A version of this story appeared originally in Washington History
Sam Smith
By the late fifties, the hounds of change were on radio's traces. Television was seizing for itself the stories, the vaudeville and the sense of being there that had been the heart of radio. And into the void was moving a new kind of music called rock 'n' roll.
To be sure rock 'n' roll already existed, but it was known as "rhythm 'n' blues" or "R&B." In the jargon of white broadcasters, it was "race music," although some white teenagers, myself included, listened almost surreptitiously to stations like Philadelphia's WDAS, where DJ Jocko Henderson proto-rapped the commercials:
Get a little cash from out of your stash,
And make like a flash in the hundred yard dash
Right down to my man John Koler at 4th & Arch
And tell him JOCKO sent you!
Years later Jocko Henderson would be recognized as one of the fathers of rap and hip hop. And WDAS would gain a reputation as one of the early providers of black music and news, as described by Tim Whittaker in Philadelphia Magazine:
Back when WDAS was in trailblazing mode, talking ‘50s through ‘70s mostly, the station was a true community radio station. Some would argue, and pretty convincingly, that it was the purest community station in the nation. Which may be why it became a regular stop for the biggest recording acts of the day, like Sam Cooke, James Brown and all the STAX and Motown groups and performers. And a must stop for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and every other major civil rights figure as well—because they all knew, like everyone in Philadelphia and in the radio business knew, that people listened to WDAS, a lot of people, and while most of those listeners may have been black, not all were, and that’s because the station had a sound and a rhythm that could make you color blind real quick.
It was not until the mid-decade triple explosion of Bill Haley & the Comets, The Blackboard Jungle and Elvis Presley, that young white America irrevocably entered the age of rock 'n' roll. Radio reacted to the new forces of music and technology by rapidly transforming itself from a ubiquitous stage for all the world into a collection of automated audio wombs for each of the country's proliferating demographic enclaves. It was on the cusp of this transformation, in the summer of 1957, that I was hired as a news reporter for Washington's WWDC.
In the spring of my sophomore year I read in Broadcasting magazine that WWDC, an independent station in Washington, DC, was developing a major news operation. Most stations at the time just ripped and read copy from the wires; the exceptions were usually network affiliates.
I immediately added WWDC to a list of 40 stations -- all the others in New England -- to which I sent summer job applications. The 40 New England stations rejected or ignored me, but WWDC took me on. And so I returned to my native Washington, which my family had left when I was ten.
The station's main offices were in a stone house on Brookville Road in suburban Maryland. Had the house not squatted in front of a large radio tower and been bordered by a county public works depot, it would have looked like just another stone house in the suburbs. Until, that is, you walked inside and found an engineer's booth monitoring three broadcast studios where a front hall should have been.
My bosses were two Texas liberals -- news director Joe Phipps and his assistant Bob Robinson. Short and bald, Phipps appeared a bespectacled and ambulatory small mouth bass. When excited his eyeballs almost rubbed against his glasses. His voice ebbed and flowed between 1950s broadcast fog and full-blown southern oratorical eruption. Robinson, on the other hand, had an unflappable Texas drawl. A tall man with white hair, Robinson was as imperturbable as Phipps was instantly reactive.
My initial task -- writing nine newscasts a day -- interned me in a small corner room with just enough space for one window, four news tickers, two typewriters, several phones, reams of yellow copy paper, even more rolls of yellow ticker paper and a maximum of four human beings.
Each newscast was expected to be different, whether the news had changed or not. Three of the newscasts occurred during evening drive time and were 30 minutes apart. This coincided with the most likely period for accidents and thunderstorms. Since WWDC paid $1 to $5 for every news tip it aired, I would be regularly inundated with accounts of fallen limbs and fender benders as I struggled to write three newscasts in an hour and a half. Often the copy ended up like this
Reports of damage done by this afternoon's thunderstorm are pouring into the WWDC newsroom. At least six houses are on fire, nine accidents have occurred and numerous trees and hot wires have fallen across roads. Police and electric company officials say their phones have been jammed. . .
That newscast probably cost $13, representing the number of incidents I managed to squeeze into one double-spaced page -- all typed in caps with the errors blacked out by a soft copy pencil.
The news tip system worked pretty well, although I sometimes suspected that the volunteer rescue squad dispatchers were calling us before they sent out their equipment, since once the dispatch had been aired, anyone with a scanner could call in the item. And on at least one occasion an employee at WTOP earned a dollar for phoning in a news tip that he had heard on WMAL.
