Special to The Star-Herald
When I explained to friends of mine recently about the methods and equipment used in years past when collecting the news at WAGM-TV and radio, they looked at me as though my head was on crooked. We used film and audiotape. What’s film? What’s tape? In these days of digital cameras, CDs and DVDs, everything is almost instantaneous. A picture is captured with a digital still camera or digital video camera, slipped into a computer and voila … instant sound and pictures … good or awful.
Photo courtesy of Voscar
USING A BOLEX 16mm, silent, movie film camera while shooting a documentary at Fort Knox in the late 1960s. How about that hat and the sideburns?
However, back in the last century, we felt as though we had advanced when we went from using Polaroid still photos to using movie film and tape recorders. The film was black and white and in negative form because that was the only way the TV station could develop film at that time. The polarity of the film was changed from negative to positive by the station’s engineers as it was broadcast. The first films were shot in silent mode and ran only two and-a-half minutes in length. The news anchor read live copy over the film, or a tape-recorded narration was used. It was really great when we finally purchased a “sound-on” camera with positive images. We recorded about four minutes of an interview or event before the camera ran out of film.
I recall doing my own interviews and operating the camera myself. I would mount the camera on a tripod, turn the camera on and then run around, stand in front of the camera, and do my interview. I see that Rene Cloukey does his interviews using a similar approach – holding the camera himself while the person being interviewed holds the mike and responds to Rene’s questions. It’s cool the way he does it.
Our early newscasts at first were “simulcast,” that is, they were broadcast live both on radio (remember WAGM Radio?) and television at the same time.
The program was an hour long with state and local news, sports, agricultural news and the weather. Frank Knight came on board later as news and public affairs director, and was the anchor. Eddie Hews did the AG show, Steve Miller the weather and Wayne Knight did sports. As news editor, I wrote most of the news copy, and I had to remember that on radio, the listener couldn’t see what was being mentioned on TV, so I had to be careful not to be too specific with descriptions in my copy.
My office was at the radio station on the Washburn Road several miles from the TV station, which made it interesting traveling in a snowstorm when I was in a hurry. I did radio news all day, writing the copy, doing interviews and shooting film for TV. Just before the TV news broadcast, I would dash for the TV station, and check the Associated Press news printer for any Maine news. We didn’t use national news unless it was a really big story, as we certainly didn’t need any extra news to fill the broadcast. I would then edit my film (sometimes the splices wouldn’t hold right off, so I would shout to someone in control to “move the film story back,” until the splices held. Then the film was given to someone on the control board, probably Henry Furtek. I would then write the headlines for the anchor.
At that time, we needed several copies of the news stories with directions for the anchor and the guys on the control board: when to start film or put a live camera on a still image.
The station had a Dodge news van that I used to cover stories. It had a two-way radio that was used for communication back to TV and also could be used to make live radio broadcasts from the van. One wintry night, while sitting in the van, I was giving a flame-by-flame account of the Coca Cola bottling plant fire when a large trailer truck drove between me and the fire. I sure had to use my memory for a few minutes! I put that van into a few snowbanks while shooting movies of a snowstorm out through the windshield and driving.
While I was at the TV station, Fort Fairfield was having a rash of fires of “unknown origin.” The comment around the station would often run like this, “Did you go to the fire in Fort Fairfield last night?”
“No, I’m going tonight.”
