I have blogged on other occasions about my stint as a disk jockey, back in the glory days of rock and roll radio. I've talked about the celebrities I met and the remote broadcasts, and the records I played, but there was more to a DJ's life than fame and fortune; there was also reading the news and weather.
At that time, news arrived on a teletype machine - basically a big typewriter that noisily pounded out the stories of the hour on long rolls of paper. Broadcasters subscribed to a news service, most often the Associated Press, that fed these items down the phone wires and one or more teletype machines turned them into the hourly "Five-Minute Summary" or the "News in Depth" or the ball scores, or the weather reports, or (accompanied by bells), "Breaking News" items.
It was the announcer's job to gather up the long stream of teletype output, strip out the section scheduled for that time slot, review it carefully (typos were rampant and equipment or line failures notoriously left stories unfinished, or garbled) and then read the news or weather as part of the broadcast. In reality, what usually happened is that I would look up, see that I had a five-minute summary coming up in two minutes, rush out to the closet where the teletype was stashed, rip off the last 40 feet of paper roll and rush back to the control room, desperately scanning the output for my needed summary and read it cold.
I was not alone in this practice; we all did it, much to management's dismay. There is an apocryphal story about the manager that inserted into the middle of a news story the sentence "Okay, you #$%&; you got yourself into this, let's see you get yourself out of it." and garbled the rest of the story. My news-reading disasters were at the hands of my fellow announcers, however.
Once, at the station in Breckenridge, I had one end of the news roll in my hands, reading the five-minute summary, and the other end trailed out the door, through the studio next door and into the hall. During my reading, I smelled smoke and looked down to see that a "buddy" had set fire to the paper trail, and it was quickly climbing the strip toward me. I got in about half of the scheduled five minutes before I had to drop the paper and ad lib my way out of the mess.
The one that got me called into the station owner's office, however, was in fact not my fault. This was in Abilene and we actually had a news department; guys that stripped the teletype, wrote up stories of local interest, and hung it all appropriately on the news room wall. We simply picked up our material, rehearsed it (in theory), and read it at the proper time.
One weekend I had a local story about an air show, to be held out at nearby Phantom Hill Lake. The story described the show in detail, how it was sponsored by the local Jaycees, admission was blah, blah, blah. And the conclusion of the story, and to the airshow, was a paragraph about how the stunt pilots were going to put a plane into a spiral, parachute out and let the plane crash into the lake!
The airshow was legitimate; the part about crashing a plane into the lake was pure fabrication, and on Monday I got a call to come in early because the station owner wanted to see me before I went on the air. IF I went on the air.
I'm not sure Mr. Ackers ever believed me when I vociferously protested that I had not made up the crash part and inserted it as a lark. The copy of the story that was retrieved from the "Read News" basket did not have the plane crash paragraph, and it was my word against the senior news guy's, but thankfully Mr. Ackers didn't fire me.
Larry Fitzgerald, the senior news guy and the perpetrator of this gag (though he never admitted it), went on to have a notable career in broadcasting in Abilene. During my less-illustrious career, I made sure that I never promoted another airshow.
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