One of our regular callers was Dan. Matching Robert Frost's paradigm for the good life, Dan's vocation and avocation had become one. He sat in his apartment surrounded by police and fire scanners waiting for tragedy to strike somewhere in the metropolitan region. He would then call and hoarsely whisper the news: "This is Dan, Sam. I've got a body for you." And another buck went to Dan.
The reports of fallen limbs and power outages we accepted on faith. More serious matters would be checked out by phone, using a criss-cross directory that was sorted by street address rather than by name. You could often scurry up a good taped interview this way. One such eyewitness began coughing profusely as I questioned him about a fire in his apartment building, finally urgently suggesting that the smoke was getting too thick to continue the interview.
Writing constantly soon became tiresome and I discovered various ways to amuse myself. One was to pick a word for the day and then see in how many newscasts I could use it. It had to be something like evince or piqued because my goal, unlike that of station management, was to raise the general tenor of the WWDC sound. This quixotic effort came to a halt when a blue paper memo from Bill Robinson made it clear that he had noticed and didn't think much of my unsanctioned vocabulary lessons.
And then there were the days when no one was around. Like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And you sat in that little room listening to the click and clack and waiting for the news wire to produce some news, but more likely a huge Santa Claus or turkey drawn completely with letters by the equally bored guy at the other end of the machine.
o
At times it seemed that the little stone farmhouse on Brookville Road marked the precise divide between the old and new worlds of broadcasting. In one studio, for example, were the props of WWDC's morning man, Art Brown. These included several caged canaries and an organ. Brown, a large, rumpled gray haired lump of a voice, would alternate current recordings with traditional tunes -- which he played on the organ accompanied by the canaries. Years later he would reveal -- or claim -- that he could control when the birds would sing because they would only warble in the key of A flat.
Brown had already been in radio for 25 years when I met him and had enough clout to get away with refusing to play rock and roll. If a listener called to complain, he would point out that there were 16 other spots on the dial.
Meanwhile, however, the commercials for this archaic program were stored in experimental tape cartridges that WWDC engineers were helping to develop. Every 30 or 60 seconds of advertising had its own continuous play cartridge that could be simply slipped into a machine and started on cue -- an immense improvement over tapes that needed to be rewound and manually lined up.
In the late fifties WWDC was the area's top rated station, but it maintained this status with substantial help from the exclusive broadcast rights to the Washington Senators games. Absent baseball, WWDC dropped to second or third in evening listening, behind WTOP and WRC, although keeping its lead in the daytime.
The new single format radio hadn't quite reached Brookville Road. While WWDC was known as a top-40 station, emphasizing the two score most popular records of the day, it still pursued a relentless eclecticism ranging from singing canaries to the most modern local radio news operation in town. And while we were expected to write our newscasts with journalistic dignity, it was also true that on my arrival each morning, I would be greeted not only by Art Brown's birds but by a jingle that chirped:
Good morning to you in the land of the free
This is Washington's Double-U, Double-U DC . . .
May your skies above all be sunny and blue
WWDC says good morning to you!
Good morning, good morning, good. . . [fade]
For such reasons, WWDC was sometimes known as Bubbly Bubbly DC. The song had come from a jingle house, one of the new parasites of the business -- a firm that provided stations with customized musical fillers. Knowing that the same jingle, slightly reworked, was being used by stations all over the country was a reminder of the illusions one could create in a medium where no one saw what you were doing.
There were many new illusions being created in those days. The radio contest, for example, was coming into its own, contests like the one in which new dollar bills were placed in circulation each week with a payoff every time the announced serial numbers were matched. Taxi drivers would keep lists of the serial numbers attached to their visors; clerks taped them next to the cash register. There was also an insidious contest in which the winner was whoever correctly counted the number of times the station's call letters had been mentioned in a two hour period.
Between about a dozen commercials every half hour, WWDC played its songlist, inserting more traditional music after every third or fourth current hit. Although such programming clearly pleased the audience, surveys confirmed what some observers suspected, namely that the new radio was appealing to an easily influenced but small segment of the population: the record-buying teenager. Stations thus were not only deceiving themselves but their advertisers since sponsors were trying to sell things a teenager would never buy. Someone described radio at the time as "a bunch of 12-year-olds trying to keep up with a 14-year-old audience."
