’s going to be so I sit tight and wait for some sort of commotion from  inside the walls. Again, lights. Sirens, The Bat Signal. Whatever. It might be a while. A long while. Did I mention there are 70 people inside, each wanting a photo with Obama after his remarks about following the Heat/Knicks game going on in Miami while flying on Air Force One? Nothing like playing to your audience. 

So the evening winds on and I’m making time and a half while sitting on my butt by the side of the road and shooting the shit with my buds. I’ve already fed in my video of the motorcade arriving. Am only here for CYA in case something happens when they leave. 10:00 comes and goes. Reporters from other stations are going live but since we don’t have a newscast at that hour I can relax and count my blessings. And my paycheck. I’ve already worked Presidents Day earlier this week so it will be a tidy paycheck next month. That green envelope will end up on my boss Alan Parcell’s desk in the morning and he can deal with the fallout from today’s folly. 

It’s about here that I would normally wrap things up and tell you that I shot video of the motorcade leaving and how I made my way back to the station, unloaded my gear, put my batteries on the charger and gone home. Normally.

Tonight, normal goes out the window.

First it was a text, then a phone call.

“Need you to head to Florida Mall,” said the nighttime assignment editor whose name I can’t remember.

“What’s up?”

“People are rioting in the parking lot there.”

“Get the fuck out!”

“Yep. Nike was releasing a new show today and a mob showed up. It’s out of control. Orange County (Sheriff’s Office) is out there now. We’re sending Rates, too.”

Scott Rates started at Channel 6 a few years back as a photographer but was pressed into service not long after as something called ‘Night Cam.’ The embarrassing display of insufficient resources came about as the result of some asshat consultant recommending a photographer on both the night and morning shifts (‘Morning Cam’) could also be a reporter as a way to give newscast viewers a more immediate sense of breaking news. Scott jumped into it. He relished it. Good for him. He had already done a nightcam report earlier for the 11:00 newscast but that was over and now he was heading back to the station when they diverted him. Photos of the big disturbance were already circulating on the internet. 

After Scott arrived and called the station, they put him through to our control room and an animated graphic soon cut in on Letterman. 

“This is a breaking news alert from Local 6.” Came an urgent voice announcing an important interruption followed by a two-shot of Lauren Rowe and Gaard Swanson on the anchor set only minutes after saying goodnight. 

Garard: We’re following major breaking news. A fight is broken out at Florida mall and police are out in riot gear. Good evening, everybody. I’m Gaard Swanson.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Rowe. We started to hear that this was because of sneakers or at least the sneakers that didn’t end up happening. It was supposed to be a shoe release at a shoe store at the Florida Mall. The crowd was so heavy and so large, according to a public relations expert from the Florida mall, that the store decided not to do the shoe release and apparently that is where the problem began. Now these are pictures that just came into our newsroom. Tons of police are out there. Dozens of police cars. We have helicopters in the air. There are police officers on horseback and riot gear. everything they say is under control now but our Scott Rates who is joining us on the phone. That’s not what you’re hearing, right Scott?

Scott: Lauren, that’s not what I’m seeing. In fact, right as I’m talking to you a big group of ….maybe about 50 people just tried to run across the street. Police in riot gear had to step up and stop to get them from crossing the street to get into the parking lot. I’m looking at 50 or so deputy cruisers cruising up and down the street here you can hear out here two helicopters overhead and again as I’m talking right now another group of about 25 people or so people trying to cross the street  police in riot gear stepping up…stopping them from crossing the street.  Like you said, we heard that this might have started over a pair of sneakers in the foot locker store during the all star festivities here  and I can tell you this is quite a scene, I haven’t seen a scene like this in quite a long time. 

The street in question was neither South Orange Blossom Trail nor Sand lake Road at which the mall is at the intersection of. The street that Scott was talking about was Florida Mall Avenue which is a perimeter road that runs between the actual mall parking areas and the out-parcel businesses that front SOBT and Sand Lake. So it was mainly mall traffic that the kids were running in and out of. Scott is breathlessly describing what he’s seeing.

Lauren: Scott before you go, Can you tell us if the police do have this under control? Or is it still just an ugly mess right now?

Scott: I gotta be honest, looking at this right now it’s a mess. I’m talking to some of the folks out here and they’re telling me it’s a mess too. and again they (deputies) are cruising up and down with their sirens on with their lights on. I’ve seen police on horses out here, trying to cross the road and the police are barricaded off all the mall entrances trying to keep this group of people out of the parking lot of the mall  right now. Quite a scene out here, Gaard and Lauren.

Gaard : I’m just curious because we know that there’s at least 50,000 NBA fans who are converging on our city and it all started tonight and I know the Florida mall has all kinds of events that started tonight. They’re gonna go Friday, they’re gonna go Saturday they’re gonna go Sunday, even if this wasn’t a shoe thing, which we believe it is. This really could be the start of something hopefully not too big. Hopefully not events that we’re gonna see throughout the weekend.

Scott: Absolutely, Gaard, that’s a great point. Not how anybody wanted to start off the NBA All Star Weekend with something like that.

Lauren: Just to recap for everybody. Those are pictures from the Florida mall where large crowds were there for a shoe release. It’s not unusual for police to actually be called to shoe releases throughout the country because of the crowds getting rowdy. Well, this one got out of hand. They call it in the riot gear. The riot police as you heard Scott Rates just say this is not under control a situation where it is dangerous at the Florida mall. If you’re around the area,  avoid it We’ll continue to bring you updates as soon as we can on this massive crowd out of control at the Florida Mall.

Scott signed off and Channel 6 went back to Letterman.

I had just arrived at the mall and set up across Florida Mall Avenue from the massive parking lot where hundreds of people were running around outside the Foot Locker store where the show release was scheduled, shouting and demanding their damn shoes!!!! I threw cables and a tripod onto the roof, tilted the dish toward our microwave received site in Bithlo, cranked up the transmitter, strapped my camera over my shoulder and climbed up the ladder on the back of the truck. Once in place< I dialed up IFB on my phone and slammed an earpiece in my ear.

Minutes later, we were back on the air and the scene that Scott described came to life through my camera.

Lauren: Live picture from down at the Florida Mall. You know right there on the OBT where you can see all of the police officers standing by trying to get this crowd under control. These again are live pictures of our photographer who has set up his tripod and is trying to get you the best pictures right now of the police trying to get this crowd out of the Florida mall  area back into their cars and out of this area. Gaard, you can see they’re actively pursuing these people on horseback. And you see kids out there too. It looks like it’s a serious situation.

Gaard: Lauren, we still can’t confirm what this whole basic riot was. And this brawl out here. But what we do know is that Florida mall has partnered with Adidas and Nike to pull off this major four-day event. Now let’s go back out live to Scott Rates. He’s on the ground and Scott, what are you seeing what are you hearing? Can you provide us any more information?

Scott: Gaard, I’m right in the thick of it, I can tell you that. And you can hear right now police on loud speakers telling people to get off the property, to vacate the property, they want everybody out of here and…..nobody’s moving.  I’m sitting in the middle of a big group of people here. Tensions are heated right now I can tell you that. Major scene. I’ve counted at least 50 deputies out here in cars. They’re on horseback with riot gear. They have shields up. And pepper spray ready to go. In fact some people told me earlier that they were shooting beanbags too. I got a cruiser pulling up to me right here. Two helicopters overhead right now as you can see there from the picture. I can kind of tell you where I’m at.

Gaard: We’re seeing a lot of people milling around. We’re seeing police officers, a lot of the helicopters up in the air. There’s just a lot of people milling around it appears that things are under control. And no one seems to be dispersing at all.

Scott: That’s exactly right You can hear in the background here. Nobody’s moving. Police are trying to move this  huge crowd out of here and they’re not having any luck right now and that’s why the big police presence. It’s hard to believe all of this could have started over some shoes, Gaard.

Lauren: And We have actually relations department at the Florida mall that this did begin with a shoe release…. a shoe release that did not happen because of the large crowds that had gathered. The store that was offering the shoe release decided to cancel the event. And they believe that is what sparked this crowd to get unruly…get out of control. We then began to hear on our police scanners. Them calling for riot police, calling for people with shields to arrive at the Florida Mall to try to get an unruly crowd under control. As you can see just how many units have now been called to the Florida Mall. You’re looking right now at a live picture from our camera that is across the street from the mall. This is now taken over this entire several blocks off of Orange Blossom Trail. And you can see that they have pretty much called out the cavalry. There are very, very few events that would require this many police units.

Gaard: I’m just a little curious why people aren’t leaving. You mentioned we’re looking at numerous….it looks like more than 100. Now I know Scott, you said there was at least 50 patrol cars out there. I can tell you from watching our photographer scan around there appears to be a lot more. This is a lot of manpower here so they’re obviously taking this extremely serious but it just doesn’t look like anybody’s cooperating with anybody right now.

Lauren: And I do have to ask, I’m assuming they’ve got some of these roads shut down. Scott Rates, you’re still with us. Something about OBT being shut down in the area. Do you know anything about this?

Scott: When we came in it wasn’t shut down but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve down that since we’ve come in just purely because all the people that have actually come over to their area I’m at now. It has grown in the short amount of time that I’ve been here from about 50 people now I’m looking at about 200 people coming my way as police continue to flush them out of the Florida mall area and now I see a big group of people actually running right towards me with behind them police on horseback pushing right in my direction that we’re gonna have to back up here…various group of people coming this way..interesting thing out here Lauren and Gaard, I just had a person come up and asking a deputy ‘Hey are they still releasing the shoes?’ I found that kind of hard to believe.

