Friday, April 6, 2012

The Best Laid Plans...

Okay, its the end of Implosion Week.

To bring you up to speed, I was working down the street 20 years ago, and I was part of the broadcast team for what we called "The Great Implosion."

It was early on a Sunday morning.  The station set up an anchor position in an office on the 8th floor of the First Eastern Bank Building at Lackawanna and North Washington Avenues in downtown Scranton.  That's me in the corner of the top photo.

My job was to open the broadcast, close the broadcast, and introduce a couple taped stories I had prepared.  Simple.  Cool.  I can do that.  An anchor and another reporter would do the heavy lifting.  I was tickled I had a great location to watch the implosion, and I as part of the team.

Then, the wheels came off.  I was at one of three live locations.  The other two developed massive audio problems, and we couldn't go to them.  On top of that, the implosion was delayed for twenty minutes because people, and there was a huge crowd, got too close to the scene.  There would be no implosion until they were moved back.  It meant I had to fill 20 minutes-- by myself.  My taped pieces had already aired.  Our producer, the great Harry McClintock didn't want to run them again or go to a commercial break because he feared, and rightfully so, that the implosion would take place while we were away.  Could you imagine the embarrassment?  Harry was trying to guide me by talking in to those earpieces that anchors wear in their ear.  Unfortunately, Harry repeatedly hit the wrong button and I never heard a word he said.

As I noted earlier, I've always considered myself luckier than I deserved to be.  I had done several implosion stories in the weeks leading up to the blast, so I had all that knowledge in my head.  Thank heaven, I was able to pull it out and fill the time.

Plus, I was blessed by having JR Azaravitch and Jim Keenan at my broadcast location.  You met Jimmy earlier this week.  JR was one of our directors.  He's in the striped sweater in the first photo.  JR was operating a portable switcher, and Jimmy had a camera pointed out the window.  Any time those two sensed I was running out of things to talk about, which was often, they got a picture of something else outside the window.  When the picture changed, I had something new to talk about.  There's a place in heaven for those two!  They saved me.

Eventually, everything was in order.  The warning siren blew, and the buildings were imploded.  I talked through a few replays, wrapped it up, and signed it off.  The morning was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

Our general manager back in the day was Bill Christian.  He was the one who lit a fire under the station and got us to change our way of thinking.  While Bill was running the shop, we made leaps and bounds in local programming-- parades, football games, basketball games, special events, and even "The Great Implosion."  We worked hard, and he always made sure we were taken care of-- with food, and a lot of overtime pay.

I almost forgot about the Kamikaze Cam.  Someone at the station had the fantastic idea to take one of our broken down, old cameras (of which there were many) and put it on the roof of one of the to be imploded buildings.  Remember the title of today's blog-- "the best laid plans..."  The camera worked fine, delivering some nice video until it was buried in the rubble.  Unfortunately, the tripod wasn't secure enough, and the camera blew over during the night before the implosion.  All the video was from the camera, on its side, on the roof.  Hey, at last it worked-- which is more than I can for other aspects of the operation.

If you do a search, you can find some clips from 4/5/92 on YouTube.

My TV station sold video cassettes of our broadcast that day.  Profits were turned over to the St. Francis of Assisi Soup Kitchen in Scranton, and I was very proud of that.  I still have a few copies, and yes, the station made me buy them.  However, I was assigned to present the check from video sales at a dinner, and I was grateful for that opportunity.

I've used the words "I" and "me" a lot this week and I don't want to overstate my role that morning.  A lot of people worked together to get it on the air.