Three years after I left the station that description fell apart. As Beatles Again explains:
15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, MD, viewed The Beatles performing "She Loves You" on the CBS news and like what she saw and heard. Marsh wrote a letter to her favorite radio station, WWDC, referring to The Beatles' appearance on the news and asking, "Why can't we have this music in America?" DJ Carroll James, who also had seen The Beatles on the news, arranged to have a copy of the group's latest British single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand", delivered to him by the BOAC airline.
On Dec. 17, 1963, exactly one week after the CBS broadcast, James had Marsha Albert come down to the station to introduce the song on his radio show.. . According to James, the station's switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with eager listeners phoning in to praise the song. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was immediately added to WWDC's playlist and placed in heavy rotation.
It didn't take long for Capitol to learn that a Washington station had jumped the gun by playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" four weeks prior to its scheduled release date of Jan. 13, 1964. Capitol telephoned WWDC and requested that the single be pulled off the air, but the station refused. Capitol then hired New York entertainment attorney Walter Hofer, who represented Epstein, The Beatles and the song's publisher, to contact the station and demand that WWDC "cease and desist" playing the song. According to Hofer, James told him, "Look, you can't stop me from playing it. The record is a hit. It's a major thing."
Realizing that they could not stop WWDC from playing the record and believing that this was an isolated incident that would not spread elsewhere, Capitol decided to press a few thousand copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to send to the Washington area.
FRED FISKE INTERVIEWS TAB HUNTER
[Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library, Washington Post]
The Beatles would hold their first American concert at Washington's Uline Arena, as well as a snow ball fight
Things were quieter when I was there. Art Brown was the first of the day's "personalities." Later there was Fred Fiske, reputedly the highest paid announcer in DC thanks in part to having made commercials with a slogan dreamed up by Arthur Godfrey and still being used: NEXT TO A NEW CAR, A CHERNERIZED CAR IS BEST! The WWDC news department manual described Fiske as "the master of the short, cornball quip. He intersperses records and commercials with dialect stories and human interest items from the news wire."
Jack Rowzie had a mellower, almost ministerial voice, drove a pastel purple Mercury convertible, ended his show with a hymn or gospel number and, whenever I hopped a ride with him, spoke of the need to turn to Christ. Years later, when Jack was 84, we talked on the phone about the old days. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, Jack asked, "Now what I really want to know, Sam, is what you're doing for the Lord."
I hadn't run into anyone like that before. Nor like Steve Allison, "the man who owns midnight." Allison was a pioneer of the radio talk show. In Boston, and then Philadelphia and now Washington, Allison had set up in a restaurant late in the evening, and interviewed stars coming out of their shows or the politicians trying to stay in office. My father had been one of his guests. He began at WWDC the summer I arrived.
Allison had left Boston under a cloud and Philadelphia after an indictment. I had read in the Boston papers how Allison and nine others had been charged with participation in a vice ring involving teen age girls as young as 15.
When Allison arrived at WWDC, I introduced myself as my father's son. Allison grabbed my arm and pulled me into the empty hall. "Look," he said for openers, "all I did was put my cock in the mouth of some under-aged girls. Show me a guy who hasn't done that and I'll show you a queer."
One night in April 1959 Allison was conducting his program as usual – sometime between ten thirty and one am – at Cores Restaurant, 1305 E St NW, when the recently victorious Fidel Castro and his aides came into the restaurant looking for something to eat without any idea a radio program was underway. Castro had come to Washington to speak at the National Press Club, right around the corner from the restaurant.
Here is the tape of what happened next as reported on the program that followed. It is extraordinary:
Together it created a curious blend of the traditional and the contemporary, the sentimental and the cynical. But then Washington radio had always been a bit different -- ever since a local morning man named Arthur Godfrey started making fun of his advertisers on the air. At least one of them, a furrier named Zlotnik, the man to see "when your wife is cold," became famous mainly as a result of Godfrey's comments about the dirty stuffed bear in front of his store.
The Washington I had returned to in the summer of 1957 was, on the surface, a quiet, rarely air-conditioned southern town. When I first got to Argonne Place, I noticed that the Ontario Theater was playing Love in the Afternoon. At the end of the summer it still was. The radio stations were playing Pat Boone's Love Letters in the Sand. At the end of the summer they still were. When I worked the late night shift, I would would drive to the suburbs listening to a program on WOL called The Cabbie's Serenade -- dedicated, said the host, Al Jefferson, "to all you guys driving the loneliest mile in the world."