Lauren: Scott, you know what, let’s let you get some information for us for a minute. We’re gonna let you do that because again, these are two separate cameras. We’re looking at a camera by another photographer. (The other camera was, in fact, just video from earlier that the station was replaying. I was the only camera there) Scott Rates is there in another area where you’re seeing the massive crowds who are still trying to arrive for the shoe release that was canceled and then apparently started this entire massive brawl or something that they had going on here. So we’re gonna go ahead and take a break here and try to regroup and get more information for you from the Florida Mall.  Again, a massive crowd gathered there that has caused authorities to come in and try to disperse it. We’ll be right back here on Local 6.

And we were off the air.

It was during that last cut-in that I became uncomfortably aware that a crowd was gathering around me and that the platform I was standing on was slowly starting to move. Slowly at first and then a little more steadily. Back and forth. Then it didn’t. Then it did. Then it stopped again. Finally, I could tell someone was climbing up the rear ladder. I braced for what was about to happen next. 

“Chuck!!!” came a voice. “It’s me, Mike!!!” 

Mike Schlissel is a news photographer at Orlando’s Fox affiliate, WOFL. He was the last person I expected to see climbing up the back of my live truck but I was glad to see him. We’ve been through a lot of shit together.

“Dude, I was about to kick you in the head!!!!” I yelled at him. 

“These assholes (meaning rioters) were about to climb up here. I ran up and pulled them off!!! Had to punch one of them!!!” 

“Much appreciated, bro. Aren’t you guys going live?”

“No, they just sent me down to get footage. I heard Rates was going live.”

“Yeah, he’s around here someplace.” 

Mike saw my van when he pulled in and parked next to me. His first order of business became keeping the sneaker freaks off both of us. 

Minutes later, we broke in for a third update. It was about 12:15 and the Orange County Sheriff’s deputies were beginning to get things under control.

Gaard: Okay let’s go back to Scott Rates and, maybe Scott, it appears from the live pictures we’re looking at right now things have calmed down quite a bit in the last 10 minutes or so what can you tell us what kind of tactics the officers are using now to disperse the crowd.

Scott: Yeah, Guard, there’s still a pretty good bit of tension down here but the crowds definitely thinned out a lot, largely in part to the mounted patrol. They’re using police on horses and they were able to push that crowd really out the front of the Florida Mall using mounted patrol and using the riot police from what looks like to me with their shields and their helmets and the pepper spray. And it looks like what’s happening now people are starting to get back into their cars in the parking lot but it’s going to be a very slow process to get everybody out of here. And this crowd is going to be a scene for quite a while.

Scott wrapped it up and tossed it back to Gaard and Lauren. I got some sound with some of the disappointed sneaker enthusiasts but didn’t stay any longer than I needed to and hightailed it back to base. My day started at 9:00 this morning and was finally ending around 1:00AM.

The next day, the internet was buzzing with details both true and false. The plan was for Nike to release its news Air Foamposite One Galaxy shoes at midnight. Only 1,200 pairs were to be sold nationwide. They were reportedly priced at $220.00 a pair but those who managed to pick up a pair soon had them listed on eBay for $2,500. For a pair of shoes.

And I thought $100.00 for my pair of Brooks Addictions was pricey. 

June 10, 2015 – Volusia County, Fla. 

In this market, There’s a list that you carry in your head of people whose street cred towers above all else’s.

In Volusia County, no one’s is as great as Clare Metz. No one.

Clare is an institution in Volusia and not just because she’s a great reporter. Her tenure with WESH stretches back for decades even before she was a reporter. Her first stint was as a studio camera operator in the early 1980’s. Because WESH was licensed to Daytona Beach (and not Orlando), it was required to staff essentially a separate station there originate a sizable degree of local programming from it. Seriously, this shit mattered to the FCC back then. The station’s license was often challenged by outside interests looking to stir things up because the bulk of WESH’s operations moved to Orlando (well, Winter Park). Therefore, the station maintained its own production facilities there (technically Holly Hill).

I mention all this to reinforce Clare’s bona fides as the reigning icon of Volusia County reporters. With family in both law enforcement and the state attorney’s office there (not to mention a chain of lounges), nothing gets by her. Nothing.

So when another pointless afternoon editorial meeting convenes today and EPX is about to subject us to his typical obtuse and pusillanimous drone-apolooza du jour, out come the devices so that people can look engaged yet be disengaged. I am, of course, no exception. I start scanning Twitter. After about a minute, I stop on a particularly attention-grabbing tweet. Then another one. Reporter Sheli Muniz is sitting next to me and I show it to her. Her eyes bug open. Then I show it to the promotions producer sitting on the other side of me. Her eyes do the same. EPX is noticing this and asks what the deal is.

In two short passages, Clare Metz is tweeting that a tractor-trailer carrying sharks from south Florida to a New York aquarium has skidded off of I-95 in south Volusia County. One of the sharks is reported dead and the effort is being made to move the surviving ones to another truck and get them on their way. Unbelievable. But EPX is not so impressed.

“Yeah, but will there still be a scene there at 11:00when you go live?” 

For decades – centuries, even – writers have strained to create adjectives to describe the absolute disbelief that I am experiencing, an executive producer second-guessing an only-in-Florida, only-in-central-Florida, only-in-Volusia-fricken-County story that has fallen in his lap!!! Astonishing seems too light. Alarming? Possibly. Amazing? Stupid? Much closer. I wish I could agree but this is not entirely unexpected given the 20 years he has said otiose things like this. I feel like all of us in the room are all now dumber after having heard what he just said. Our collective IQ’s have taken a massive hit and we’ve all temporarily lost our sense of taste and smell as a result. Spectacularly indecisive only begins to describe what we all are having to endure here. What’s the opposite of sagacious? 

The room is silent. A pall has taken hold. Everyone is staring at each other in disbelief. I could have sworn I heard a wolf baying in the distance and a the sound of a strong west Texas wind sweeping in from Lake County. This is the most typical of Florida stories and our anodyne leader doesn’t think its worthy of covering.

As is too often the case, I spoke up annunciating in what I can only describe as a pure Christopher Walken speech pattern.

“A truck…

…carrying sharks…

…wrecked…

…in Volusia County.”

Pause.

“One’s dead.”

“The others are being moved…

…on the highway…

…right now…

…to another truck.”

With the incredulousness of Jim Halpert staring at the camera almost every week at Dunder Mufflin, I looked over at the 11:00 producer. EPX continues to hem, hew and haw. He realizes that he’s said the wrong thing (again) but he can’t bring himself to correct the situation. Typical. 

“Well, I’m just saying….”

I gathered my belongings, stood up and left the meeting at that point. Walking into the temporary newsroom in Studio B (the actual newsroom was being remodeled at that point), I ask to anyone who’ll listen if they’re aware of Clare’s tweets about the sharks. It just crossed their dashboards and now the question is what to do. 

“I’m already in a live-truck. Sheli and I are heading up,” I declare just before Sheli walks in.

“So are we going to this shark thing?” She asks.

“Hellz to the yeah, you and me right now. They got us in the 6:00.” That might sound like a lot of time to get there and set up but it’s already 4:00 and it’s been raining all day which means I-4 will be crawling. 

During the next hour, Sheli and I commiserate about what we just had to endure. This is the story of the day and we had to sell – SELL – it to our clueless nightside executive producer. Sheli is very good at staying composed in a newsroom but when she leaves she will hilariously unload on whoever and whatever is stressing her out. She’ll start out with a abrupt OHMYGOD!!! and she’s off to the races. It’s uproarious and we both end up laughing more often than not before arriving at the scene. Florida Highway Patrol PIO Kim Montes is tell us that the truck carrying four Brown Sharks blew a tire near Oak Hill and ended up in a clump of trees in the highway’s median. The rain is continuing as we turn off onto State Road 44 toward I-95. Once southbound, we eventually pass the accident scene on I-95’s northbound lane near Oak Hill. It’s been more than an hour since Sheli and I drove out of the station parking lot and still have to drive seven more miles to the next exit (in northern Brevard County) in order to get back on and head north. 

Insert Keith Morrison voice: “Or do they?”

In a maneuver I can best describe as unnecessarily risky, I notice an unpaved crossover just past the scene and to the left. Troopers often sit here waiting for speeders, filling out paperwork, talking to each other from rolled-down driver’s windows or all three. If a 10-year-old low-clearance Crown Vic with 300,00 miles on it can make that dirt crossing, why can’t a 5-ton Ford E-350 van with a telescoping mast and balding rear tires that were never meant to handle all the weight that comes with it including a 7kw generator thrown in make it as well? Oh, wait. It isn’t dirt after all. It’s mud. Lots of it. And it’s deceptively deep. And there are steep grades going down and coming back up. Too late.

“OHMYGOD!!!!!”, comes a loud voice from the passenger seat, “Chuck, what are you doing?!?!?!?!?” 

“I’m getting us to our 6:00 live shot!!!!” I yell over the gunning of our van’s engine (It’s already 5:15). We have j-u-s-t enough momentum to make it up the northbound embankment and onto the shoulder, mud and road debris flying off the tires and smacking the inside wheel wells and anything else near us. It worked. With certain disaster behind us, the wreck is ahead. Mission accomplished.

Kim is there and waiting for news crews to arrive. I am her favorite. By favorite, I mean her biggest headache. If I had a nickel for every time she yelled at me or called my boss about where I parked on the side of an expressway or interstate highway, I’d have enough to buy her a new patrol car, kevlar vest and fancy trooper hat. Despite all that, she’s one of my all-time favorite PIOs. She directs us to where all the other live trucks are setting up just past the accident scene. We’re in luck. There’s construction going on on the highway (canceled for the day because of the rain) so we can all marshal on the shoulder inside the cones. Otherwise, Kim wouldn’t let anyone pull over and set up. She’s very strict about that. Ask any of my ex-news directors. 

Like us, the other stations have sent their night crews. Except one.

“Hi, Clare!!!!”

“Hey, Chuck!!! Hey Sheli!!!” She knows everyone, even the Orlando reporters. 

