Autobiography Chapter 4 - Broadcasting Memories, Part 1: How It All Began

CHAPTER 4 Broadcasting Memories, Part 1: How It All Began

by Paul Pakusch

I am making a series of posts on my broadcasting memories, from the point of view of someone who has worked mostly behind the scenes for nearly 40 years.  My hope is that some readers will have an interest in what it is that gets their favorite TV or radio shows into their homes.  It still amazes me that some people I meet are surprised when I tell them how often I've worked holidays, evenings, weekends, very early mornings and overnights.  What they don't seem to realize is that there are humans behind the scenes.  So, when they are watching their favorite sports teams, reality shows, newscasts and more, someone has to be there to put it on the air. 

Briefly summarizing, my career began in high school radio in September, 1975 when I joined WGMC radio in Greece, NY, when I was 14.  That led to both part-time and full-time radio jobs through the next few years at WEZO/WNYR, WPXY/WPXN in Rochester, WJJB in Hyde Park, and WSAY in Rochester.  I was heavily involved in college radio & TV at SUNY Geneseo from 1979-1983, at WGBC-AM, WGSU-FM, and GSTV.  In the summer of 1982, I worked at WROC TV 8 and then WHEC TV 10.  I was at WHEC for 32 years.

What first sparked my interest in anything related to broadcast technology occurred around 1970 on a snow day from school.  I went to my friend's house.  Since we were in a blizzard, his dad was also home from work.  His dad got out his reel to reel tape recorder and recorded our voices.  I had never experienced anything like that before and I was totally fascinated by tape recorders.  I later asked for and received one for Christmas.  As the old ad campaign once said, I had a "Sony of my owny!" 

I spent many hours recording and playing back myself, my sisters and the audio of various TV shows.

If my friend's dad's tape recorder provided the first spark, what really got the engine going for me occurred in the summer of 1974 when I was a member of the Greece Cadets Jr. Drum and Bugle Corps.  Our hometown show was coming up and we were to host a competition of drum and bugle corps.  As part of publicizing the show, the corps' PR director, Warren Heiligman, asked about a dozen of us kids to appear on the TV show, "Louise," which aired at 9:00 every weekday morning on WOKR Channel 13.  I was one of them.  We stood at attention in our uniforms with our music instruments while Warren and Louise discussed the upcoming show.  It was my first time inside of a TV station.  I was dazzled by the studio, the cameras, the sets and the lights.

I wanted to see more.  I started watching WOKR's evening newscast, "Eyewitness News," with Dick Burt and Don Alhart on a regular basis.  I wrote a letter to Don Alhart asking him if I could come and watch a newscast on the air.  He set it up for me and made it work.  Dick Burt was not there that night, so I wrote to him and got a second visit for another time.  In both cases, I stayed around long enough to also see the live broadcast of "Bowling For Dollars," which aired at 7:00 PM on weeknights.  Later on, I made visits to see live news broadcasts at WROC Channel 8 and WHEC Channel 10.

Shortly after I started high school in September, 1975, I learned of radio station WGMC, which was based at Athena High School. Many people today know of WGMC as a jazz radio station, supported by donations.  It was a different atmosphere at the time, funded by the school district.

 The town of Greece at the time had three public high schools and one Catholic high school.  WGMC was meant to be available to students of all the high schools.  It was also considered a community station, meaning any adult from the area could volunteer at the station.  It was a wonderful mix of students and adults working together.  Some were on the air and some were behind the scenes.  When I think of that time period, I think of how we had a group of high school students and adults that got along so well together.  Everyone cooperated; we all learned from each other.  Kids quickly picked up on radio production techniques; adults exposed kids to culture.  We had radio shows that featured different genres of music and countries from around the world.

The station had only 10 watts of radiated power at the time, which generally covered the town of Greece and some other nearby areas.  The goal at the time was to eventually raise its power so the signal could be heard further out.  What prevented this from happening was an agreement with Canada in which the station could not interfere with a Canadian station on the same frequency.  Ironically, there was no station on that frequency.  Canada assigned frequencies by area, whether there was a station or not.  So, a non-existent station in Canada is what kept WGMC from raising its power until the early 1980’s.