Despite the apparent somnolence, DC was actually undergoing a mass migration of blacks from further south. Almost from its beginning, DC had been the first stop in the promised land. Now the city had just turned into a majority black town.
Despite the demographic trend, however, there was nothing remotely approaching black power. More than once, when calling the DC police dispatcher to check on the overnight action, I was told, "Nothin' but a few nigger stabbings." It had, after all, only been twelve years since the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell arrived to take his seat in the House of Representatives. Stepping into his office for the first time he found a memo on his desk headed "Dos and Don'ts for Negro Congressmen." One was "Don't eat in the House dining room."
The city was run by three commissioners appointed by the president. Many, though, assumed correctly that the real commissioner was the director of the very white Board of Trade. The local papers routinely listed the race of victims and perpetrators in crime stories. A Washington Star veteran recalled "the grieving widow who called me one day after I'd done an obit about her late husband, in which I had referred to him as a D.C. native. 'He wasn't no native,' she shrieked. 'He was as white as you or I!'" And when I went to cover the annual Brotherhood Week luncheon at a local hotel, a reporter leaned over and said, "Do you notice the only Negroes in this place are the waiters?".
This same reporter called me at 2 a.m. the morning after the funeral of Sweet, Precious Daddy Grace, the colorful bishop of the United House of Prayer for All People. "I'm down here waiting for them to choose Daddy Grace's successor," he whispered into the phone, "and I'm the only white person here. How about coming down?"
I had covered the funeral earlier that day and had been struck by the jewelry bedizening the lifeless and red, white and blue long finger-nailed form of the late charismatic - who one paper said resembled Buffalo Bill. I got dressed and joined my friend at 601 M St. NW -- two young, unwelcomed white guys sitting quietly in the pre-dawn darkness of a church basement hallway waiting for the end of a seven-hour deliberation. Finally, the 224 elders from as far away as New Bedford, Mass., and Miami selected Bishop Walter McCullough by about 30 votes.
Daddy Grace has been born Manoel da Graca, a Cape Verde immigrant to New Bedford and a cranberry picker who would come to claim that God had also come to America in his body. He would eventually give baptisms to up to 1,000 at a time and accept "love offerings" from female followers. Among the tenets of his theology: "Salvation is by Grace alone. Grace has given God a vacation. If you sin against God, Grace can save you, but if you sin against Grace, God can't save you."
Daddy Grace, came to DC in 1927 and, according to Molly Rath in Washington City Paper, left this world a debt-burdened $25 million estate including an 85 room mansion in Los Angeles, a farm in Cuba and a coffee plantation in Brazil. Along with quotations like, "If Moses came here now he would have to follow this man," pointing to himself.
… I gravitated to people like Rouhlac Hamilton, who represented a string of southern radio stations and newspapers and carried within him an encyclopedia of congressional information. It was Rouhlac, for example, who told me that South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston -- Olin the Solon as he was known -- had once greeted the Pontiff by saying, "Good morning, your popeship" and had declared trees to be "our primary source of lumber."
You found out who was kind to young journalists -- like Sid Davis and Ann Corrick of Westinghouse Broadcasting and Mike Michaelson of the House Radio-TV Gallery -- and who wasn't. And you noticed things. One of the things I noticed was that my ambition to become a network anchorman or national correspondent might not be so wise. To be sure, this ambition had its encouragements, such as getting drunk with Chet Huntley and a few others in a hotel suite following a Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner. But it also slowly dawned that the network correspondents I overheard in the radio-TV galleries talking to their bosses were being told what to do and not, as was typically my case, suggesting their next assignment or how the present one should be carried out better. These journalists seemed to be taking a lot of orders given their ostensible success. I, it seemed, was being underpaid in salary and overpaid in freedom.
Later, in January 1961, I made my only foray into the real world of network television. I was hired for Kennedy's inauguration by CBS News as a news editor. Along with fellow WWDC newsman Ed Taishoff, I sat all day capped with a headset in a ballroom of the Hotel Washington , turning phone calls from CBS correspondents into stories then placed on Walter Cronkite's personal news ticker. If there was one thing Ed and I knew, it was how to take news from callers, turn it into copy and get it on the air fast.