We get down to business. Because of lightning in the area from the storm, I’m not putting a 60-foor aluminum mast in the air. Fortunately, our microwave receive tower in Orange City is about a mile high up so I can hit it from here with the mast still retracted in the van. I just swing our transmitter dish west and BAM. Solid signal. There’s not much to record at this point so it’s wide-tight-medium, wide-tight-medium, cutaway of troopers (meaning just get some basic scene video), SOT with Kim, feed it back and get ready for our 6:00 hit. Live see-and-say from Sheli. Done. 

We head up the the New Smyrna Beach exit to grab some dinner and head back to the accident scene. By the time we get there, we’ve learned that Sea World is taking the surviving sharks to Orlando for rehab until new transportation arrangements can be made to take them on to New York. We get video of the transfers to a Sea World truck. 

At 11:00, we went live outside Sea World’s entrance on Central Florida Parkway. It was the lead story that night for us and all the other stations. Was there a scene? No. There was just the conclusion of another story that makes central Florida such a unique place to cover news. 

I love Claire. She has never ceased to make my day brighter whenever I work alongside her. Or even when she just sends out a tweet. 

February 3, 1986 – Oklahoma

You don’t who Wes McKinney is and that’s okay. But today he learned that he’s going away for ten years.

McKinney was a Tulsa financier charged by the feds in a $600-million dollar check kiting scheme . He headed Tulsa-based Republic Financial Corporation and Republic Savings and Trust until they collapsed in September 1984. More than 72-million dollars is still tied up today in bankruptcy proceedings. But it was his Petra group of oil and gas companied that put him deep in the red. Energy prices were plummeting in the early and mid-1980’s. While investors were losing money,  he was refurbishing his yacht, the Lord Jim. He thought he could wait out the slump and that no one would be the wiser. He thought wrong.

“McKinney, you’re a bastard!!!” one lady yelled as he made a hasty retreat out of the courtroom. 

Knee-deep in this was Layn Phillips, U.S. Attorney for northern district of Oklahoma. A native Oklahoman, he not only handled this case but others that were of interest up this direction. As the 10:00 newscast producer at KJRH, Channel 2 here in Tulsa, I often found myself calling his office for updates on this case and others in these parts. Back when we had rolodexes on our desks with dozens of phone numbers haphazardly jammed into them, his card was one of the most thumbed to. 

Having attended the University of Tulsa for both his undergraduate and law degree, he felt he had roots in the town and was always receptive to calls from us. Rather than legaleeze, he spoke in everyday terms about the cases he was pursuing and the basis of the federal charged brought against defendants. A very affable man. The McKinney case however was being tried in Oklahoma City so there was no way we could assign a reporter to it and cover it on a daily basis beyond wire service updates. 

Still, we’d get updates from time to time from his office which, again, we’d call all the time. Either he or his staff would answer and make time for us. Great people. 

His phone number was there on the rolodex card right above his address:

200 Northwest 5th Street

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

The Alfred P. Murray Federal Building 

With the arrival of 2024, WKMG-TV in Orlando marks 40 years of a big leap forward in central Florida broadcasting.
By March of 1984, then-WCPX had seriously outgrown its headquarters on Texas Avenue just north of West Colonial Drive. Now it was about to open its new facility on North John Young Parkway. It was a big event. HUGE!!!! The buildings housing the two other stations in the Orlando/Daytona Beach market were more or less products of their pre-Disney times.
WFTV (ABC) was housed in the decaying and increasingly crime-ridden Parramore section of downtown of Orlando, a once-vibrant working-class neighborhood amongst a hodgepodge of creative city zoning that eventually put industrial properties next to homes and For Rent signs on shuttered buildings along Church Street between Bob Snow’s paean to nostalgic entertainment and the city’s red light district. The station’s aggregation of owners eventually bought a warehouse next door to house its news department when it outgrew the cramped quarters at 396 E. Central. Anchors and staff both had to walk outside, cross a gated driveway and punch-code their way into the original building to air newscasts. What could go wrong? After all, it was printing money after ascending to first place as a result of the massive analog broadcast signal blasting from its east Orange County tower that any old-school vacuum-tube TV could pick up anywhere even without an antenna. Life was good even if Bitholians were getting irradiated and you had to dodge junkies and hookers on your way in to work.
At the same time, WESH (NBC) was still fighting the perception that it was a Daytona Beach station (serving for decades as the default NBC affiliate for Gainesville as well) even though it moved its newsroom and main studio from a residential neighborhood in Holly Hill to one in Winter Park. But with a lousy signal that improved only slightly in 1980 when their transmitter was moved to Orange City, it was an uphill struggle. Employees of the Minnesota Avenue facility (and I was one of them) were always asked if it was a drag having to commute to Daytona Beach every day. For that reason, the station’s license was constantly being challenged by interests claiming that owners Cowles Communications of Iowa weren’t serving Volusia County as FCC documentation mandated at the time. As a concession, Chief Meteorologist Dave Marsh broadcasted his nightly weather segments from the Holly Hill studio so that a certain amount of programming could be marked down on broadcast logs as having originated from Volusia County. Some local programming such as a down-home televised hootenanny called ‘2’s Country’ came from there. Eventually, its early morning newscasts were also produced there and the threats slowly went away. But it would be years before it moved into its current modern-day facilities and its Orlando presence was taken seriously.
But WCPX got the jump on both of them. The solid #2 station had made its original home in Pine Hills ever since that area opened up for development in the 1950’s. The then-progressive community boasted a widened Highway 50 lined with acres of new car dealerships, a Montgomery-Wards department store (now the headquarters for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, btw), a movie theater outside of downtown, an ice skating rink and golf course for the families of newly-opened Martin Marietta plant on the south end of Kirkman Road. Residents could now virtually walk to the nearby fairgrounds for events out there. Yes, Pine Hills was the epicenter of post-war prosperity in central Florida. But by the early 1980’s the station’s original homestead as well as the quonset hut it built next door for production of PM Magazine had become to small and outdated. Pine Hills was deep into its steady decline into what it is today. The cash-flush new owners mapped out its replacement at the north end of the emerging traffic corridor named for Orlando astronaut John Young and not yet comprised of warehouses, convenience stores and a crime-ridden Walmart where an OPD officer would eventually be shot to death. Again, what could go wrong? Its plan was incredibly forward-thinking for its time. The new $9,000,000 home would be two stories tall (TWO STORIES, PEOPLE!!!) with the sales, traffic and art departments on the second floor (WESH’s similar departments were housed in a separate nondescript building next to the station’s general offices, studio and newsroom; its art department even further back behind the garage that housed WESH’s production truck. Ask Kirby if you don’t believe me) which opened up to sunny patios on the roof, have plenty of parking including a gated lot in the back just for news vehicles and the pompous sports director, a fountain out front and two (TWO!!!) studios and control rooms. Let me repeat that. TWO!!! The newsroom was massive with brand new electric typewriters for everyone. Glass panel windows on the building’s south side provided a view for production, promotions and PM Magazine offices of Bay Lake.
They called it Broadcast House, a giant bunker from which 3G signals would decades later struggle to penetrate and escape.
In addition, the empty side lot of a nearby industrial park provided a landing pad for a helicopter. By contrast, the other two stations had to send crews to Herndon (now Orlando Executive) Airport from which to fly out. This was cutting-edge stuff. “We’ll never catch them now” was the often-heard lament at WESH.
For weeks, on-air talent and technical staff picked up their scripts and tapes from their 6:00 newscast (their only evening newscast, only WFTV was doing a 5:30 show), drove up JYP and produced the same show in-house in preparation for the scheduled debut in April, 1984. It all fed through a new state-of-the-art Grass Valley 300 video switcher in the main control room which was covered in clear plastic sheeting when not in use. Everything had that new station smell from the carpets to the cables to the couches in the break-room until Glenn Rinker ceremoniously unwrapped the first pack of Lucky Strikes to give it that genuine working press ambiance.
This was going to be great. Commemorative prints were ordered, key chains were passed out and formal evening-wear was rented for the big debut.
Then it all went to shit.
At 5:59 on April 6, 1984, as the closing credits for MASH faded out, the wrong camera was punched up on the air. It was a bureau-camera trained on Brevard reporter Jacqueline Boulden. She sat stunned. She handled it like a pro, looking slightly off-camera waiting for someone to toss to her for a live debrief which was supposed to come later in the newscast. And the monumental first words of the first newscast on the first day of this modern colossus of Florida broadcasting were uttered off-camera by her photographer.
“That’s fucking live!”
And, if you can believe it, things just went downhill from there. The wrong newscast open rolled, anchors Glenn Rinker and Carole Nelson looked at wrong studio cameras, errant video rolled instead of the stories that they tossed to, the chroma-key effects didn’t work during Tom Hale’s weather segment. In describing the fiasco, Orlando Sentinel TV columnist Noel Holston wrote “cameras bobbed and weaved like punchy boxers. The lighting at times recalled a prison yard during a breakout attempt. Information-filled information boxes floated over the edges of the anchors’ faces. Videotapes did unintended stop action freezes. Weatherman Tom Hale’s electronic ‘weather window’ went dead in mid-forecast.”
“The first three days were real rough,” news director Tom Hauff told the Sentinel. “It’s been real difficult bringing all the pieces together, more difficult than any of us anticipated….We knew there would be problems but it was a combination of people not being familiar with new equipment and equipment that was still being installed, equipment that hasn’t arrived yet, new surroundings and just the new building forcing us to do things differently than we ever had before.” Hale’s weather computer had apparently been damaged in the move and “had to be rebuilt, wire by wire.”
As for that first newscast, it was a struggle just to get to the end of the newscast at which point everyone involved looked like survivors of the final fire-fight in Platoon. Years later, the director told me that he still had nightmares about that day.
A few miles away on Minnesota Avenue, Bill Bauman watched it all and felt a mix of pity and satisfaction. Having just been ousted as news director at WCPX 6 months earlier and picked up as assistant news director at WESH, Bauman shook his head in disbelief. He sympathized with the crew with whom he worked on Texas Avenue after leaving WFTV years earlier but how sorry could he feel for a station that bounced him just before what was to be a big breakthrough? Bill’s a pro. He put Channel 6 in his rear-view mirror and marched forward at WESH.
Years later, Channels 2 and 9 moved into their new facilities along I-4 and the East/West Expressway respectively.
No meltdowns, frozen video or swearing photographers.