In any case, WGMC was the beginning of a 39-year career in broadcasting for me.  I started there as a student in 1975 at the age of 14, and left broadcasting in 2014 at the age of 53 when my position was eliminated at WHEC Channel 10 in Rochester.

I began riding my bicycle from Arcadia to Athena High after school was out.  After awhile, I made arrangements to ride a school bus.  The bus would do its Arcadia high school run, then go to Athena for its Junior High Run.  I would stay on the bus until it got to Athena.

In the beginning, I was first shown how to used WGMC’s production room.  I quickly caught on to how to use the board, as the audio console of a radio station is called. In a pre-computer world, everything was analog and mechanical.  We had turntables, reel-to-reel tape decks, and cart machines. Cueing up records, segueing between songs, playing audio carts with prerecorded content, and keeping it “tight” came naturally to me.  I learned tricks from other students and experimented with different sound effects, such as reverb, double-tracking, speeding up or slowing down tape speeds.  I learned how to splice tape and how to put new tape into a cart.

WGMC broadcast school and town board meetings on alternate weeks every Tuesday.  In order to pick up the voices of all the participants, we had to set up an array of microphones in the board rooms.  I learned how to connect all these microphones to a mixer.  The school board meetings were in the same building, so I learned how to connect the  mixer to a wire that ran back to the room where the station was.  In the case of the town board meetings, which we held several miles away at Greece Town Hall, we unscrewed the mouthpiece of a telephone and hooked the mixer up to that, using alligator clips.  Back at the station, we unscrewed the earpiece of another phone, hooked up alligator clips to that, and fed a wire into a patch panel, which then connected the audio line to the board.

One of the first on-air shifts I had was on Tuesday evenings.  I ran a slew of programs, including the board meetings.  Other programs were on reels of tape that were sent to the station; such short programs like Consumer Watch and Earthwatch.  We also had shows that came into the station on vinyl records, such as a weekly country music show.

I engineered shows for other announcers.  One was a religious program; another was “The Irish Party House,” hosted by Ted McGraw who, to this day, still does his show on another local station!  A folk singer named Al Rehn came in to sing and play his guitar; his trademark theme song was a tune where he strummed his guitar and whistled.

Occasionally, we had live bands in the studio.  Thinking back to how small those rooms were, it amazes me that we crammed in all the people that we did.  The studio became a maze of band instruments, microphone stands and cables.  A young lady named Nancy Park did a weekly folk music show, often with these live bands.  Or she would simply have a local folk singer come on and the two of them would sit in front of microphones and play together.  My own band at the time, Silver Quarry, was once a guest on one of her shows.

As much as radio engineering and production techniques came naturally to me, on-air announcing did not.  With moderate hearing loss, I had some speech impediments that prevented me from getting on the air quickly.  I credit Louis Betstadt for helping me to overcome some of this.  During some one-on-one sessions, he helped me to understand what my impediments were and what I might do to overcome some of them.  Several years later, in college, I was able to get speech therapy. I also had to overcome some shyness issues and deal with the fact that I was soft-spoken.  Once I did start announcing, DJ work and broadcasting newscasts on WGMC, I never liked how I sounded.  Over the course of my four years in high school radio, I had accumulated a huge stack of reel to reel tape recordings of many of my radio shows and newscasts.  But it was always difficult for me to listen to them; I just hated how I sounded.  Years later I ended up throwing most of them in the garbage.

Even today, I sometimes have a recurring dream that I’m on the air at a radio station and I can’t read a script coherently, without stuttering or stumbling all over the place.  Happily, in real life, I have overcome all of those fears and can now read a script for a wedding ceremony confidently and sometimes loudly without a microphone.

But my fears and disillusionment with myself didn’t stop me from going on the air.  I did a lot of DJ shows and newscasts.  I collaborated with my childhood friend, Erik Hemdal, on a weekly news program we put together called “The Week in Review. “  Erik was going to Cardinal Mooney high school.  When I told him what I was doing at WGMC, he also joined the station.  Our first DJ shows were back to back on Thursday afternoons.

