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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Early TV had big price tag There was that same sense of excitement in the pioneering of local television stations in the 1950s and '60s as there had been in developing local radio three or four decades earlier. The main difference: A radio station could be built with a relatively small amount of capital and operated by a staff of a dozen or so; a local small-market television station required money by the baskets full and at least 30 or more people to staff it. Unfortunately, the owners of a small market TV station had to pay the same prices for equipment as did the larger stations. The only answers were to buy as little equipment initially as possible and to hire one heck of a sales staff. When I arrived at Channel 10 in January 1963, more than a year after it went on the air, it had just added a one-man news department. His equipment was a huge Polaroid camera and a tape recorder. He moved on and I replaced him. After a few months, the Polaroid was replaced by a Bell and Howell movie camera, the wind-up kind used by newsmen during the war. Later, a sound camera came. I also was furnished with a processor to develop the black-and-white film. I learned to operate the thing, which my wife, Nora, dubbed "Elizabeth" after the movie star because it was so fickle. During the week, the news crew numbered several people, but on Saturdays we added an 11 o'clock newscast that was a solo act. I would go out and shoot news stories, then develop the film at the studio, splice it, write the stories, go home for a few hours, then return to the studio to do the broadcast. There was no floor crew to run the camera. It was just me and the board operator. He would have me sit at the desk, while he rolled the camera into position and got me in focus. At broadcast time, he would shout through the open studio door, "You're on!" Then he would flip the switch and there I would be on TV sets in living black and white throughout the area. We slowly added people and equipment, but I did those Saturday night gigs for about 10 years. I was away from home so much in those early days that I took advantage of any situation where I could be with our three children. That was why I took one of them down most Saturdays to watch my newscast. Our son Joe was about 10 when a feral cat found its way into the building. The cat had the loudest meow I had ever heard. The engineer and Joe tried to herd the animal out of the studio while I gamely continued the broadcast. I always considered my Saturday night newscasts as being about as primitive as they could be until later, when Isabel Champ came to work for us. She had been a board operator at Channel 5 when it went on the air in 1954. The studio was then at the transmitter site on top of Blackwell Hill. Getting there _ whether for engineers, salesmen, on-air staff, clients or just visitors _ was difficult in good weather and almost impossible when it snowed, but somehow they carried on. Isabel Champ told me that in addition to her technical duties, she was asked if she could give a short newscast just before sign-off on Saturday nights. All of the visitors and advertisers had gone home by then, and only one or two people were in the building. The operating board, with all of the switches and tubes and monitors, was up against a glass window. A TV camera was set up behind her, and the newscast opened when she turned the camera on and then swiveled around to face it, a sheaf of stories from the wire in her hands. Her do-it-yourself newscasts went on for some time before they had an announcer to do them. Isabel later went on to be a columnist for a number of newspapers and then became a contributing editor to the magazine Guideposts. Newscasts before unmanned cameras were actually not unusual in those days. At least it was never dull. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA