My (Short) Career in Television

            It’s hard to believe in this time of massive corporate conglomeration, but television once was an integral part of the local community, just as radio had been before it.  KING was owned by an heir to the Stimson lumber fortune, Dorothy Stimson Bullitt.  KOMO, the second station on the air, was an enterprise of a local flour mill, Fisher.  KTNT, the first CBS affiliate, was started by the Tacoma News Tribune.  And the first non-commercial station in the Northwest, KCTS, was the home of my brief career in television production (KCTS even reflected these local roots in its name—it stood for “Community Television Service”).

            That, of course, meant that it was perpetually broke.  KCTS started in 1954 with organizational support of the University of Washington and donated (i.e., already-obsolete) cameras and equipment from Mrs. Bullitt.  University students staffed the operation most of the time, but occasionally community volunteers did some of the work.  That’s where I come in.

            In the late fifties and early sixties, I was a Boy Scout, and, when I turned teen, an Explorer.  Other scouts went camping, canoeing, hiking … they learned how to whittle and put up shelters and identify edible plants and all kinds of cool quasi-military stuff.

            Mine volunteered at KCTS.  I was a teen-aged camera operator.

            It was a decidedly low-budget operation.  Virtually all the programming was local and, frankly, talky and less-than-compelling.  The studio smelled almost like a lumber yard because the sets were plywood and 2X4’s. The cameras smelled electronically hot; transistors were still cutting-edge, and these cameras used tubes.  They were bulky and heavy, mounted on dollies.  To operate them required a delicate balance between stasis and movement; the goal was, of course, to be invisible to the viewer, so the camera operator had to refrain from any motion and never sneeze or cough.  But the vidicon tube that captured the image had to move frequently or the image would permanently “burn”.  It was the job of the director to shift between the two cameras frequently enough to allow each operator to reframe the image.  All broadcasting was, of course, in black and white.

            So every week, my small troop of Explorers would go to the University of Washington campus and spend a couple of hours running the cameras, patiently standing stock-still and stifling body noises.  It was the genesis of my original major when I went a few years later to the U.W. as a student:  Broadcast Journalism.  You might have seen me today on one of the networks (hopefully not Fox News) but for one unfortunate outcome.

            I was fired.

            I didn’t make any untoward noises or burn the vidicon.  It was purely a matter of genetics.  You see, even as a teen I was abnormally short, just barely five feet tall.  Even beggars can be choosers under extreme circumstances, and the KCTS directors finally had enough of camera angles that highlighted the underside of speakers’ chins.