Remembrances

Dick Bertel: One of my favorite recollections was an interview I did on the 12 O’clock Report (on Channel 3) with a noted professor whose specialty was werewolves. It was Halloween and Bob Steele played the noted professor. He assured me, in a two shot, through his thick, German accent that there was no such thing as werewolves. The camera then dollied in to a close-up of me while I expressed relief at his revelation.
  Of course, while the camera was in tight, Bob put on a rubber werewolf falseface. The camera then pulled out to reveal the transformation as I thanked him for appearing on the show. I can’t imagine doing anything like that on the news today.
  Announcer Bob Arel and I had common vibes when it came to breaking up. He lost it on the 6 o’clock radio news one time when he reported some Soviet dignitary traveling from Minsk to Pinsk. It was simply the rhyme that sounded funny. He made the fatal mistake of looking up at me to see if I had heard it and we both collapsed. J Back

Joe Crowley: Bob Dwyer and I were on our way to an assignment somewhere in Hartford. I was driving the white WTIC jeep and Bob was in the passenger seat. Some how the passenger door must not have been closed tightly and as we came around Bushnell Park, the door opened and Bob exited the vehicle. I didn’t notice for a few seconds and when I looked toward Bob, there he was hanging on to the door like a monkey and swinging back and forth as we went around a curve. I slowed; the door swung back in and Bob just plopped down on the seat again as if nothing had happened.

  During the Bobby Seale, Black Panther murder trials in New Haven in the early 70’s, News Director Paul Kuntz had rented a suite of offices on the fifth floor of a building across the street from the New Haven Court building. It was to be our remote headquarters and we had both radio and TV gear in it.The building was vacant except for us.(That’s probably why Paul got it so cheap)The trial went on during the day and at night there were street disturbances.
  Paul left explicit instructions that someone was to be in the suite at all times.
  Well ,one evening, Bill Mill, Randy Scalise (I think Sherm Tarr) and Bob Butterworth and I decided we could slip out for a nice steak dinner on the company. We were gone for about an hour. As we walked back through what had almost become an all out riot, we saw smoke coming from the area of the court house. We hurried along to get Butterworth’s camera and get the action. As we got closer, we saw that the smoke was coming from our building. Someone had set on fire.
  We had to get all that expensive equipment out or face Paul if it burned up. But the police would not let us in. We finally explained the situation to Lt. Steve Ahern, who later became New Haven police chief and a nationally known figure in police education circles, and Steve said we could go in to get the gear. However he would not allow us to use the elevator. So, we trekked up and down the five flights until we had all the equipment out.
  We never told Paul what had happened. He thought someone had been standing by and that’s how we got everything out. The meal was great and Paul o.k’ed the expense account.

  That night the rioting was especially bad and when we finally knocked off to get some sleep after the 11 p.m. news had aired, it was very difficult to make our way back to the hotel. We were on foot and were detoured several times and also ate a considerable amount of tear gas.
  When we reached the hotel and were riding upstairs in the elevator, I asked Randy Scalise if he had remembered to pack the shotgun mike. However, I just said, "Have you got the shotgun?" A poor woman, who was in the elevator with us, let out a scream and almost fainted. We managed to calm her down finally.

  Another time we were covering rioting in Hartford’s northend. Paul Kuntz had rented us a van so that we could move about without the WTIC logos on the vehicle. As we drove north on Main St near Albany Ave, I was leaning up against the passenger door when I felt a thud against my back. We later saw a dent in the door and determined that some sort of projectile had been fired at us and had lodged in the door. Fortunately, it did not penetrate and I was fine.

  Another time I was covering a state police stake out on a super market in Suffield that they had been tipped would be burglarized. The burglars showed up and a shoot out followed in which one suspect was wounded. After it was all over, the local police chief was holstering his pistol (He wore it cross-draw style on his left hip). I was standing to his left. Suddenly, I heard a bang and felt a breeze stir my pant leg. Yep, the gun had gone off and the bullet buzzed by my leg.

  On a very hot and humid August day, Dick Heinze and I were covering a scene where a man was holed up with an arsenal in his Barkhamsted home He was a career military man and had beaucoup weapons. He was firing at anything that moved.
Dick and I were flat on our stomachs along with police about 100 feet from the house. We could hear the ping of bullets as they whizzed by over our heads.
  At one point the man came out and started to walk toward the street. State Police Commissioner Leo Mulcahy and another trooper advanced toward him but were shielded by a tree. Mulcahy told the trooper, who had a shotgun, that they could not let the suspect get to the street under any circumstances. The man refused repeated orders to stop and put down his weapon. Finally, Mulcahy told the trooper, "Take him down." The trooper fired and hit him in the knee. He fell and was subdued.
  What Mulcahy didn’t know was that Heinze and I were right behind him and Dick got the whole thing on film. When he saw us, Mulcahy shouted, "What the hell are you two idiots doing here? Wait till I see Eaton." Well Mulcahy wasn’t really that angry and even if he was and had complained to Tom Eaton, once Tom saw that film we knew we wouldn’t be in any trouble.