*******

But 2024 also marks another anniversary for my former employer. WDBO-TV was the first television station in central Florida having signed on 30 years prior to that auspicious day in 1984. Wikipedia will tell you all you need to know about that including the disastrous call-letter change to WCPX in anticipation of being brought by Columbia Pictures in 1980. When Coca-cola bought Columbia, the deal went south. Maybe that should have been a warning. After selling off WDBO-AM and FM to Katz Broadcasting in the early 1980’s, the station’s longtime owner Outlet Company merged with the Rockefeller Group which owned massive parts of Rockefeller Center in New York. That’s how and when the John Young Parkway facility got built. Then it went up for sale. It got bought by the members of the Marriott family who paid waaaaaaaaay too much (200 million dollars). Not helping was the Governor Bob Martinez era tax on advertising which botched things up even more and was quickly repealed but not before First Media (the ownership company the Marriotts created) took a bath and started severe cutbacks. Secretaries were laid off, updated equipment purchases were postponed and before it was over our 5:30 newscast was cancelled (and not for the last time). It was about then that WESH not-so-miraculously overtook WCPX for second place in overall ratings and never looked back. Some might debate me on this. They’d be wasting their time. And mine. And yours.
Nonetheless, plans are (at last report) afoot this year to celebrate WKMG’s 70th anniversary. Graphics are being made, promos written, programming planned and micro-managing accelerated. The sad part is that there are fewer people around the station to do those jobs and very little to celebrate anyway. That massive parking lot, expanded in the 1990’s to handle a projected expanded staff, more live-trucks and (finally) a satellite truck, sits greatly underused. 1980’s-era satellite dishes randomly dot the sun-beaten asphalt and the manicured landscaping was removed years ago to cut costs. An ugly fence haphazardly surrounds the property (in all fairness, most stations coast to coast have had to do the same out of concerns for employee safety but the others in Orlando at least allow drivers to drive up to the station’s front door. WKMG’s security gate starkly greets you as you turn off John Young Parkway). The helicopter pad, precariously built on-property in the 1990’s and wedged alongside a row of those large satellite dishes and against the station’s main driveway, sits unused. The bright Broadcast House sign out front welcoming to an otherwise dreary, soulless stucco-covered concrete bunker which gets a fresh coat of beige every few years is long gone. While WESH’s imposing tower has a massive flat-screen a hundred feet up beaming moving images and animation in full view of drivers along I-4 in Winter Park, WKMG greets drivers on John Young Parkway with its latest slogan from a static mounted sign that looks like it was rescued from a 7/11 liquidation sale and that can barely be seen through what few living trees still remain on the property. And Majid always seems to leave the flags at half-staff. What’s up with that?
Inside, at least four different editing platforms struggle to communicate with each other along with: the chief engineer who once told me that wifi could never be installed in the building because of ‘security concerns’ (Frank, Panera can have wifi. But we can’t?), can’t keep rain from leaking into the building from those nice patios and watched helplessly as Hurricane Charley knocked out our backup power once the main OUC line gave out forcing the station off the air for hours and not able to disseminate important information during one to the most destructive storms to hit our area (He later would bring in massive power trailers to back up the backup generator during hurricanes); a chief photographer who once texted me and insisted that I call him while I was attending legendary Channel 6 anchor Ben Aycrigg’s funeral and prefers not to burden himself with mundane tasks of schedules, vacation requests and equipment issues in favor of expanding his collection of Emmys (I think he’s at about ten now) through his work in the special projects department; an executive producer who harassed younger (mostly female) reporters to the point of at least one emotional breakdown that I was witness to and was lukewarm about a story of dead sharks on I-95 because there might not still be a scene still there for an 11:00 live shot still keeps getting promoted.
They all still have their jobs. But do you know you doesn’t? The latest round of people laid off, that’s who. They include a newscast producer whose newscast (9:00AM) was canceled for ratings even lower than is acceptable even at Channel 6 (as purported by a social media post promoting the success of their own 9:00 AM newscast, WESH/WKCF cited Nielsen ratings claiming WKMG had an average daily viewership of 1465 viewers a day last August. Channel 6’s desired demographic of women 25-54 was worse, 974 viewers), the assistant news director, the news department’s operations manager who has miraculously kept the station humming along on more occasions than I care to remember, the #2 production department honcho who has forgotten more about producing station specials at KSC, Daytona International Speedway, the theme parks, The Amway Arena and Lake Eola on July 4th than you or I or anyone else will ever know; as well as meteorologist Troy Bridges. All professionals. All, despite differences of opinion that we might have had from time to time, have my utmost respect and best wishes moving forward. Happy New Year.

**********

To be sure, times are tough all over for the field from which I walked away nearly 6 years ago.
Since viewership of linear television began truly dropping off in the early 2000’s, advertising revenue has nose-dived. In June of 2001, then-WESH general manager Bill Bauman told the Orlando Sentinel “I’m concerned about the tune out of news at 6:00 PM. It’s industrywide. No one seems to have an answer.” That Article (“It’s Bad News For Newscasts – Tell Us Why”) cited declines in 6:00 news viewership from May of 2000 to 2001; 12% for WFTV, 15% for WESH and a whopping 24% for WKMG. In May 1996, WFTV’s 6:00 scored an average 17 rating (number people out of all the HUTs <households using TVs>) with a 34 share (what percentage of TV-viewing households were actually watching anything at all), WESH 8/16 and WCPX’s 6/11. The last time I checked (January 2018), WFTV had a 1.5 share and a 6 rating. WESH 1.3/6 and WKMG 1.0/4. Just between 1997 and 2008, WFTV’s 6:00 household viewership slipped from 166,000 households to 123,000. And it’s only gotten worse, for everyone.
And that’s just Orlando. Consolidation of television ownership groups and nationwide media organizations have put the squeeze on spending all around. A recent article in on Poynter’s website cited employment firm Challenger, Gray’s research citing more that 2,600 job cuts in news across the nation in 2023. The number, they say, includes broadcast, digital and print employees. “The news sector has lost more jobs this year through November that it did in all of 2022 or 2021. Media, of which news is a sub-set, has experienced 20,342 cuts, the highest year-to-date figure since 2020.” Layoffs in 2023 included The Washington Post, NPR, Buzzfeed News, Vox, Wired and The Texas Tribune. Gawker shut down in February. Layoffs that started in late 2022 at CNN continued into 2023. A friend from the Dallas CBS O&O (a station owned and operated by a network) was just laid off from a lengthy career because parent company Paramount Global is gushing red ink. Another friend who worked for decades at WCBS-TV in New York just accepted a buyout.
Not a week goes by these days without an announcement of layoffs in media, tech and finance.
I could go on but hopefully you get the picture.

