You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Being a news photographer is crazy.
I am qualified to speak on this issue, certainly more than most reporters, because I began my career as a one man band in Idaho, Falls Idaho.
I began my broadcasting career at 16 years of age. I was a DJ at a 100 watt high school radio station known as KSPB. I played rock and roll for two hours. I came on right after a Korean kid who played music from Korea. It was a wild transition.
“OK, enough of whatever the heck that was. Now a little Dirty Ted Nugent.”
It wasn’t pretty. Nothing I do ever is.
I got suspended for a few weeks for telling dead baby jokes on air. It was inappropriate, but hey, I was 16 years old and we only had 18 listeners. I guess one of them was pissed.
By my senior year, I was the sports director. I did every football and basketball game for KSPB.
I ended up with over 500 hours on air before I went to U.S.C. I did some work for the local radio station, but I mostly majored in girls and keg parties. More on that in future episodes of That is Crazy.
So to say I have always been in broadcasting, is hardly an understatement.
Early on, I dreamed of being a sports guy. Why not? That’s all I knew.
So I did the requisite number of internships at KTLA, and KTTV. I made contacts and learned the ropes.
I graduated and lucked into a good gig at KABC TV in Los Angeles. I was a sports production assistant doing whatever as the sports team covered the Raiders, the Rams, The Lakers, The Clippers, the Trojans, The Bruins and a slew of everything else. I worked with iconic sportscaster Jim Hill and NFL hall of famer Gene Washington. I worked with a bevy of anchor women who were drop dead gorgeous. They use to be MissThis and Miss That. Now they were stunning on air news readers who were hard not to look at.
I met Tommy Lasorda, and a number of sport superstars who came by to visit with Jim Hill.
After the USC vs UCLA game, it was my job to wrangle up interviews for Jim Hill. I got a hold of a young Oklahoma Bumpkin named Troy Aikman. His lip was full of Coppenhagen chewing tobbacco.
“Hey Troy, you might want to pull that plug of chaw out of your lip before you go live,” I said.
He looked at me with big droopy eyes and said, “Yeah, you’re right huh?”
Now the guy is announcing the Super Bowl.
While working in the sports department, my job was to watch baseball and football and basketball games and log the exciting moments.
I answered phones and read mail. I did whatever the producers needed me to do, to get 5 sportscasts a day onto tv.
The producers had me hustling my ass off. What Playboy, former Detroit Defensive Back, and stud anchor man, Jim Hill needed from me was much more simple.
When the phone rang and the lady on the other end sounded cute, it was my job to get her number and make sure he got back to her. If she sounded like a freak, Jim Hill trusted me to blow her off.
L.A. is a town of weirdos and misfits. It’s also a town of blazing hot young women who see a good looking rich dude on tv and the calls start early and start often.
Jim would enter the office and say high to his producers, but he would always come to me. With a wink that was as cool as the other side of the pillow, he would smile and say in a deep voice that almost made me want to have sex with him; “any prospects today?”
We’d both laugh and he would shuffle off to his office to presumably set up a number of blind dates that he never once discussed. It was like a secret game between us. Phone rings. Cute girl. Phone number. Sexy wink. Door closed. Every day. same thing. It was like what’s the first rule of fight club? Don’t talk about fight club. What’s the 2nd rule of fight club. Don’t talk about fight club.
In a strange way, I feel like I was a match maker before Harmony Dot Com was a glimmer in the internet’s eye.
Anyway, while I was working for KABC, I was also waiting tables at the Olive Garden. At the same time, I was submitting stories for ESPN Scholastic sports America. Way back then, it was hosted by Chris Fowler, who now is big time on College Game Day.
I was doing stories on blind tennis players, and surfer girls with one arm, and kids with great athletic talent that is so prevalent in Southern California its as common as lint in a dryer. I really thought I could cross over to the big time via sports, by staying the course. Doing play by play on cable access and getting the occassional national plug on a very young ESPN.
One day an editor at KABC pulled me aside and said, “Dude, you gotta go away to come back.”
He was right. I was never going to break it big by covering Garr H.S. versus Lakewood. I began sending out demo tapes. I figured I’d get a sports job at a local affiliate somewhere in America.
