Radio Memories Vol. 19

It was a clear cool Sunday morning, November 21, 1971, just four days until Thanksgiving. I was working the morning shift as the engineer on duty along with Bill Roehl, the only other person in the station, operating the Master Control Switcher. There was a cinematographer in the newsroom earlier but he had left to shoot footage of the upcoming demolition of the Columbia Hotel on the corner of Gervais and Sumter Streets just a block and a half further west than the WIS Studios at Bull and Gervais. It was a typical Sunday morning filled with religious programming on film and videotape. The weekend Today Show was still more than a decade in the future. 

Normally weekend morning shifts were quiet and gave me a chance to finish up some repair projects that were left over from the busy week. I had completed working on one of the production monitors and placed it into the rack in the Production Control Room, queued up a commercial on one of the Ampex 1200 Video Tape Machines (VTRs), and the 11 AM syndicated religious show on the other. There was a short door that led from the Master Control Room on the second floor out to the roof of the older studio that was under the legs of the 400 ‘ tall self-standing tower that supported the microwave studio to transmitter link that fed the 1’200 foot “Tall Tower” just off of I-20 in Kershaw County. 

Since I wasn’t involved in switching the station break, at 5 before 11, I told Bill that I was going to step out onto the roof and watch the implosion and give him a blow-by-blow description through the open door. 

When I looked to the west-northwest, I could clearly see the brick walls of the hotel, the barricades blocking off the traffic, and the large crowd that was gathered for the event. Precisely at 10:58:38 Bill started the 7-second pre-roll on the commercial VTR and switched it up at 10:58:45 to start the 11 AM station break. At 11 AM he punched up the half-hour videotape program. 

At that moment, I heard the booms of the demolition and watched the hotel start to collapse. I noticed that some of the falling debris fell into the intersection and wondered if that was planned or not. 

It turns out that it was not planned! The next thing I heard was Bill yelling, “Get in here Rick, the VTR just shut down.” I dashed through the door to discover that not only had the VTR with the show shut down but the other one had as well. There were red “loss of sync” lights shining on the 20 or 25 plug-in modules in the face of the machines, the video and waveform monitors on the machines were lit up but there was no signal on either one. 

Realizing that I was going to have to repair both VTR machines, I grabbed the film that was the source of the last show off the projector and laid the reels on the film splicing table for later rewinding. Bill had punched up the “Please Stand By” slide and put the film show that was supposed to start the next hour on the projector. I grabbed the spare take-up reel and loaded it and while Bill ran back to the switcher I cued up that show and gave him control of the projector. As soon as he saw the light in the switch indicating that he had control, he rolled the show and punched it up on the air. 

We had a few minutes to catch our breath, figure out what to do next, and figure out what went wrong. Fortunately, we had enough film shows in the control room to make it to 1 PM and Football from NBC. Bill told me that all the monitors in the control room and the switcher flashed at the moment he heard the blast through the open door. Remembering the fallen debris in the street, I theorized that the debris had fallen across the power lines on the corner and sent a spike through the grid. Not knowing how much of our equipment was damaged, I called Tom Bradford, the studio engineering supervisor, and told him what happened. He jumped into his car and headed to the studio. 

It seemed that he got there in seconds because I had just begun testing voltages on the test points on the front of several modules. Tom looked at the power supplies on the bottom row of the VTR and said, the lights are out we have no power coming out of the power supplies. That was a “head slap” moment for me, I should have looked there first, but in my panic, I concentrated on the sync modules instead. We pulled the first of the four power supplies in the two machines and placed it on the bench. Tom checked the four decoupling transistors and found that all four of them were blown. I checked the chest of drawers where we stored our transistors and found that we had exactly 16 in stock which was exactly what we needed with none to spare. 

As Tom began replacing those transistors, he told me that he had driven past the demolition site and confirmed my theory of a spike created by the debris falling on the power lines. There were several SCE&G crews repairing the damaged power lines. 

He asked me to check all of the other electronics in both control rooms and the cameras downstairs most of which fortunately were turned off at the time. By the time that I completed my rounds, he had replaced the 8 transistors in the first VTR and it was time for a “smoke test”, that is turn it back on and see if it smoked.  We did and it didn’t! 

By 1 PM, Tom and I had repaired the other two power supplies and returned them to service for the NFL Sunday Football Game on NBC. We went down to the canteen/break room on the first floor and had lunch.  That vending machine sandwich was so good. I earned my first grey hair that day.