But when the calls weren't coming in, I looked around the room and tried to figure out what the scores of CBS minions and executives were doing. As far as I could tell, Ed and I and a few people in front of dials and screens were doing most of the work. Yet we were badly out-numbered and underpaid by men in suits who tore around yelling and looking concerned or angry or wanting to know where something was. It all didn't look like much fun and I think it was when I decided I didn't want to be a network anchorman after all.
After the summer of 1957, I returned to Harvard even more determined to go into radio. I was elected WHRB's station manager but two weeks later received an official letter stating that "the Administrative Board voted to place you on probation instead of severing your connection with the University." It had been my second unsatisfactory term as a result of my infatuation with radio; among the penalties would be the surrender of my new post. Nonetheless, and in the tradition of the college's station, I continued on the air under a pseudonym and comforted myself with the thought that WWDC had asked me to come back. I toughed it out and eventually graduated without honors but with a job.
…. Just before I returned to WWDC in the summer of 1959, Joe Phipps left the station to begin a radio news service headquartered in his apartment down one of the long, dark, cabbage-perfumed halls of the Chastleton apartments at 16th & R NW. I started working for Deadline Washington on my off-days and after work on other days -- putting in 12-14 hour stints. Often I would be on joint assignment for Deadline and WWDC.
Joe had bought the operation for $75,000 from a less than admirable journalistic hustler named Jock Lawrence. I asked Joe if $75,000 wasn't a lot of money for such a business. He replied, "I'll tell you, Sam. I believe every man before he dies owes some service to humanity. And I thought if I could buy a charlatan out of the news business it would be worth it at that price." I never found out whether Phipps had a financial partner in WWDC, but for most purposes, the news service was closely integrated with the station's own operations.
I wasn't all that happy and kept looking for a better job, but I also wrote a friend at the time:
There are real compensations to the job. There is the satisfaction that comes with a feeling that the city is yours. Nothing in it is foreign to you, the trivial or the important. The foot patrolman and the District Commissioner will both answer your questions.
Besides, I was making more at WWDC than a Washington Post friend. I was covering everything from murders to White House and my salary was even higher than union scale as set by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
At its peak, Deadline Washington provided two dozen independent radio stations with Washington news. That in itself was a novelty, but even more appealing to these stations was our ability to appear to be their personal correspondents. This was achieved by recording custom tag lines e.g. "This is Sam Smith, WPIG News in Washington, and now back to the studio." Using two Ampex recorders, each story would be fed to stations with its appropriate tag line dubbed on the end.
WWDC also received feeds from other stations. For example, when Nikita Khruschev was visiting the US, we arranged for a mid-western station to give reports of his tour of an American farm. In the days before satellite links, covering a Soviet premier's visit to an Iowa farm was not easy. In order to get around the inevitable delays and to beat the competition, Robinson came up with a simple solution: the Iowa radio station would simply imagine Khruschev's visit.
Of the Khruschev story I wrote in my journal:
WWDC News hit another low. It received from a station in Iowa five advance stories on the Khruschev visit to Des Moines. These stories described several hours in advance how Khruschev had been received, what he had said and to whom he has said it. The incredible thing was that the personnel at the station saw nothing incredible about such a procedure . . .
Bob liked to write memos. One in October 1959, a month after the Khruschev visit, was on the subject of "Where are we going? How are we doing?" Ben Strouse had just been to the San Francisco Conference of Broadcasters and Bob shared some of the ideas his boss had brought back with him:
We must try for more human interest. We must have more interviews, even if it's only a few words, with the man who has killed his wife; with the woman has been pulled from the Potomac; with the juvenile who has led police on a 100-mile-an-hour chase; with the bus driver who has been beaten over the head by a thug . . .
WNEW in New York did a helluva a thing when Khruschvev was there. As Mr. K was appearing on TV, a WNEW newsman went into a New York bar and interviewed people as they watched the TV screen . . .
We should try to catch recorded comments from people in the hallways outside police courts. When someone like the Air Force sergeant is shot dead by punks tampering with his car, we might send a newsman to the funeral. Perhaps a few remarks from the sermon, the sound of the mourners can be picked up on tape . . .