**********

Are other Orlando stations getting hit as hard by layoffs as WKMG? Not really. Since being purchased by Apollo Global venture capital fund in 2019, WFTV has elected to mostly not fill positions once someone has left (and people are ALWAYS leaving, trust me). As indicated by my WordPress blog ‘Hard Times at 9’ from last year, the best example of this is the disappearing main anchor. Neither Bob Opsahl nor Jorge Estevez were replaced when they left in 2016 and 2020 respectively. Greg Warmoth now carries the whole load from 4:00 to 6:30 and again at 10:00 and 11:00. That’s four hours a day on the air. Unbelievable for a market this size.
WESH has managed to keep its numbers fairly steadily while replacing veteran reporters Claire Metz, Bob Kealing and Amanda Ober with lesser experienced (and thus lesser paid) replacements. When anchor Jim Payne retired last year, Stewart Moore, who was already on staff, moved up to replace him. I doubt he’s making the Payne bucks though. But they do embrace the longevity of their news staff recently citing ten of its members as having served at least 33 years. Only a handful in WKMG’s newsroom can come close to 10 years much less 33. And it looks to stay that way as well. Forever.
While a plaque near Channel 6’s employee entrance (close to where a trailer was set up in late 2001 in which a guy named Nardi was allowed to open everyone’s mail) commemorates former Post/Newsweek-now-Graham Media president Bill Ryan for having the vision to “purchase this property (in 1997), rename it in honor of Katherine M. Graham…and make WKMG Orlando’s best television station”, the poor guy just didn’t pay much attention to his investment after that. Acquire a sister station like WESH (WKCF), WFTV (WRDQ) and WOFL (WRBW)? Naw. Keep swapping out anchor teams? Sure, why not? Cycle through news directors, assistant news directors and general managers for the first few years? Stay the course. Ryan’s successors weren’t much better at running the place either. After all, this is a station that told Nancy Alvarez that she’d have to go elsewhere to be an anchor, Tom Terry that he didn’t have what it took to be a meteorologist there and NBC Sports anchor Todd Lewis that he wasn’t cutting it as a local sports director. Other examples: Departed meteorologist Reynolds Wolf is now one of the main talents at the Weather Channel. His colleague Larry Mowry is in Dallas. Reporter Adam Longo, released during a particularly ugly 2009 station bloodletting in which some 20 employees were frogmarched out in one day, is now an anchor in D.C. Jacqueline London is an anchor at the NBC station in Philadelphia. Last year, two of my esteemed colleagues at Channel 6 retired…from Channel 2. “Our people are our greatest assets.” Yeah, at other stations.
With the exception of the 2009 layoffs, past forced departures at Channel 6 didn’t get as messy; A Todd Jurkowski here, a Marla Weech there. But even an Orlando news legend like pioneering African-American photographer Tee Taylor was eventually asked to gather his personal belongings after 50 years of service to the station. You would think a lifetime achievement Emmy would solidify his place in a newsroom with an increasingly younger and lesser experienced staff desperately in need of mentors. You’d be wrong. The centerpiece of every annual Black History Month observance at Channel 6 was discarded just like the hundreds of master tapes in 2013 on which the history of a once-vibrant news operation was preserved for posterity in order to make more room in an upstairs storage area. Gone are the entire legacies of Aycrigg, Ed Trauschke, Ellen Macfarlane and much of Tony Pipitone. Their efforts helped define solid reporting in Orlando. Shepard Smith’s haphazard nightly look-at-me reports? Okay, those won’t be missed.
In fact, news photographers in general are an endangered species at WKMG with reporters (mostly in Volusia and Brevard bureaus) shooting their own stories due to cutbacks caused by a near-nonexistent viewership and the weak advertising revenue. No other stations in Orlando have gone to this extreme. And it shows. James Sparvero’s iPhone interviews and standups are a pitiful new low. Would someone please at least buy him a selfie stick?
Newscast producers, who once focused on details like clarity, story flow, visual elements and using the fewest words to convey the greatest information, now mindlessly stack meaningless stories together, cut-and-paste news releases, rehash scripts and video from previous newscasts and make sure the gimmicky “Getting Results” is written into every script. Is it necessarily their fault? Not really. Since the early 2000’s, producers everywhere have been asked to take on a greater technical role in piecing their newscasts together. They have to create multiple placeholders for a single story, come up with something called a snipe, make their own graphics (often misspelled, I could publish a coffee-table book about lower-thirds gone wrong) and code their shows. That last one means to assign a cryptic set of letters and numbers (and something called a grommet) to a box in the rundown to make sure the right talent camera, talent microphone, video source, audio source, OTS (over the shoulder) graphic (if there is one), etc., is properly placed. One simple mistake can thrown everything off. In fact, Channel 6 used to rehearse its 11:00 PM newscast at 10:40 every night to make sure everything worked and to fix what didn’t. (Anchor microphones were often left open during pauses in these exercises and we in the field often heard them over IFB disparaging reporter tosses, lead-ins or the newscast in general. We. Can. Hear. You. Laur. En!!!!!) All this effort takes away from the main job of the producer which is (or was) focusing on the editorial content and integrity of the newscast as well as updating/improving it in the lead-up to its airing. While that still might happen, producers spend an inordinate amount of time simply making sure tab-A goes into slot-B. Newscast directors used to oversee this. Not any more. It’s all on you, Ashley, Brittany, Kelly, Shelly and the other recently promoted ex-interns struggling to fill time. All of this was supposed to save money by eliminating two positions in the control room, technical director and audio operator. Making your own graphic means no more graphics operator. Going with an all-digital playout of video means no more tape play-back operator in the bowels of the operations area of the station. Studio techs were replaced by robotic cameras operated by one person. Roy and Joe got sent packing. And (my favorite cost-saver) anchors had to start being their own teleprompter operators, once an entry-level position that got your foot in the door.
Let’s continue. Local stations used to have a local staff inside the building that ran a giant control board and switched back and forth from local programming, commercials, network programming and live events such as newscasts. They followed daily broadcast logs that mapped out what aired that day. In the cost-cutting digital age, that job was assigned to a broadcast hub in Atlanta where a minimum of staff monitors multiple local stations’ automated programming. What could go wrong? As it turned out, a lot did.
“It was a disaster,” said one departed employee. In the startup, commercials popped up during network programming, the station sat in black or one then the other. This continued for weeks until, like that fateful chain of events in 1984, it was finally brought under control. But even now you can still watch it happen during soaps, Colbert or CBS Sunday Morning. The folks who used to handle that job? Laid off or reassigned to other meaningless tasks until their retirement window opened.
All those jobs were eliminated. Money saved: apparently not enough. Even when you’re buying on the cheap. Real cheap.
As proof, note the barrage of emails, tweets and Facebook posts berating the failures of new technology. Take the day in 2014 when virtually NO newscast video could be played from our server when it stopped accepting new files. I was told to work around this problem by ‘hot-rolling’ my story from my live-truck that night at 11:00. “The problem we had at 5:00, 6:00 and 7:00 grew so bad by my show,” tweeted one producer, “we couldn’t send ANY video to the playback system.” When asked by a photographer from another station if the playout server was down, he replied “Some kind of communications/gateway error. It ultimately crashed every edit station. The manufacturer reps just happened to be here today. Interesting coincidence.” He concluded with “cross your fingers and pray it gets fixed.”
Stuff like this happened. All. The. Time.
And don’t get me started on Velocity (too late), the non-adaptive counter-intuitive editing software WKMG editors and photographers started using in 2012. Everybody hated it. Adobe Premiere? Edius? Final Cut Pro? Avid Newscutter? Nope, we’re buying our newsroom software now from a defense contractor (Harris). And it crashed. In both training sessions and in the field. And it crashed again. And it crashed even more. It crashed so often that an emergency summit was finally held in the general manager’s office on the day in 2013 when a heavily-armed UCF student almost went postal in a dorm and the stations went wall-to-wall with coverage. That’s the wrong time for you to finally learn that the crappy editing software that your chief engineer assured you could and would handle the task has failed. When I once tweeted #VelocitySucks, my news director dragged me into his office, berated me and warned me that my tweet might go viral. This from a guy who sent out an email asking us to throw other co-workers under the bus in the famous ‘battery-drainer’ memo and didn’t think that it would be leaked and get national attention as high-profile as MSNBC. Google it if you don’t believe me. Yeah, he’s lecturing me. Velocity? It kept crashing until the day he left and the day I left. It’s probably still crashing today.
Parts falling off live trucks, microwave towers that unexpectedly failed, a new audio recording booth with no acoustical foam on the walls, random blue-screens of death, fingerprint-scanners meant to unlock employee entrance doors not working in the rain, and producers being told to back up their rundowns by 4:00 PM because the power surge caused by our back-up generator kicking in when the afternoon rain storms regularly rolled in would delete everything.
As noted earlier, the chief engineer responsible for all this and more is still employed. Bless his heart.
Oh, but the station finally got wifi.

**************

All of this has lead up to what? In the eight-plus years since I bailed from WKMG to join central Florida’s news leader, here’s what’s changed there: nothing. Not a blessed thing. The shows are as stale as they were in 2015 when the last group of managers was replaced by the current group of managers who promised to get results. They have not unless you count continued mediocrity from doing more with less as a result. The news director, sports director and main news anchor are hires of least-inconvenience (promoted from the marginal talent within as if that means anything anymore. In fact, the current news director started as an intern herself and has never worked for any other station in any other market in her career) and the one person who got moved from meteorologist to news anchor had to move back to the weather board for a week when heavy weather moved through and chief meteorologist Tom Sorrels was at an out of town conference. They might call that flexibility. I call it sad. This is a top 20 market. Your bench should be deeper than that. A general apathy has, in fact, settled into the newsroom. No one seems to know who’s in charge. It seems to be all CYA and just make sure the minimal amount of effort being expended is enough to get by and not get you laid off in the next round (and, believe me, it’s coming). The general malaise that creeps in every few years gets attributed to the building having been built on an ancient burial ground. I’m not sure if that’s true but the cremains of one employee was and has been kept in an upstairs filing cabinet near where those tapes used to be. Not making that one up. Ask around.
The one-time parent company of the Washington Post tends to give WKMG a pass at shareholder meetings every May in Washington D.C. (and I’ve attended more than a few) while Katherine Graham’s son Donald celebrates the strength and longevity of its other stations in Jacksonville, Detroit, San Antonio, Houston and, at one time, Miami. All great stations. The company’s take on their Orlando station: We’re still working on it. We’ll figure it out eventually. Let’s lay off a few more people and cut our losses for the year.
To make that point even more clear, talent from Spectrum (which owns Spectrum News 13), Cox (which owns WFTV), Hearst (which owns WESH) and Fox (which owns WOFL) have transferred from smaller markets to work for their sister stations here in Orlando. Not a single employee from a Graham Media Group station elsewhere wants to work at WKMG. No one. Why should they? No one’s getting laid off at their other stations. Just here.
So sit back and enjoy WKMG’s 70th anniversary observance. I’m sure it will be a great one. Just don’t expect to see a parade of past anchors and reporters congratulating the station on its longevity. No David Wittman, no Pamela Brady, no Mike Storms, no Gaard Swanson, no Ping (big or little). Most of them, along with producers, assignment editors and assorted other newsroom denizens, disappeared mysteriously over the years in what was almost always described as the station going in a “new direction.” That direction was generally the wrong one but at least they were (sometimes) trying to improve things. The current look of News-6 is as played-out as anything you’ll see across the vast wasteland. And it will stay that way. It’s like watching benchwarmers start the second half of a football game that their team has already lost. Garbage time. They’ll do the best they can with inane ideas like Inconvenient Weather, the weekend anchor’s DIY Home Repairs, something called The Takeover, an FHP trooper doing morning traffic reports (and who apparently can’t seem to leave his political views at the door when he arrives in the morning) and breaking into programming to report live on a shoe riot at Florida Mall. That last one happened years ago but it’s still my favorite.
Here’s to 70 years, Channel 6. Have fun with your exercise in self-congratulatory irrelevance even though you’ve generally accepted your place in Orlando as a station fighting to stay out of 4th place. I’m almost embarrassed to be collecting a pension from you. Almost.
And congratulations on whatever you think you’ll achieve by your latest round of job cuts. Many in that group are in their 50’s and will have to start all over again somewhere else. That’s not a good place to be in this day and age of widespread layoffs. May the next round include those who thought they could stop or even slow that 40 year skid but just ended up along for the ride before themselves being ditched.
That’s the real legacy of News 6, a station with a great future behind it.