  As I said, it was an extremely hot day and on the way back to Hartford, I suggested to Dick that we should stop by his house on Steele Rd. and take a dip in his newly installed in-ground pool. His response was a curt, "I inwite(CQ) no one."
I said, tongue in cheek, "Dick, we just faced death together." He replied, "I said I inwite no one and that includes you."

  Bill Mill and I were working an early morning radio shift and Bill had prepared the 7:15 hilights for Bob Steele. One of them involved a story about the then president of Korea Park Chung He. Bob, as he often did, disagreed and told Bill that the man’s name was Chung He Park. Bill assured him that it was not and a discussion followed which eventually became rather heated.
  Not to give up easily, Bill placed a call to the South Korean Embassy in Washington at about 6:45 a.m. to find out who was correct. It turned out that they both were. The Korean style was Park Chung He and when Anglicized it was Chung He Park. J Back

Art Masthay: It must have been 30 Years ago. Herb Hankin and I were on duty late in the evening at the transmitter when the newsroom called and said this is no joke. A stewardess has fallen out of an airplane and the towers was given as the location. We were asked to go out with a flashlight and look around. We did, hoping not to find anything. Shortly after a group from the Avon fire department came and took over the search. However, it wasn't until the next morning that she was found near the railroad tracks near Avon center.
  She had tried to stuff a pillow in the door air leak and lost her life.
   There were plenty of significant transmitter outages but with our emergency procedures and redundancies the yearly total outages were usually measured in minutes.
  In 1961 there were not many channels available and there was a huge audience for the game that Rodger Maris was to hit the home run that would beat Babe Ruth's record. During the game we lost commercial power and the diesel gave its reassuring roar but nothing came back on. Ignoring most of the insistent phone calls, we lost about eight frantic minutes before we realized that the generator field switch was open and there was no power being generated. The switch was later replaced despite never having been a problem. Back

Lou Holcombe: A Yale/Harvard Regatta brings to memory a funny incident.
  I believe it was the third regatta. It was decided to place a camera and equipment on an island, in the center of the Thames River, downstream at some distance from the Sub Base. The Navy was to supply a small craft to ferry the gear to the island. They were late in arriving, so all the gear was loaded on to a rowboat. The bow was front loaded, and began to sink after shoving off. Yes, the rowboat sank with all the gear. Navy Seals were brought in to retrieve the equipment. Some people laughed, others well......

Barbara Cope Lounder: When Charles Fitzgerald was engineer for "Bob Steele Show", I would visit him in the control room until work started at 8 am. One morning Charlie was looking at me talking and he missed Bob Steele's cue to put on a commercial. Bob became very upset when we both looked at him. We knew what had happened.
  The next morning a memo came around prohibiting visiting in the control room. I knew that was meant for me.

  The day the announcement was made that we were getting TV at the station, it was a big surprise for all. When the meeting was over, we all came out and Frank Atwood just stood there, looked at me and said, "Now our troubles begin." He spoke slowly, emphasizing every word. I will never forget that. Back

 Bob Steele: When we dedicated Broadcast House on Constitution Plaza, I was assigned to do a program showing the construction and introduce the notables attending. But being in a huge studio with a hundred prominent people was a tougher spot than I thought. The teleprompter went haywire and I couldn't follow it. They showed a film of workers digging a ditch or something and I commented, "I wish I were in that ditch myself right now." That drew a little laugh.

  WTIC played a major role once with a Willie Pep fight I was broadcasting from the Hartford Auditorium. During the war we broadcast fights on FM and recorded for delay broadcast at midnight on AM. With all the war workers, we had quite an audience at that time.
  Willie was an exceptional fighter, but the challenger dropped Willie near the end of a round and Willie got up just before the bell. The challenger's handlers accused the Hartford officials of delaying the bell to save the round for Willie. They raised quite a stink in the media and New York papers played it big because Pep was a big deal and at the peak of his career.
  We took our recording of the round to Connecticut Boxing Commissioner Frank Coskey and replayed it. It timed exactly three minutes. Both New York and Connecticut boxing commissions fined the challenger and his manager for making false accusations.
  John Lardner, son of Ring Lardner and sports editor of Newsweek at the time, wrote a whole column on this fight calling me "another Thomas Edison," or something like that. Lardner wrote to me and said if I ever had another big story to let him know.
  Much later, engineer Fred Edwards and I went to Sandy Sadler's camp when Sadler was prepping for a bout with Pep. I met Lardner and he remembered that story. J Back