We must work constantly to avoid the use of clichés in our writing. . . One thing is certain. None of us, least of all the News Director, knows all the answers. But if you'll pardon my attempt to restate an old cliché, togetherness can produce better quarterbacking.
In another memo, Bob bragged about my successful efforts interceding on behalf of a man who needed medical treatment, but had fallen through various bureaucratic cracks, and who felt several congressmen were conspiring against him. I had found that the man was entitled to be in a VA hospital, but when I called to tell him the good news, his response was, "Does this mean you're going to drop my case?" His last remark to Bob Robinson before he left for the hospital was, "I hope Mr. Smith will work on those Congressmen while I'm gone."
Such cases were not unusual and the same station that broadcast fictionalized reports of the Soviet premier's visit also spent hours dealing seriously with social issues and personal problems that came its way.
Thus I was sent to interview a woman who was refusing to move out of her house in the Southwest urban renewal area. Hundreds of acres had been leveled around her and still she clung on like a survivor of the Dresden carpet bombing.
The project, the largest in the nation, had begun in April 1954 and five years later some 550 acres had been cleared. Only 300 families remained to be relocated. More than 20,000 people and 800 businesses had been kicked out to make way for the plan. Some 80% of the latter never went back into operation.
…In a 1959 letter I described my thoughts about writing news:
The reporter's job is to bring life to life. Drama has a role, of course, but the real problem is how to use color without having a colored newscast as a result. The approved approach here is for sentences like "Tragedy walked the streets of Washington last night. . . " or "Grief and disaster struck the home of. . . " I have found that a direct quote or a factual description of some small scene can be almost as effective and, in most cases, more so. Thus at the funeral of Admiral Halsey the scene of hundreds of officers dressed in white uniforms with black arm bands against the gray walls of the Cathedral struck me as something that would be only weakened by the use of adjectives such as "somber." The trouble is that you have to make decisions on things like this every hour and it is much easier to say the corny, the exaggerated than to paint a picture dramatically but honestly.
But the truth was that I was also fascinated by some of the showmen of the business such as Paul Harvey who once started a broadcast something like this:
Up in Albany New York, eleven year old little leaguer Johnny Henderson hit a high fly ball to center field. . . He ran to first. . (pause). . . rounded second. . . (pause). . . .rounded third for the trip home. . . (pause). . . He was safe. . . (pause). . .And dead. . . . (long pause) . . . No, don't ask me; there'll be an autopsy tomorrow. Meanwhile in Washington today. . .
Truth was I wanted to be both Edward R. Murrow and Paul Harvey.
WWDC's news fleet consisted of two vehicles, a Nash Rambler station wagon and an Isetta minicar. The light blue Rambler had WWDC NEWS, in reverse image, painted on its hood in large dark blue letters, thus allowing the sign to be read correctly in a rear view mirror. The style would become common, especially with ambulances, but at the time was the sort of novelty WWDC loved.
The Rambler had an even more startling, albeit unintentional, characteristic. The front seats of Ramblers folded down to become beds. Unfortunately, this capability had developed an anarchistic streak in our model, resulting in a tendency for the driver's seat back to become prone whenever sturdy brake pressure was applied, say at an ordinary stop light.
The Rambler was, however, the more conventional vehicle of the two. The Isetta, an Italian import, was far smaller than any car on the road today, and powered by a motor scooter engine. It had four wheels, but they were tiny and the two in back were almost adjacent to each other. You sat in what amounted to little more than a cockpit with barely enough room for a 210-pound reporter and a radio telephone. The door doubled as the entire front end, with the steering wheel swinging out of the way for entrance and egress. More than once I pulled up to a wall or post only to remember that I had blocked my own departure.
A 1957 ISETTA OF THE SAME MODEL THE
AUTHOR DROVE
AS A RADIO NEWS REPORTER.
[Microcar & Minicar Club]
Via Mr DC Memories
From its door-width bow, the Isetta slimmed almost to a point in the stern. It was painted bright red with the words WWDC NEWS inscribed in large white letters. In sum, the Isetta looked much like a lopsided, egotistical, overgrown tomato rolling down the highway.
It was not the best way to cover the news. The Isetta had a flank speed of 50 mph on flat, good pavement, and it practically had to be pedaled up hills. This sometimes interfered with arriving promptly at the scene of a distant fire, murder or drowning. Nonetheless, no one at WWDC would admit that novelty in this case had gotten a bit out of hand. Besides, the Isetta's light carriage allowed me to push it out of mud and sand in which a heavier car would have become mired.