**************

Post-script: The wiser of my former colleagues might be well advised to forward this along to Mr. Graham as a printed version of this missive is on its way to Arlington as you read it. I doubt he’ll only then want to learn about it.

June 29th, 2004 – Orlando

Lee Constantine is getting on my last damn nerve.

Earlier today, the state senator from Seminole County was standing next to Jeb Bush as the governor signed the Wekiva Parkway and Protection Act. The measure was sought by environmentalists in order to connect State Highway 429 near Apopka to Interstate 4 near Sanford while protecting the environmentally sensitive areas in Orange and Seminole counties through which it will run. 

“If we live in paradise,” Bush said, “we need to protect it. If we don’t, paradise goes away.” These are ironic words for a man whose family made much of its fortune in the oil business. 

Nonetheless, the law was championed in the Florida state legislature by Constantine and others who say they want to protect the ecological balance along the Wekiva River but who also want a new highway for new development and the sweet new taxes that come along with it all. The effort had been stalled in Tallahassee and remained the last portion of a highway beltway round central Florida. Nonetheless, it would take nearly 20 years for it to finally open. The interstate highways of 10, 12, 55 and 610 were completed along south Louisiana more quickly. Ask me how I know that sometime.

Following the signing ceremony, the local newsies gathered around Bush to ask him how this all came about and where state transportation officials go from here. After that Bush left and our attention turned to Lee.

That’s when things got awkward.

Just last month, Lee’s Mercedes was pulled over by Maitland Police. On that early Sunday morning, they claimed that Lee was drifting in and out of lanes and when pulled over had the smell of alcohol on his breath. Tough break. 

Except for this: Lee, then an Altamonte Springs city commissioner, had been pulled over 14 years earlier for the same reason and he eventually plead guilty of DUI. 

But back in May, Lee refused to take a breathalyzer test and kept asking to speak with then Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary. 

“Kevin is my friend,” Lee said, “I’d like to talk with him.”

It’s another instance of Lee trying to weasel out of clear blame. 

I had known Lee since I was a pledge in Kappa Sigma’s chapter at the University of Central Florida during my sophomore year. Lee was a charter brother from the chapter’s founding in 1971. He also served as president of UCF’s student government before moving onto a seat on the Altamonte Springs City Commission. Sometimes you’d run into him knocking back a few at UCF basketball games where he’d sit with other brothers from that era. They all welcomed me with open arms. Over the years, he’d recruit undergrads to volunteer for his charity events. You’d also see him drive up in his convertible Mustang to the chapter’s parties and chatting it up with little sisters and other young women who were stopping by. Since he wasn’t married or anything, no one thought much of it. But slowly you would catch on to Lee’s sense of self-importance and his need to be the center of attention. This is endemic of most politicians so I let him have his forum with the girls and his well-worn lines. As the years wore on, you’d see him at our homecoming gatherings, Founders’ Day parties and chapter anniversary celebrations especially during the years that we were trying to get our house built on Greek Park Row at UCF. He’d work the room alright but always be focused on the single ladies there and if they needed a fresh drink. And they always did, especially if it was offered by a member of the Florida legislature.

I generally gave Lee a pass. If he wanted to speak at a Founders Day or chapter anniversary dinner that I planned in order to impress the vacuous skank he brought with him, I’d let him. If I covered an event that he was attending, I’d get video of him if not a sound-bite. If he asked me to produce a 6-minute video for Charity Challenge, I would in exchange for an interview with him for a chapter promotional video I was producing. 

On the occasion of that sit down interview, I arrived at his Altamonte Springs office early to get prepared. When Lee arrived later, he excused himself to speak with two female members of his staff. In the other room, I could hear him seriously upbraiding them for some trivial matter. It made things awkward when he emerged to bring me into his office. The staffers remained behind in the room that they had met in, probably to recover from his tongue-lashing. They were not present in the office at all when I packed up and left after the video shoot.

Eight years ago, MTV’s Choose or Lose bus rolled in to the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios. The purpose was to get young voters registered and involved. Government figures such as Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham and Lee were there as well as MTV news correspondent John Norris. B-52’s lead singer Fred Schneider was also there to promote youth involvement in the upcoming presidential election and his solo band which was scheduled to perform later that day. Lee was introduced to Fred and they spoke for a while although I don’t think Lee really picked up on much of what Fred was saying. Nevertheless, I took a photo of the two, Lee in his preppy pleated Dockers and Wayfarers and Fred in a short-sleeved thrift-store patterned shirt. I later dropped a print of the photo off at Lee’s office along with a sticker on the back so he’d know who he was standing next to.

“Fred who?”

“Schneider.”

“And he’s in a band?”

“Yes, the B-52’s”

“Like the airplane?”

“Yes, like the airplane.” Don’t line up to correct me. I know that the band was named for the bouffant hair-do named for the Cold War bomber. But this conversation had to end while my spleen was still comfortably in my abdomen. 

But today is a day for serious business. Following the speeches by Bush, Constantine and Republican House member Fred Brummer, who had opposed the plan as late as April, each player in this plan answered questions about the new legislation and the expressway’s future. But it was the first chance that the local press had had to ask Lee about most recent this arrest.

Sensing what was to come, Lee started with an acknowledgement of the interest in talking to him but wanted to discuss the legislation first. He described it as a bold step in making sure transportation demands were met but that also the needs of the fragile environment were served as well. A few sentences off glorified press-release politics later, the attention turned toward his arrest and desire to talk with Kelvin Bearer that night he was pulled over for DUI.

In repeating what his attorney Mark Nejame stated earlier, Lee insisted that his request to speak with Beary was not an attempt to evade arrest and insisted that his remarks mischaracterized in their press. I’m sorry but being recorded asking to speak to the sheriff when you’re pulled over is exactly what it is. Mischaracterized? That dog simply won’t hunt. 

Reporter Mike Deforest and I went live from the Wekiva for our noon newscast. We came back to the station after that to put the Wekiva together for 6:00. After ingesting all of my raw video, I told our editors that Lee’s comments about his DUI was part of that footage. The producers planned to use it as a ‘break-out’ VOSOT in another newscast away from the Wekiva story. After going live at 6:00, gassing up my live-truck and returning to the newsroom, I went through my normal routine of unloading my gear, putting my batteries on a charger and making sure that my tapes were placed on the ‘Tuesday’ shelf along with field tapes from every other story that every other photographer shot that day. In decompressing, I took a seat in the newsroom and watched the rest of CBS Evening News on the in-house feed. 

“Chuck, you have a phone call. It’s Lee Constantine,” came a voice from the assignment desk. 

What does he want?

Ire is the best word to describe what came next.

“Chuck, the only reason you guys showed up today was to ambush me about my arrest. You didn’t mention any of the work that I’ve been doing to protect the Wekiva.”

“Did you see our story, Lee?”

“No, that’s what I’ve been told.”

Well, whoever told you that is wrong. The very last sound-bite in the piece was you saying how glad you were that this was worked out and how you hope this sets an example for legislation like this into the future.”

Silence.

“Well, I’ll double check on that but how can you guys give more time to my arrest than, than this important accomplishment? I’ve been upfront about it all along.”

“Lee, you asked for Sheriff Beary to intervene or at least you would have if they had let you call him. And this was the first time since then that we’ve had the opportunity to ask you directly about it. Don’t tell me we’ve been unfair. Your sound-bite on your arrest was in a completely different story. In fact, it was just a quick voice-over with a sound bite. I shot the Wekiva story and I made sure that I got plenty of video of your out of respect that you and Brummer came to agreement on the issue in a relatively short time. What other station did that? Stop your complaining and take responsibility for your actions. And maybe go look at the story.”

“Well, I just wanted to express my concerns,” Lee said before turning more to a more sympathetic voice, “I know that you have to do what you have to do and present what they want you to present.”

“That’s absolutely not true. And the next time this grates on you, Lee, call my news director. In fact, he’s in his office now. I’ll transfer you to him.”

“Okay.”

I couldn’t wait to get off that line. Minutes later, after I noticed that Skip Valet had hung up his phone, I knocked on his office door. Skip hadn’t had the experiences that either he predecessors or I had had with Lee.

“Why is he calling you?” Skip asked.

“We’re fraternity brothers and he must feel that I am part of the liberal media conspiracy against him so he takes it out on me. This is not new. I tell him the same thing every time. Call the bosses.”

“And you’re sure about him being in the Wekiva story.” Skip had bent over backwards wanting make sure the two stories were not in the same newscast.

“Yep,” I said, “Mike put his sound-bite at the very end. It was a nice way to tie it up and no one mentioned his DUI until the next newscast.”

“Sounds like a real winner. Okay, thanks. Tell him to call me and not you next time.”

“I always do and he never does.”

Skip’s expression was that of resignation in a sense. I’m sure he’s dealt with this at his Jacksonville station earlier in his career.

It didn’t end there. Lee cornered me during a gathering of 1970’s brothers at the home of one of our alumni on Lake Howell in Casselberry. He just couldn’t let it go. I repeated that I wasn’t the person to speak with on the issues of news coverage and that, again, he should speak to my news director. Only the intervention of other Kappa Sigmas attending the event caused him to back off. I was within seconds of leaving the gathering altogether.