Jim Strongin: In February, 1951, after a year and a half at WTIC. I was called up for military service. This put me, at the ripe old age of 21, into the maelstrom of infantry combat training at Ft. Dix, NJ. (I had hoped against hope that they'd have recognized my superior talents in communication and put me in the Signal Corps, but no such luck.) To a relatively naive innocent, this switch in careers could be compared to going from the "heaven" of my life in Hartford and WTIC into "hell" in just a three hour train ride to Trenton. My view of the new career can be summed up by the sign that greeted us recruits into the "Charlie" Company, 39th Infantry Regiment's area: "Our Mission Is To Close With The Enemy and Destroy Him."
  The company first sergeant gave a short welcoming speech: "Give your soul to God because your ass is mine!" Things went downhill pretty quickly after that.
  We were immediately plunged into a 18 hour-a-day training schedule, hosted by newly returned Korean veteran cadre, who spared no effort to make us lose our identities as individuals, while honing us into a semblance of the "grunts" that were needed on the front lines. Couple this with an outbreak of the flu which put half of our company into the hospital and the other half into hacking, coughing, sneezing, feverish lumps of cannon fodder. Then, add a shortage of winter clothing, including blankets and boots, and some food basics, like fresh milk, all of which, we were told, was being sent, "to the front." To put it mildly, we were a miserable bunch of homesick strays. Mail call was one of the few diversions that rescued us from our misery.
  About four weeks into this, when I was convinced that the army was planning to kill me before I even saw combat, I received a letter from Bob Steele. However, there was something peculiar about it. Every letter was in a different color.
  Bob rambled on about the goings on at WTIC and mentioned the people I'd worked with, including Paul Lucas, Fred Wade, Bob Tyrol, Ed Anderson, Ross Miller, Floyd Richards, Bruce Kern, George Bowe, organist Hal Kolb, my special friends, Marge Stavola and Katie Dimlow, and the announcer's, "shrink," Mary Cargill, who listened to our collective tales of woe, night after night, (As low man on the totem pole, I worked three nights and two days, over weekends.) with the sympathy and patience of a surrogate mother. He talked about the changes that were predicted by the promise of that elusive Channel 3 being awarded to WTIC and speculated about of the effects of TV on our broadcasting world.
  The letter went on for four pages, in small script, with every letter written in a different color. It wasn't until the closing that I was to discover the secret behind Bob's attempt to cheer me up in my dark days. His postscript read: "By the way, Jim, how do you like my new 15-color pen?"
  Over all these years, the memory of that letter and the knowledge that someone out there was willing to take what must have been an excruciatingly long time to write it, summed up the kind of funny, corny, lovable thoughtful guy that was Bob Steele. Thanks for the memory, Bob.  J Back

Franz Laubert: My memories at WTIC date way back. I remember participating in a Connecticut River swim for charity. I had to swim through mounds of toilet paper. Not too Pleasurable.
  One of my other "happenings" was reading by candlelight, poetry at night as a music host. The sound track was actually recorded in a restaurant. After a while I received letters telling me to change the track because people would hear the same sound of tinkling glass and a hub-bub conversation.
  My first ever televised newscast came with a phone book in the chair so I could measure up to things.  J Back

Bob Ellsworth: I was hired by WTIC in August 1956. Shortly thereafter, Vice President Richard M. Nixon came to Hartford on a political campaign mission. He was slated to speak to a live crowd in Bushnell Park on a statewide radio hookup anchored by WTIC. Yours truly was selected to announce the open and close of his appearance -- the first major assignment of my career with 'TIC. I secured the "crowd count" from the Hartford Police Chief and noted it on introduction.
  The time of Nixon's arrival descended quickly upon us. We were given the signal to introduce him as he ascended the platform. I began on cue from Bob DuFour, "Good afternoon everyone. You are about to hear an address by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Millhouse Nixon, speaking to a crowd of eight thousand people gathered here in Bushnell Park, and over our WTIC statewide radio network. Here is Mr. Nixon."
  The first words out of his mouth were: "I think the announcer is wrong - I'm sure there are many more than eight thousand people here today…"
  Well, everyone looked at me. I knew Mr. Morency was listening. Bob DuFour asked me what I was going to say at the close. I went back to the police chief and checked on the estimate again. He saw what happened. As I was introducing the Vice President, Little Aetna across the park had let out all of their employees who came running through the park as Nixon started his greeting.
  When I was cued to sign-off, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just heard an address by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Millhouse Nixon, before a crowd of eight thousand people here in Bushnell Park in Hartford, that grew to over ten thousand as the vice president greeted the crowd and radio audience."
  Bob smiled along with the engineer and allow as how I probably saved my job, or at least improved my chances for a future at WTIC.