So that was my new mission. Sending out demo tapes by the dozen. I was such a regular at the Redondo Beach Post Office, that all the clerks knew my name and asked me if I had heard anything from anyone.
It was all sports all the time. I was doing play by play for Cerritos Junior College, and I had a slew of ESPN stuff on my tape. I was raw, and untested. I wore a bad tweed jacket and a bad hair cut. But I had a certain something combined with the energy of a tiger on amphetamines.
The newsdirector for KPVI in Pocatello Idaho must like wild cats on speed, because one day I get the call.
“You interested,” he says.
Why not?” I reply.
What could I lose by accepting a free trip to Idaho.
So he flies me up. There is no direct flight to Idaho Falls. You have to fly through Salt Lake City, which is a story all by itself. More on that at another time. But for now, the station put me up at the Pocatello Holidome. The whole place is scary. It’s basically a lousy Holiday Inn that they put under a gigantic plastic dome.
How bizarre! It looked like a bomb bunker, or an athletic field where the Titans practice.
I remember the inside being full of walk ways, surround by astro turf. There’s a pool near the lobby and the whole place reeks like chlorine. The minute you check in, your eyes start watering.
The first thing I notice; the women had that 1980’s big hair that was a decade out of style. Big and stiff and pointing straight up. I felt like I was in a White Snake video.
The guys were a trip as well. A bunch of pimple faced white guys who ate deer jerky in their spare time.
Remember I’m a beach boy, living on the Esplanade in Redondo Beach. I wake up in the morning, jump start the blender and take in the view from the patio. My visage was easy on the eyes. Chicks in thongs roller skating down the strand. The aqua green pacific undulating easilly before it crashed on the white sand. Porpoise would surf in the warm sea, while gulls soared on delightful zephyrs of 77 degree perfection
From that vision of the American Dream to the great white north. It was like exiting a Rolls Royce at a roadside truck stop and entering a filthy gas station bathroom.
Idaho has its beauty, but not much of that lustre can be found in Pocatello.
The city was uncomfortable, like a leg cramp that won’t ease. The sky was gray and the people all looked like they were a wiskey shot away from incestuous insanity.
So I meet Jim Hale. He is the newsdirector and the anchorman for channel 6. He picks me up at the Holidome and shakes my hand with a stern grip.
“Andy, Nice to meet you.” His voice is booming like a 1950’s radio announcer. He wears glasses and his toupee is perfectly erect, not a plastic hair out of place.
We climb into his Cutlass and zoom off to a barren little street where the station is located. I left the technicolor excess of Southern California, and now I feel like I am in a zombie movie in black and white.
The buildings are two and three stories tall. The streets seem dull and dusty. The people look like they have just been sand blasted with grey.
I hate this all ready, I think to myself.
It’s 1988 on the calender, but it feels like 1978 here. Jim’s pants look like something out of the John Daly collection. I wonder what picnic table his Tailor stole his pants from.
He takes me inside the newsroom, which is little more than box with desks. There is an AP wire copy machine spitting out paper all over the floor. It’s a jungle of paper and the place is rattling with teletype machines and type writers. Somewhere in this little matchbox of a newsroom, a police scanner is chirping. The place is frenzied and chaotic and somewhat hypnotic.
People glance up and smile or say hello with their eyes.
Jim is a no nonsense guy. His head doesn’t move much when he talks, and that thing on his head moves even less.
“What do you think?” he asks.
I think you are all freaks who married your sisters and bathe in nuclear bath water. That’s what I wanted to say.
“People are great” Is what I actually say.
“Well, I see you have a tape full of sports, but we don’t need any more sports guys.”
He nods over to the sports department which is less department and more like a couple of desks over in the corner.
“These two guys will be here forever,” He says. “They’ll probably die here. Sports Guys never leave, but I like your energy. We could use a reporter. You interested?”
The tape editor told me that you have to go away to come back, and you couldn’t get farther away than this. I mean it was one time zone and a decade removed from where I was currently paying rent.
“Sure,” I said with a ‘hey I’m young, who gives a damn,’ kind of response.
And with that, My career as a general assignment reporter began.