The behavior that most of us outgrown at a certain point was still part of Lee’s free-wheeling style into the 2000’s. In 2015, after he left the Florida legislature and was elected to the Seminole County Commission, complaints emerged about his being a nightmare boss. According to a WFTV investigation, in his first three years in office “three of his aides had quit our asked asked to be assigned to another office. In each case they all had the same complaint. Soul-crushing, demeaning, unfair, inconsistent and rude were all terms used by former aides to Constantine.” When one of them sent a letter to the county’s Human Resources department claiming a hostile work environment, Lee said “‘If she didn’t want to work that hard, she could have come to me and we could have rectified it.’” The woman “told investigators that the former state senator berated her, chastised her, and even accused her of having dyslexia because she had given him a wrong phone number.” The worker transferred to another office for Seminole County. Lee said he would go through ‘management training’. Who knows if he ever did. 

In 2019, a UCF intern working for Lee’s non-profit Charity Challenge accused him of sexual harassment. 

“He placed both of his hands on my shoulders and started massaging them,” she wrote in a letter to Seminole County’s HR department adding that he touched her again later that day. “Commissioner Constantine snuck up behind me and grabbed my sides, tickling them.” She reportedly ended her internship immediately. “I decided I could not feel safe with Commissioner Constantine.” She also informed UCF who also brought the matter to the county. The county countered that since Charity Challenge was separate from them, they had no dog in this fight. A short time later, UCF said it will no longer supply interns to Constantine at either Seminole County or Charity Challenge. 

Shortly after that, a petition was circulated on Change.org calling for Lee to resign his post on the commission.

“The fact that he roved around the event space and visited the victim on multiple occasions in an effort to objectify and victimize her sexually is proof positive that Constantine is no longer fit to serve in public office.” 

I started to steer clear of Lee after that. When I couldn’t avoid him, I had minimal conversations with him. When even that was too taxing, I didn’t talk to him at all, told him I was too busy.

It’s sad when someone that you used to have some respect for just can’t seem to appreciate the position that he holds. 

It’s time to move on.

July 4, 1987 – Ft. Mill, S.C.

I’ve seen crazy. But I’ve never seen it like this.

A few days ago, reporter Rick Jackson told me he heard Reverend Jerry Falwell would be visiting Heritage USA today. Rick has been covering the PTL scandal since it broke earlier this year. Despite our otherwise meager resources and lackluster ratings, we’ve been able to deliver some of the best coverage of the ongoing saga of Jim and Tammy Bakker and their Fort Mill, S.C. ministry through Rick. He punched above his weight.

Thus began a cascade of televangelist downfalls. Earlier this year, Oral Roberts said that God would “call me home” if he didn’t raise 8 million dollars from his followers for a what he claimed was a medical missionary scholarship program at which time he entered the Prayer Tower on the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa and stay there until the goal was met. The move garnered massive attention from local and national media.

But none of that would rise to the level of ongoing stochastic pulchritude that the almost-daily flow of new developments from Ft. Mill, South Carolina, ground zero of Heritage USA and its colorful cast of characters, would eventually provide. 

For years, Jim and Tammy had produced their own religious programming (at my station WPCQ back when Ted Turner owned it) and, thanks to their nationwide congregation, bought time on various TV stations around the country for them to air. But buying 1-hour reels of 2-inch-wide video tape and shipping those telecasts around the country was expensive and a logistical nightmare. It was a then that Jim had an idea. He would purchase a channel (or transponder) on a satellite to directly feed content to mostly independent TV stations and cable systems nationwide and create his own network. With the explosion of cable TV in the 1970’s, providers were scrambling for content even if it was the grift of a couple of bible college drop-outs. Home Box Office pioneered the practice in the early 1970’s and Turner himself used it to put his Atlanta-based UHF station into homes across the country for free and make his money from advertising to the larger audience. Bakker’s aim was to not only rake in money from donors but to charge other evangelists to put their programs on satellite as well. The operation would at first be run out of a facility he built south of Charlotte and called Heritage Village (coinciding with the American bicentennial. He eventually bought 2,300 acres near Forth Mill, just south of the North Carolina state line. Bakker called his ministerial vision Heritage USA and it opened in 1978. From then through the early 80’s, the complex would include a hotel with a shopping mall, waterpark, rides, an RV park, state-of-the-art television recording and uplink facilities and more. Its growth seemed exponential thanks to his legions of worshippers and their donations. But Bakker was selling them lifetime 4-day/3-night annual packages on the grounds faster than he could build places for them to stay. By 1986, Heritage attracted some 6 million visitors a year and was the third largest theme park attraction in the U.S. behind Walt Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in California. And like the Disney parks, Bakker wanted more people staying there in order to help boost the bottom line.

That’s when the trouble really started. 

In many quarters, builder Roe Messner is credited with the construction of hundreds of churches and religious facilities throughout the United States. He was a much sought-out contractor and his Wichita, Kansas, based company built most of Heritage USA. When it came time for another of Bakker’s massive expansion plans, he and Messner set out to build Heritage Towers. Bakker’s plan was to convince more of his followers, or PTL Partners, to donate $1,000 for which they would receive three night’s lodging per year for the rest of their lives. Money was raised and construction began. As the concrete went up, many of the partners began to realize that plans fell way short of reality. Pledges and space didn’t match. The math concluded that PTL could never accommodate that many people. Ever. They had been defrauded.

Meanwhile, the Bakkers were living a life of luxury with a large overpaid staff, expensive cars, jewelry and homes from Florida to Tennessee to California as well as a grand estate in nearby Tega Cay, S.C. Maybe someone should have taken notice of this. No one did. The whole story is chronicled in other books that explain this a lot more than I can, taking into account Jim and Tammy Fay’s history with other ministries and development of their own faith-based shenanigans. This is what ultimately brought them down and I was knee deep in it. 

Following up on a spate of rumors and federal investigations dating back to 1979, Charlotte’s daily newspaper, the Observer, began looking into the situation and discovered even more massive irregularities. When it began publishing the results of its investigation, the proverbial waste-product hit the fan. Prominent in the findings was a quarter-million dollar payment to a Long Island church secretary who claimed that Bakker and another minister tag-teamed her in a Florida hotel room in 1980. Once word of that got out, things went to a whole new level of national attention. Mail and wire fraud were one thing. Paying off a rape victim for her silence was another.

The Bakkers themselves were starting to feel the squeeze of the series of events. In January, claiming a dependance on prescription medication, Tammy Faye retreated to the couple’s Palm Springs home to rehab at the Eisenhower Memorial Hospital in Rancho Mirage. She said she could see her “demons coming at me.”

“I saw hell. It was like satan was trying to kill me,” she said in a videotaped message played during a PTL telecast in March. By that point, rumors were flying that Tammy was either dead or that the two had separated. Bakker said his family had been made aware of her condition after she contracted what he described as a life-threatening bout of pneumonia earlier in the year and that doctors advised her not to return to television for a year. In the message, Tammy claimed that her drug problem began 17 years earlier when she was pregnant with her daughter Tammy Sue and she took allergy pills which Jim claimed “kept her hyper.” This lead to prescription tranquilizers and things got worse from there.  

Days after that telecast and after being presented with evidence of financial and personal misconduct, Jim Bakker resigned from PTL. It was the culmination of apparent threats of a takeover by rival Assemblies of God televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. 

Swaggart had gotten wind of Bakker’s financial house of cards and the Hahn payoff. In leaving Heritage, Bakker asked another televangelist Jerry Falwell to temporarily assume control of the ministry and the park until the scandal died down. But Falwell had his own plans and in late April barred the Bakker’s from ever returning Heritage. Falwell claimed that the Bakkers had engaged in homosexuality and wife-swapping and were unfit to return to their ministry. It didn’t help that televangelist John Ankerberg went on Larry King Live in March and made multiple charges of moral improprieties as well.

Discordantly Jim’s dad, Raleigh, denied it all. 

“I talked a few days ago,” Raleigh told news organizations in May, “He’s hurting because all those things are untrue. Those things John talked about did happen but not with us. Those people are long gone from here. Jim wasn’t involved in anything.” Raleigh then turned his attention to Ankerberg. “I told him (in a letter) that he was unscriptural in the way he did this (making accusations about Jim).” 

The war of words between the Bakkers and Falwell escalated with the couple appearing appearing on Nightline in late May (20 million viewers tuned in, the show’s highest ratings ever) to accuse Falwell of stealing PTL and Falwell countering the next day with a 90-minute news conference blasting back and reiterating charges of lurid behavior on Jim’s part (“He needs to acknowledge these homosexual problems dating from 1956 to the present”) and claims of greed on the Bakkers’ part in the form of severance demands from the couple as a prelude to their departure from PTL. Those demands included lifetime salaries a year of $300,000 for Jim and $100,000 for Tammy, title to the PTL house at Tega Cay, S.C., health insurance and legal fees, cars, a security detail, rights to books & records and a maid and secretary for a year. “I don’t see any repentance there,” said Falwell. “I see the greed.”

Eventually the Bakkers made their way back to Tega Cay. On June 10th, they flew back from Palm Springs stopping at Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport for a connecting flight and calling the Charlotte Observer. 

“Our goal is to be on the air in 30 days.” When asked for specifics, he declined. “We haven’t gotten all the bugs worked out – we haven’t bought cameras yet.” All this while the Bakkers had still pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1987 alone.

Also in June, PTL filed for bankruptcy protection. Debts were listed at more than 50 million dollars

“Buildings have been constructed to pay for prior buildings and negative cash flow,” said new PTL chief operating officer Harry Hargrave quoted in the Washington Post later in the month. “The game has ended and we can’t build any more buildings to pay for past fiscal sins.”

The Post article, written in part by reporter Michael Isikoff, laid it all out. “Beyond the questions of financial misconduct, the PTL story also raises serious questions about the lack of scrutiny of religious organizations in general and TV preachers in particular – many of whom have long sought refuge from financial accountability under the cover of the First Amendment. In the case of PTL, as far back as 1982, a Federal Communications Commission staff report charged that the ministry had violated federal wire fraud laws against misleading fundraising over the air. The case was dropped. The FCC report was dispatched to the Justice Department but nothing was done.” That about sums things up.