Where were you when JFK was assassinated?

  Floyd Richards and I were hosts on Mikeline that fateful day in November. A lady was on the phone with Floyd about a special chocolate cake recipe. While she launched into the ingredients, Dick O'Brien came into our studio from the newsroom. He handed me a bulletin as he stared intently into my face before releasing it -- as if to remind me to look at it and understand the content, thoroughly.
  I looked and was properly taken aback. I then signaled Floyd that I needed to interrupt him. He caught on quickly and I gave the bulletin -- followed by another final bulletin from Dick that JFK had expired.
  At that point, I gave it back to Floyd and the lady. By this time, she had the wind knocked out of her sails and she hesitated and said she would rather not continue with details of the cake recipe at this time. So, we said a few words and further information prompted us to turn the proceedings over to the NBC Network as everything was collapsing around the tragic event.  J Back

Dick Zwirko: It was a hot evening, July 14, 1965, when WTIC again went into the history books. The event of this historic broadcast was the fly by of Mariner IV past the planet Mars. The spacecraft's mission was to obtain the first ever close-up photographs of the landscape of the red planet as well as collecting data on it's magnetic field, radiation fields and it's atmosphere.
  As the spacecraft approached the red planet, passing within 6,118 miles of it's surface, Dick Bertel conducted interviews with a number of guests including a then young scientist/astronomer Richard Hoagland and a much older J. Allen Hynek. The location of the broadcast was the auditorium of the Springfield Science Museum in Springfield, MA. An equalized telephone line had been ordered from the museum to relay the broadcast audio to a mountain top location, on Mt. Tom in Agawam, MA. From there another line was run to the WTIC Master Control room in Hartford. In addition to feeding the broadcast audio from the museum down the TELCO line, it also fed a special laser transmitter, made by the Perkin-Elmer Company. This light transmitter on the museum's roof was aimed at a special receiver atop Mt. Tom in Agawam, MA, which picked up the light beam being modulated by the remote broadcast audio. I believe that Bob Scherago was at the Mt. Tom end of the path.
  The plan was that at some time during the multi-hour broadcast, the laser link would be switched in place of the wire line. Well, as it turned out, July 14, 1965 was an unusually hot day. The laser light transmitter was switched into the circuit a number of times in place of the wire part of the circuit. But since the light beam had to pass across a hot Springfield on it's way to the mountain receiver, the heat produced a scintillating light signal which garbled the audio quite badly. This distorted audio was aired long enough to say that WTIC had made history as the first commercial radio station to transmit a remote broadcast via a laser light beam.  J Back

Monica M. McKenna: In 1970, I had been working in TV Traffic for a few months, but I really wanted to get into the newsroom, writing copy. I prepared myself and my resume for an appointment with Leonard J. Patricelli, then Boss of all Bosses before it turned into WFSB, named for Frederick S. Beebe, a prominent Washington Post editor.
  A month earlier, Patricelli had approved our wearing those radical new pantsuits to work. Deborah Poehnert White, then in Radio Traffic, had convinced him in her beautifully tailored gray flannel ensemble, complete with Peter Pan collar, that women could wear pants and still do their jobs. Men wear pants, and they do their jobs. Why can't we? Surprisingly, LJP said yes. Now, I thought. It's time to make my move:
  "I'm here to apply for a job in the newsroom, writing copy," I said.
  "Oh, my goodness. That would never do. The engineers' wives would be all over me," Mr. Patricelli answered.
  "What do they have to do with my background to write news? I have a BA with majors in English and history. My languages are French and Spanish. Why can't I work in the newsroom?"
  Pat explained, "I could never do that to them! They would definitely not want to have a girl (I was 22) working with their husbands late at night. It just wouldn't do. Besides, (he said reaching up to pat me on my head), you're Irish Catholic and so is your husband of six months. We can't spend all that money training you for a job that you'll just have to leave when you start having babies..."
  I blurted out, "But NO! We've decided to put off babies until he gets a job as a principal. He's going to school now. It will be a few years." (This disclosure was on a subject I had not even voiced to my sister or my mother!)
  But Pat was firm. "I can't help you. You'll just have to stay in TV Traffic. I hear you are working out well down there."
End of conversation.

UPDATE: I'm still Irish but sit on the Vestry at the local Episcopalian church. I got tired of waiting for the Vatican to recognize the worth of half the human population. I have worked at five or six newspapers as a reporter and editor. I dumped the Irish husband, later met and married Bob, the best guy ever. and our son is 14 and in the throes of adolescence.
  After a mid-life career change, I am working on my master's in criminal justice at Curry College's Worcester campus. LJP kept me out of news for about a year before I drifted over to the Hartford Courant and my newspaper career. If he could see me now! Back