Working In A Broadcast Time Warp

By Frank Absher

In 1972, compliments of Uncle Sam, I was serving in Alaska, and to scrape together enough money to actually live, I took a part time job at an AM/FM/TV combo in Anchorage. It was like working in a time warp.

Because of its remoteness, Alaska was about four years behind the Lower 48 in terms of what broadcasters were doing.

In radio, that meant we had no consultants. Everything was done as a team. The FM station format was oldies with currents sprinkled in. The AM was Top 40 with recurrents sprinkled in.

Some of the music on AM was on carts, but there was a lot of slip cuing on both stations. AM even had an echo built into the transmitter. (This made for interesting listening when the news guys came on with actualities of President Nixon. The Pres and the echo chamber produced a novel sound, to say the least.)

One evening per week we had a mandatory program meeting. The on-air jock was expected to tape an hour of his show those nights because everyone, including him, went to those meetings. The PD would pick random skimmer tapes of each jock and the tapes were played in front of everyone. Then your peers critiqued you.

This may sound brutal, but it had a great influence on everyone. We were not competing against each other. We were a team competing against the other stations.

On the TV side, technology was also behind the times. The CBS Evening News with Uncle Walter didn’t run live on KTVA because when the news was fed to the West Coast it was 3:30 in the afternoon in Anchorage. Satellite time was cost-prohibitive. Instead, the Seattle affiliate videotaped the news and put it on a plane. We met the plane at the airport and put the news on the air.

Our station didn’t have any color studio cameras when I got there. When we finally bought one, we only had one. The other cameras and all the news film were black and white. Then there was the chromakey.

Our young news anchor sat in front of the blue background, on which were mixed the graphics. There was one slide of a raging forest fire. When newsman Ed put in his gray contact lenses, his eyes became the same shade as the chromakey. The result: Flames in his eyes every time that slide was used.

And since we had no live network feeds, the TV programs were shipped the same way the news was, but there was no rush on the shipping. Our shows ran two weeks after they ran in the Lower 48, with all the Christmas shows running in the weeks following Christmas.

I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. The camaraderie we had at the radio station was the best I’ve ever seen.

And there was the night that brought it all home. During my show I watched as the tone arm bounced across the record grooves and landed on the felt-covered turntable top. A nice little earthquake had jolted us, and I had another war story to tell my friends when I got back Stateside.

Discuss on the STLMedia Message Board. (Registration required)