Transition Back To Television
During my time at Cosmos Broadcasting the parent company for WIS Television and Radio, the company owned four TV Stations; WIS in Columbia, WSFA in Montgomery AL, WDSU in New Orleans and WTOL in Toledo OH. In the summer of 1979, they acquired an AM radio station in Florida that had a very experienced engineer, much more experienced than I was. They made the decision to move that engineer to Columbia and put him in charge of all the radio properties they expected to purchase in the upcoming years. They offered me a position at WDSU and sent me down there to have a look and to see if I was interested in moving to The Crescent City. The station was located in the French Quarter and I was charmed by the city.
But, I was also still attending the University of South Carolina pursuing my Electrical Engineering degree and didn’t[t want to go through the hassle of transferring to a similar program in New Orleans. So I turned the position down and began a search for another position in Columbia. Cosmos graciously gave me as much time as I needed for the search while I finished up some loose ends at WIS.
Surprisingly, that search took me less than two weeks. Very soon after I floated my availability out to the Columbia broadcast community, I received a call from Martha Fowler, who I had worked with at WIS-TV , She told me that the South Carolina Educational Television Network (SCETV) was about to expand their studio engineering shop to match the growth the network was experiencing at the time and that I should call Charlie Bowers, the VP for Engineering. By the end of the week, I was hired at SCETV and turned my two week notice in at Cosmos.
This created a bit of a problem for WIS, who would have my assistant, John Scott, cover the engineering duties but they needed a producer/engineer for the Gamecock Football Network, a function that I had been filling during the 1977 and 1978 seasons. A quick negotiation with SCETV and I was free to contract with WIS Radio for the 1979 season. I was ready to go but I had a lot of unfinished projects including some major rewiring of some patch panels, so those last 2 weeks contained a lot of 12 – 14 hour days including weekends.
So after working until midnight on Sunday, August 12th, I reported to SCETV at 8:30 AM on Monday the 13th. After the on-boarding process, I reported to my new home as a Studio Engineering Supervisor in the shop in the northwest corner of the studios on Millwood Avenue. My supervisor was John Hancock, and no, he did not sign the Declaration of Independence. But he was an Air Force Veteran who managed one of the C-130 Hercules based flying television stations operated by the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network (AFRTN) in Vietnam. Since my position was a newly created, my first assignment was to create a purchase order for all the tools I would need and a toolbox and take it to Dixie Radio on Gregg Street who had the state contract for tools and electronic supplies.
One of the most important tools of the day was an Xcelite green “tweacker’ that was used to adjust almost everything in radio or TV at the time. That puppy found it’s way to the number one position in my shiny white pocket protector. Yes, I’m that big a geek.
Gerald Cromer was the counterman at Dixie who filled my order and sent me on my way back to the studio. It wasn’t long before Gerald would join SCETV’s Field Engineering team. SCETV was growing leaps and bounds at the time. In addition to the three C-Band Satellite dishes that connected SCETV to PBS, there was a microwave tower that connected the studios to their transmitters across the state. Today the network operates 11 TV stations, eight radio stations, and a statewide ITFS microwave network that serves schools, hospitals, and emergency management teams.
SCETV was one of the three major satellite uplink sites that provided national programming to the Public Broadcasting System. The other two were WETA Washington, D.C and WGBH in Boston. The master control switcher had 26 outputs fed by several dozen videotape machines in the tape room behind it. It required two switcher-operators plus a semi-automatic system to route the outputs of the tape machines to the correct telephone video circuit, microwave transmitter or satellite uplink. Across the hall was the door to the tape vault in which thousands of individual 2” wide videotapes were stored on 12” reels. The vault itself was the storefront next to the studios.
During my early years at SCETV we made the transition from 2” quad videotape to 1” Sony tapes shown above, and with the significant reduction of needed storage space, SCETV sold the adjoining storefront to Ken Long’s Pharmacy, the same Ken Long who operated the Cornell Arms Pharmacy below WCOS. We were neighbors again.
We also made the transition from the traditional color cameras to the new Ikegami Cameras with computer controlled electronics that significantly reduced the time the video operators needed to set up the cameras before each show. I snatched one of the wooden shipping containers in which the cameras came over from Japan and made a dog house for my doggies that lasted over 20 years.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of anther revolution in television technology.
I was born in a great Radio Town; Jacksonville Florida. So it was only natural that I joined WUSC (AM at the time) in my first semester 1963. I went on to a career in commercial radio and television in Columbia, WCOS AM & FM, WIS-TV, WIS Radio, SCETV and PBS. I'm retired now, giving back since 2010 to the station that started my career, WUSC-FM. If you did the math you will know that I celebrated the 60th anniversary of my first radio show ever in November 2023.