Days ago, Falwell announced a visit. Bakker’s supporters announced that they’d be there as well despite being told that they would be restricted to the parking lot of Heritage’s administrative building’s parking lot and risked arrest if they interfered with a pro-Falwell rally today on the park’s grounds. 

“We’re going to sing some hymns and pray some prayers and just hope God listens to us and gives us back our property,” said Marietta businessman and association president Joe Havailand. “I think he (Falwell) has the right to come out and talk to us…We’ve sent telegrams and everything else but he’s been avoiding us.”

Other Bakker backers were less diplomatic. 

“I look for them to arrest me but if they arrest me there will be a lot more people behind me to take my place,” said Paul Wood, also with the Association of PTL Partners. That was yesterday. The stage is set.

I met Rick at the station along with his wife Brenda Cain and photographer Steve Saxon. After piling into one of the aging 36 News cars, we drove the 20 miles or so to Fort Mill. Along the way, Rick gave me an insider’s look at the players at PTL and how they figured into things. I knew about PTL president Richard Dortch from our nightly reporting of his struggles to remain in control of the ministry after Bakker’s resignation but there were many others: Bakker body guard and confidant Don Hardester who had resigned last month shortly after the couple had left PTL but was still in charge of security at the park; Bakker’s secretary Shirley Fulbright who regularly recorded the reported bonuses for Jim and Tammy and was compensated a 6-figure salary for her troubles along with PTL finance director Peter Bailey; the Taggart brothers, who started working for PTL in the late 1970’s as piano players. David became one of Jim Bakker’s top aides and James was PTL’s interior decorator. Since fired by Falwell, the two maxed out every PTL credit card they could lay their hands on and were eventually convicted of tax evasion; Bakker’s new superstar attorney Melvin Belli; Vicki Goodman Meadows who headed up the Bring Back Bakker Club that operated out of a room at a nearby Holiday Inn. Her parents were entertainers Vestal and Howard “Happy” Goodman who had been PTL insiders for a number of years and lived near the Bakkers at Tega Cay.

“That’s why Keith’s arm is in a sling,” interjects Saxon.

It’s true. Shortly before my arrival here, photographer Keith Rumpf was out here covering an unauthorized visit by Tammy to the park. She was attending a worship service at which a reported handful of fans approached her. In the ensuing scrum, Keith was, depending on who was telling the story, elbowed in the ribs or grabbed & jerked by the arm by the portly Mr. Goodman who was escorted Mrs. Bakker. Thus Keith’s sling during my arrival at WPCQ.

A more official pro-PTL group was the Association of PTL Partners which operated out of a room at the Heritage Grand Hotel and claimed 10,000 members by June, 1987. Its members ranged from those (charismatic Pentecostals) who just wanted Falwell (a fundamental Baptist) out, those who wanted the Bakkers to return and those only just their investment in PTL to be honored. 

And that’s the group here to great us today at the Heritage Grand Hotel. There numbers were in the multiple hundreds and you could easily pick them out among those in attendance. They all had a certain rage in their eyes. 

“We have given them guidelines and if they choose to cross those guidelines they will meet with our police,” a Falwell aide was heard to say earlier in the day. “If we have to, we’ll bring in outside police. We have security people and we have fire trucks and hoses but I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

There was no sign yet of Falwell when we got there around noon. PTL supporters however began to gather at the parking lots of both the park’s World Outreach Center, a pyramid-shaped building that housed the offices of Bakker and other PTL officers, and the the unfinished Towers Hotel, a 21-story monolith next to the Heritage Grand that Bakker had promised to build but that never made it much past a concrete shell. We assumed that the hotel would be the best place to catch Falwell, we went straight there. We certainly weren’t expecting him at the water park or King’s Castle, a huge castle-shaped building in which Bakker had planned to open the world’s largest Wendy’s.

The Heritage Grand Hotel was everything Bakker ever envisioned for the centerpiece of of the park. With 500 rooms and the largest conference center in the area, the 3-story hotel also contained restaurants and a Main Street shopping complex with shops like “Bakker’s Bakery” and “Tammy Faye’s Cosmetics” inside. We watched as a litany of park guests strolled the grounds, splashed in the pools and marveled at the sumptuous surroundings that a multi-year grift had built. As theme parks went, it was…nice, in a kind of Knights Inn sort of way. We talked to visitors and asked if they thought differently of being here given the circumstances that the park, the ministry and the Bakkers themselves had found themselves in. To a person, they said they were enjoying their stays and hope for the best for all those involved. PTL partners were also circulating near the Grand. We got interviews with them and sound of their anti-Falwell chants. This was astounding to me. Back in Orlando, a local TV news crew would not have gotten anywhere near the front of a theme park’s hotel much less access to guests without being challenged by security. If you wanted access, you’d have to ask ahead of time and a park representative would be tethered to you the whole time. You would only be able to talk to guests if you were off-property like an adjacent shopping center or nearby 7-11. It was astounding how much access we were given. But who was going to say that we weren’t allowed there? After all, the park technically belonged to the partners. Right? We’re just out there walking around and talking to people. I would never see anything like it again.

The intent of Falwell’s visit today was said to be two-fold: celebrate the holiday by meeting guests at his newest acquisition and push back against his detractors of which he claimed might number 200. He also wanted to counter a two-part interview with the Bakkers that ABC’s Good Morning America had aired yesterday and the day before. He knew that all three Charlotte stations and the Charlotte Observer would be there covering the day’s events. 

When Falwell did arrive, he was with his wife Macel and one or two others. I would hardly call it an entourage. Noticing sign-carrying non-believers, they went straight from the portico into the hotel’s lobby. Once there, he greeted guests and chatted with them about how they’re enjoying their stay. Passersby asked him about the park, the ministry and the Bakkers. He begged off questions about the Bakkers, told them the ministry was doing well and that he was doing everything he could to save Heritage USA through bankruptcy protection and intense on-air fundraising. We asked him about the demonstrators who were looking for him. 

“I just drove by myself and I noticed about 200 people which I think is the maximum number of dissidents,” he said, “There are over 50,000 people on these grounds, or there will be by the day’s end, to celebrate America. I consider, with 200 dissidents, that’s a very positive statement.”

That’s when it started getting loud outside.

“Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell Falwell!!!” came chants. You could tell they were getting closer. And louder. And closer. And louder. 

“Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell Falwell!!!” 

Falwell looked nonchalant at first as he continued speaking with guests but even he knew what was coming.

“Stand back,” yelled one of the security guards after the crowd breached the front doors. “If you come any closer I’ll arrest you.” It didn’t work.

“Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell Falwell!!!”, they chanted. The two groups had obviously converged and were now forcing Falwell into a corner. Fortunately that corner was near an elevator that staff members had readied for him just in case something like this happened. 

“I don’t support you one bit,” one protester screamed at Falwell. “You haven’t go a dime in this place.” 

“I’m sorry, I have a meeting. This is awful. I have to go,” the beleaguered minister uttered as the elevator doors closed and he ascended the atrium to the fourth floor. I can only imagine the conversation taking place during that ride. It couldn’t have been pleasant. 

But the protesters continued shouting and booing. Even the pianist at the lobby’s grand piano was getting into the act pounding out the Pentecostal hymn “I’ll Fly Away.”

“Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell, Falwell!!! Farewell Falwell!!!” Now hundreds were converging inside the lobby and toward the Main Street. They took to the stairs and other elevators to make their message even louder. 

Rick found Joe Haviland in the crowd and the sound-bites started flowing. “It’s our investment,” he said. “We’re the ones who by blood, sweat and toil have built this place and nobody has the right to take it away.” 

Crews from WBTV and WSOC are in the midst of the scrum as well. They’ve either been backed literally into a corner of the lobby or up against the registration desk. Whatever security detail there is is now helpless to control any of this. There are no cops and, technically, the protesters own the property so they can’t be told to leave. 

I was carrying Steve’s record-deck all this time and because we were tethered together we had a problem. Cords were getting tangled and I couldn’t go in Steve’s direction when he darted off some other direction. People were all around us. Rick and Brenda got behind me and we all started moving backwards as the crowd grew larger and part of it surged toward us. Rick and Brenda saw the stairs going up behind us. I didn’t. One foot then the other backed into the bottom step and I could feel myself falling backwards, record deck and all. The last thing I saw before I was about to tumble backwards was an angry group of swindled Jim and Tammy supporters moving toward me. How will this be explained to my grieving parents? I don’t even want to know. 

Fortunately Rick was watching the whole thing and immediately stepped forward to scoop me up just as the cord between Steve and me was about to violently pull him backwards and possibly on top of me. Once I got back upright, the four of us retreated so the crowd could finish its march and leave. In the distance, Rick spotted Don Hardester. We got him off to the side and asked if Falwell would meet with the protesters.

“No way. How can I protect him in a crowd like this? With tempers running the way they are, there’s no way in the world he’ll talk to them.”

With their point made and our video shot, the partners started making their way to the exits after about 20 minutes and reconvened outside. The day was drawing to a close. 

“We were not prepared for this,” said Hardester. “They totally got themselves out of hand.”

I almost got trampled by a raging mob of pissed off Pentecostals and all Hardester could say was that he wasn’t prepared for this? 

With the protesters leaving and the pianist probably fired by now, we collected ourselves and made our way back to our car. On our way out, we passed the waterslide, the castle and the 12-story hollow shell of a monument to greed and fraud. This was the first time here but it wouldn’t be my last. I would bring guests here for amusement and tell them the story of my intrepid endeavor into a heart of darkness from which I barely escaped certain disaster. It seems to be a recurring theme.

Back at WPCQ, Rick stayed a while to log our footage but there was no hurry.

After all, we don’t have weekend newscasts. I mean, at all.

Happy birthday, America.