Radio Memories Vol. 24

November 12, 1975, is the date that it all started to change. 

On that date, WIS-TV received a delivery of one of the first shoulder-mounted video cameras to arrive in SC: an Ikegami HL-35.  Short aside: HL stood for Handee Lookee; I kid you not. It weighed 10.1 pounds and came connected to a 30-pound backpack by a 6-foot-long camera cable. I remember walking into master control to see three or four guys from the studio engineering staff ogling it on the workbench. It was a salmon colored beauty that we quickly hooked up to the portable Sony ¾“U-Matic cassette video recorder that had arrived a couple of days earlier.  We all took turns hoisting it up on our shoulders and shooting each other and the rest of the crew, doing silly things. In addition to feeding the video to the tape machine, it could also be hooked up to the “Window Ledge” microwave system that we were expecting in the next week or so to feed a live picture from almost anywhere in the city. 

Shortly after 6 that evening, we had to put our new toys aside and get ready for the 7 O’Clock Report, our evening newscast that immediately followed the NBC Nightly News. I remember hearing a train go by, something that I didn’t remember hearing before, despite there being a set of tracks just 8 blocks away. It was stormy outside, so it shrugged it off, thinking the sound was reflecting off the low clouds. I also heard thunder and knew that it was raining pretty hard. 

Sometime during the NBC news, our news department started getting calls about a tornado that had struck Five Points 6 blocks in the other direction from the tracks. The newsroom sent out a reporter and a film camera crew to see if they could find any damage. They came back to the station around 7:30 to tell us that there was visible damage to several storefronts and were sad that there was no way to develop and edit the film they had shot before the 11 O’Clock report that evening. Hearing this, I looked at Phillip Bryant, who was the other engineer standing the shift with me, and we had the same idea. We asked Tom Bradford, our supervisor, if we could “test” the new camera and ¾ “ U-matic recorder by driving them down to Five Points and see what we could capture on tape. Tom agreed on two conditions: that we were to be back in the station in 30 minutes and that we not take the camera out of the van.  

We were out of there in a flash! I got into the back of the van with the camera, set up the camera on batteries, and connected it to the portable U-matic machine. Phillip would drive the van, and I would shoot video through the open sliding side door. 

We had time only for a drive down Harden Street from Gervais to Devine Street and back; about 5 blocks one way. There was visible damage to several buildings that I was able to shoot with the available street light I wound up with about two minutes of raw footage before we had to head back to the station to get back before our curfew. 

When we got back to the station, everybody in Master Control was marveling at how good the video looked. Even the news guys loved it. The problem was that the U-matic tape could not be put on the air without first processing it through a device called a time base corrector. That was needed to “sync” the picture from the tape with the other video sources in the station.  Ours had arrived that week, but we were a long way from getting it installed and correctly adjusted. Chuck Drier, the assignment editor in the news department, said we could certainly use that footage as a “B-Roll” as our in-studio reporter told the story. It sure looked good on that 19” RCA color monitor. 

I don’t know who was the genius that night; Tom, Chuck, Phillip or I, but we hatched a cockamamie idea to roll the color floor monitor from the other studio into the back of the News Studio where it was nice and dark and shoot the monitor with one of the studio cameras as we played the tape back through the monitor.  It worked great! 

After the news and all the excitement were over, I settled into finishing the shift and signing the station off at 1 AM after the Tonight Show. I heard the phones on the work bench and the engineering office ring around 12:15 AM. This phone could be reached directly from an outside line after hours, so I scooted over and picked it up. I heard an excited voice say, “Rick, you gotta come here when you get off.” Not recognizing the voice, I said, “Who is this?” He said, “Milton!” Millton was Milton Holiday, the very soft-voiced chief engineer at WCOS AM&FM who also worked with me at WUSC. He was so excited that he was talking in a normal voice instead of his usual whisper. 

He told me that the WCOS tower was down! At that point, I realized that I had not seen the tower when Phillip and I turned onto Harden Street from Gervais, just three blocks from the tower. I arrived at the WCOS site near the corner of Gervais and Millwood around 1:30 after signing WIS-TV off the air. Sure enough, the 400’ tall tower was not there. I found Milton and Bobby Lambert, the dean of Radio consulting engineers, out in the tower field checking out the twisted metal tower all curled up around the tower base. The guy wires were all intact, none had broken.  This and the fact that the tower was curled up around the base told us that the tornado had lifted the tower off its 4-foot-high base insulator and set it on the ground beside it. That left enough slack in the guy wires to allow the tower to fall as it did. 

Milton, Bobby, and I, well mostly Milton and Bobby, came up with a plan to get the stations back on the air while the tower was being rebuilt. Milton had a spare FM antenna that they could mount on the top of a telephone pole next to the station. For the AM station, they could rig a long wire horizontally about 60 ‘ off the ground from that same pole to one across the field. But none of this could be done until the morning, so we all went home. 

Ironically, this “long wire” antenna configuration was commonly used back in the early days of radio.  WIS Radio had one strung across “Horseshoe Pond” in West Columbia when they signed on in 1930 at 1010 on the dial. 

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Photo Credits: Dennis Degan