Everything was simpler. Even the US Capitol which I wandered around with my mike and tape recorder like it was my apartment building. Even the US Capitol Police force was comprised mainly of young men benefiting from the patronage granted their fathers by various members of Congress. It was a fairly pleasant crowd and you knew you were not just dealing with a law enforcement officer but perhaps a grad student whose dad was a buddy of the majority leader.
My favorite Hill cop story from the period involves a friend who was a bagpipe -playing Lebanese Catholic from Boston who knew everyone in the Democratic Party and worked for a number of them including Massachusetts governor Foster Furcolo and, later, Ted Kennedy. She was on her way to an LBJ State of the Union from Boston but was late and arrived from the plane still carrying her bagpipe case in which rested not only the instrument but some pita bread her sister had made.
In a hall crowded with some of America's most powerful, my friend was told by a Capitol police officer to open the bagpipe case. The officer was disturbed by what he found inside. "Don't worry," said my friend. "It's just a bagpipe and some pita bread. . . Call your chief and tell him Terri Haddad is here with her bagpipes. He knows me."
The officer did and at the other end the Capitol Hill police chief issued one
blunt order: "Tell her to play 'Danny Boy."
And so for the chief and many of America's most powerful, she did and then was allowed to repack her instrument and go hear the speech.
… Before long, I knew Washington and its environs like a cab driver and could quickly compute such arcane calculations as the shortest route from the White House to a six alarm fire in Upper Marlboro. I also knew every press room in town.
My favorite was at the District Building, which one entered through swinging doors reminiscent of a frontier bar. Inside were three desks, a center table and a worn-out sofa. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa and the covering was greasy and black from years of resting heads. After Watergate, a sign was posted above the press room sofa. It read, "Carl Bernstein slept here."
The desks belonged to the three dailies. The Post and the Star desk were manned by men who looked much like other Washington journalists. Their suits were due two weeks ago at the cleaners, cuffs worn and pockets pulled out of shape by too many stenographer's notebooks and too many news releases stuffed into them. The Daily News reporter had spent his morning and early afternoons in the District Building for more years than anyone including the gray-haired elevator operator at the end of the long hall could remember. Nothing frightened, surprised, upset or bewildered this man. Like a vintage bar room piano player, there were no new tunes in life. And if there were, he could fake them.
Much of the time the News man played solitaire. When his companions weren't busy he would silently amble over to the center table, clear away the scrap paper and news releases and deal three hands.
The pale green walls had accumulated a half century of miscellany, written with bold copy pencils and fine pens, in illegible script and distinct printing. There were quotations from city officials of things they wished they hadn't said. Clichés, malapropisms and by the telephone there were numbers running in every direction. Sometimes the numbers had a name beside them but most often there was nothing but the exchange and the digits. Not even the News man could have told you what more than a half dozen of them signified. They were the grave markers of stories long dead.
Complementing the novelty of the station's news fleet was its collection of still rare battery operated tape recorders. These devices were about three inches thick, five inches wide and ten inches long. The microphone, a small rectangular piece of plastic, was permanently attached by a cord just short enough to complicate the task of securing the mike to a stand at a news conference while simultaneously resting the recorder itself on the ground.
The recorders were so new that the engineer's union had initially insisted it send a member out with all reporters using one. Fortunately for the future of news radio, this particular piece of featherbedding was scotched. The tape recorders, however, presented a number of other challenges -- including a deep sensitivity to temperature. More than once I returned from an outdoor winter taping -- a burial at Arlington cemetery or a fire -- only to find my recorded voice sounding like Porky Pig as the batteries returned to full power once back in the studio .
Whatever the machines' faults, there were fewer than a dozen stations and networks in Washington that had them, so even a neophyte reporter such as myself had easy access to the most senior politicians.
In a manual on WWDC news reporting that I wrote in 1960, shortly before leaving the station, I outlined some of the peculiarities of the technology:
The Mohawk is a temperamental machine that gives excellent service until the sunspot level gets too high or some other change takes place . . . [The Steelman recorder] is a useful machine when it works . . . Tape machine repairs are done at Brenner Photo store in the 900 block of Penna. Ave. NW. Parking on D Street in front of the back entrance has netted no tickets so far . . . Brenner Photo does not, as it may appear, swallow tape recorders. It merely chews upon them for several weeks or months, then spits them back at you in more or less repaired condition. Constant phone calls and in-person appearances results in some progress. If things really get desperate, Chuck can be prevailed upon to loan a recorder.