On my visits to the local TV stations, I picked up on concepts such as timing news scripts and backtiming so that you can end at a predetermined time.  You would add or delete stories while on the air in order to finish the news program on schedule.  I was intrigued by how the pro’s did news and wanted to imitate them.  Erik and I proposed the idea for “The Week in Review” to Louis Betstadt and he encouraged us to do it. We wanted to take news stories from the past week, as a review of what happened during the week. I think we started it about midway through our sophomore years in high school and it lasted until nearly the end of our senior years.  Later on, as we both became involved with other activities, we sometimes did the show solo, one without the other.

For over two years, we made a weekly ritual of spending our Saturdays at WGMC.  During some of that time, we also participated in WGMC’s live broadcasts from Long Ridge Mall.  Then we’d spend the rest of the day writing, timing and organizing our scripts, and putting together recorded elements from other sources.  At 5:30, we were on the air, and prided ourselves on ending promptly at 6:00 in time for the station to sign off for the day.

Always with the encouragement of Louis Betstadt, we learned how to increase the show’s visibility.  I wrote press releases about it that, after review from him, got sent to the local newspapers and were published.  Local news anchor Dick Burt recorded a promo for us that aired throughout the week on WGMC.

News journalism fascinated me at the time.  WGMC had a small library of books about broadcasting that station members were allowed to borrow.  I read the books about news journalism and what objectivity and balance are all about.  I read about how you need to seek and quote sources of opposite points of view.  Later on, in college journalism classes, I read about the pyramid structure of writing a news story; how to include “The 5 W’s” that should flow from any article, which are who, what, why, where and how.  The truth is, when I started working at a TV station in 1982, I was better prepared for the news department than I was for TV production, where I ended up.  Through all my 32 years of working in television, I don’t think any of my colleagues ever realized how much news experience I’d had for 8 years in high school and college.

People today really do not understand what makes good news journalism.  Everyone is doing so much shouting and hardly anyone is listening, and they want to blame "the media."  What makes a good, balanced news story is pretty simple.  You state the facts of what happened, including who, what, where, when and how.  You quote your sources; a statement from the police, a government official, a witness, a participant, etc.  If it is a controversial issue, you get a statement representing both sides of the issue.  Once you insert your own opinion or try to sway the reader/listener to one side of the story, it’s no longer a news story, it’s a commentary.  Broadcasters used to differentiate commentaries from news stories by stating that it’s a commentary. Now, news and opinion is so blended together that people can’t tell the difference between facts and opinion.

I learned about sensationalism.  Since I loved playing with radio production techniques, I remember one time when I decided to add sound effects to a news story.  The story was about an earthquake in China.   I prerecorded a “tease” to the story, using an excited voice over the sound effect of an earthquake rumbling, “AN EARTHQUAKE STRIKES CHINA!!!”  Louis Betstadt heard that and told me, “That’s sensationalism! You shouldn’t do that.”  I immediately got the point and understood what sensationalism is.  I never did anything like that again.

Radio production was where I was most at home.  I loved playing around with different production techniques and mixing sound effects and music.  This was the one area where I didn’t mind how my speech patterns sounded.  I could record myself over and over until I got it the way I wanted it.  So, although I tossed out most of my DJ and news recordings, I did save dozens of radio promo’s and other production pieces that I created.

My high school broadcasting experience wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t write about  WeMoCo, which is short for Western Monroe County, part of the BOCES II program for high school students.  It’s basically a trade school for a number of occupations, including carpentry, auto working, hair salon, food services and more.  Students spend half a day at their high school and the other half at WeMoCo.  Naturally I was interested in the radio & TV course.  It was a two-year program; the first year was generally radio and the second year was generally TV.  With all the radio experience I already had by the time I was a junior in high school, they put me right into the second year of the program so I could learn about TV production.  I learned about TV control room and studio operations, including camera work, studio lighting, TV audio and video switching, and directing.  The class often put together a half-hour newscast.  We rotated positions in order to experience all of them.  There’s no question that my WeMoCo experience is what got me my first job in television two years later.

It was WGMC that led to my first job ever.  The first job I ever had was at a radio station when I was 16 years old.  I will talk about my commercial radio experience in my next chapter.

https://paulpakusch.blogspot.com/2018/04/autobiography-chapter-5-broadcasting.html