I have exciting stories about Idaho that I will touch on in later editions of That’s Crazy, but suffice to say I learned by fire, or in this case, ice, how to be a news photographer.
They drove me to the Idaho Falls office, where they called me the Bureau chief. That meant I was responsible for the 2nd largest city in the Gem State, as well as Montana and Wyoming.
BY MYSELF!!!!!
Are you kidding me?
I was in an office over the fire department. I had an edit bay, and a microwave relay which allowed me to send my stories the 50 miles or so to the Pocatello newsroom.
Nobody ever showed me how to use a scanner, so every time the ambulance or fire engine took off, I had to drop what I was doing and jump in my channel six news mobile and chase the emergency unit. Since I didn’t have a map of the city, and I didn’t know where the hell I was, I use to tailgate the emergency vehicles.
STAY BACK 500 FEET!
Not today boss!
I was always the first photog on the scene. It was usually stuff the other stations didn’t even respond to. Food burning on stove calls, or cat stuck in tree emergencies, or the most dreaded rectal bleed.
But once in a while, I was the first photog on the scene of a serious story, like a river rescue where kids were drowning or had to be rescued by emergency divers.
After a while, the old salts would say, “Damn boy, how do you beat us to all these stories?”
And that always stuck with me. In news, it is better to be the first photographer on a breaking news scene. It’s when you get the purest emotions, and the most unfiltered pictures. There’s no perimeter and you can move around like warm chocolate sauce on a tasty piece of ice cream. It’s when you get “the good flames” as producers always like to ask.
There’s nothing easy about being a one man band. I had a three tube ikagami camera with a big 3/4 inch porta pack. I had a huge light belt that looked like something a mexican bandito would wear. Add in the big wooden and metal tripod and I was easilly lugging around 65 pounds of ENG equipment.
There wasn’t a day that I didn’t completely sweat through a dress shirt, that I would soil with dirt and grime and idaho filth.
Summers were brutally hot and winter was something out of an antarctic horror movie.
When I began, it was January. We were experiencing an Arctic Blast. It was cold unlike anything I had ever known.
I would often wonder how those thong wearing hotties were doing back on the Esplanade, as I trudged though my day that was laborious due to parkas and snow boots and tons of equipment.
It was so cold during this winter, that car tires literally froze and cracked. I remember doing standups holding geese heads that had literally snapped off and frozen.
Can you imagine it being so cold that animal heads freeze and break off. That is Quentin Tarrantino kind of crazy ass cold.
One of the first stories I ever covered indoctrinated me into what news is all about.
I went up with the Army national guard helicopter and a soldier pointed down to a barren white field covered in a virgin white layer of snow.
What? I said out loud over the roaring chopper blades.
“That’s where his herd use to be.”
And that is when it struck me, that a cattle man had lost a 1000 head of beef cows over night. They were buried under 10 feet of snow. They were frozen, like moo-sicles under a feathery soft layer of unforgiving cold.
As the chopper flew low, I saw heads sticking out of the snow drift. I saw hooves sticking above the layer of perma frost.
In one night, a prominent cattle rancher was ruined. Thanks Idaho.
All in all, my experience in Idaho lasted about a 18 months. It really was an adventure. It was like that show Northern Exposure where the Moose came into town to drink from the fountain. That stuff actually happened. I learned to snow mobile and I skied at world famous Grand Targhee in Driggs Idaho. I visited Jackson Hole Wyoming regularly and enjoyed the world famous Cowboy Bar untold times. It was a splendid adventure, and a great place to begin honing a craft.
It’s taken me a lifetime to get to Market 30.
Now, young people graduate from college and practically start in market 30. It’s sad, but that is why the news now a days looks and feels like it does.
If you can survive being a one man band in the wild of Idaho, you can’t help but be a better journalist for it.
In the chapters to come, I will share more of these adventures, and there are many.
I promised one of my old photographers in North Carolina that I would tell you tales of fighting and vomiting in the news vehicle, and airing 4th of July Fireworks celebrations that were a year old.
“And you are watching fireworks over the Tar River that were fired off just moments ago,” The anchor man screamed at 11pm.
Oh my god! The insanity.
And that my friend, Is Crazy.