The various machines operate in various ways at various times. For example, they have different proper recording levels and sometimes these change after the machines have been repaired. . .
Do not let the speaker hold the mike unless he is in such a position that you can not comfortably reach him. You will find that the compulsive mike-grabbers often seem to be trying to record themselves internally. Saliva does not help the mike crystal.
The mike stands to which we secured our recorders often belonged to the networks. It took a combination of diplomacy and deference for a young newsman to safely affix his toy machine to the phallic symbol of CBS News, but over time these men -- all of whom looked like John Madden -- became accustomed to such intrusions. My suggestions included:
Covering events with you on the local level will be the three daily papers, an occasional wire service man, and sometimes a man from WMAL The basis of successful operation alongside these other news people is largely intuitive and is worked out by experience. But if the WMAL cameraman asks you to move the mike a little to the left, you should do so as long as it does not hamper your work. If you need to get through a crowd of reporters with a mike, polite requests combined with the proper quantity of physical pressure will assure entrance.
There are many events at which over a hundred reporters will be present. Obviously, a dog-eat-dog attitude could easily result in chaos. A scoop is one thing, but it doesn't mean cooperation is eliminated.
Covering national stories, the networks present a problem. The network engineers and cameramen try to intimidate new independent newsmen and like to play tough. Some of their requests are responsible. Sometimes they just are trying to give you a hard time. It gains you nothing to get angry. Be good natured whenever possible; otherwise go about your business ignoring them . . .
In time this policy pays off. One cameraman, without being asked, gave me the idea for the paper clip mike holder. NBC's Johhnie Langanegger repaired a transformer for me. A cameraman named Skip lent me a screwdriver at a crucial moment. These men have a job to do and take a certain pride in being old-timers at it. It helps to remember this . . .
Many interviews are done on a pool basis. In the case of fishing expeditions in the corridors of the Capitol, two independents may be seeking the same Congressman at the same time. It is often pointless and annoying to the interviewee to have to go over the same material two, three or more times in separate interviews. Make sure the other party agrees. Mike Turpin got so mad at Steve Dixon 'piggy backing" his interviews that the pair got into a fight that was broken up by a Capitol guard.
The manual also included advice on where to find electric and sound outlets, descriptions of common news locales as well as this note on how to report a presidential news conference:
After the conference there is a mad rush for the few phones available. Since the conferences always end on a half hour, you have a half hour before first airtime. So the simplest thing to do is to go the People's Drug Store on the corner of 17th & Pennsylvania Ave, buy a cup of coffee, sit down at a table and write your story in relative peace.
THE AUTHOR, 2nd FROM RIGHT,
INTERVIEWS JFK RIGHT AFTER HE ANNOUNCED HIS PRESIDENTIAL CANIDACY.
Photo by Hank Walker, Life Magazine.
The stories I covered for WWDC ran from Eisenhower news conferences, to an interview with Louis Armstrong, to the murder of the former head of a Illinois college who was found "stark naked, beaten and dying" in a room of the seedy Alton Hotel, murdered by a male carnival worker.
At the time, I saw these stories as separate events but it seems now that maybe it wasn't a bunch of stories I covered back then, but rather the end of one big story, a story that Americans such as I had been raised to believe, a story about perfectibility and how close we were to it and how easy it would be to go the rest of the way. It turned out that the end of the story was that much of the story hadn't been true.
I couldn't have put it as directly then. I was only 23 and my mind was on other things -- such as getting into Coast Guard Officer Candidatde School before my draft board got me. But I know those months changed me even as they changed the country. I no longer thought of the Capitol as a cathedral, the exciting had turned a little tawdry, the right choice was less certain and the important no longer peremptorily apparent.
I had stopped noticing the shine of the marble. The floors of the House and Senate office buildings became harder, the hallways darkened, and the doors that lined them seemed to conceal more than they invited. Even on foggy and rainy evenings, the Capitol dome no longer floated in the sky but sat lumpy and leaden on top of the Hill, waiting for a new story to begin.
PHOTOS WASHINGTON HISTORY, MLK LIBRARY, WASHINGTONIANA DIVISION
