The Reluctant Historians

Yesterday I wrote an article about the collection of videotapes housing all the news coverage of WTVH-TV.  The Channel 5 building is all but cleared out and I don’t know if the tapes are still there, or stored some other place.

As the longest-tenured member of the newsroom, former Chief Editor John Ellis knew those tapes best.  I asked him for his thoughts on that treasure trove of Syracuse history.   With his permission, here are the words he Emailed to me:

You can barely see him; John Ellis stands in the top row, second from the left

Whether they like it or not, TV News operations wind up being the keepers of local history. In their archives rest not only the record of important people and events, but a scrapbook of the mundane things that make up modern life.

As the task of historian is not listed in the statement of goals or the business plan, keeping track of these things is, at best, a sometime thing.  This is understandable, if regrettable.

I first got involved in this process because I was the new kid.  In the days of film, it was the new kids’ responsibility to keep track of the hundreds of little reels of film that made up the newscasts.  I usually went in to the station on a Sunday night, filled out my time card, then gathered up all the film from the previous week’s shows.    I sorted them out and spliced them all back together so there was one reel of film for each show.

You must remember that in film days if you needed film from a previous story, you had to physically find the film, remove it from the past show, then edit it into the new story.  This made my job very important. I had to keep track of where the footage was last used so it could quickly be retrieved for the new story.   If it was a continuing story that lasted weeks (or months!) you couldn’t waste time searching.

By the end of the film era we had shelves in the edit room that held three years worth of old shows.  How to find a story?  Each day the newsroom assistant filled out a 3X5 index card with the titles of each story on it.  You had to manually go through those cards, find the card with that story, then go find the film reel for that day, then wind through the film and hope to find the story you were looking for.  If it had been pulled for another story it was back to the index cards and try again.  My detective skills were honed with this cumbersome system.

With the advent of videotape, the job did not become  easier, just different.  In the first place, it was almost a year before we were totally video, so now we had to keep track of video as well as film.  Initially, it was the job of Dennis Jones, our designated video editor, in consultation with Andy Brigham, to decide which of the previous day’s video stories would be archived.  This arrangement didn’t last long.

Soon we began saving all video stories.  In those days, unlike the system adopted later where there were show tapes that would be filled up, then retired, each show tape was dubbed onto an archive tape, then erased and re-blacked each day.  It took hours!  By this time Dennis had left us for CBS and the Video Editor position had been eliminated.

I inherited this task as well as all the other things I had to do as Chief Photographer.  Now, photogs had to edit all their own stuff.  Finally we came up with the system of using show tapes only once, then retiring them.  Each tape was numbered and that number was written on the rundowns for each show, and the rundowns went into large 3-ring binders.

So now we searched through the rundowns to find the tape number and retrieved the footage that way.  Well and good, except that video tape can be reused.

During one of the recessions of the late ’70s, it was decreed that in order to cut costs, we would re-use the archive tapes!  By the time this order was rescinded we had lost forever everything on video from July 1976 to early 1978.  A year and a half of history- gone!  Everything we had of Al Roker, for example, was destroyed.  Al had in fact been the very first video story we ever aired.

When I became Chief Editor in August of ’88, The job of quasi-historian became mine permanently.  It became a little easier once we had computers to refer to.  I could type in a key word and receive a list of shows and numbers to refer to.  But I still had to find the tape!  It was still a detective story.  Take into account the physical size of the operation.  I had to find places to store 600 or so tapes a year.  And that was just the show tapes.  We had hundreds of other tapes besides the show tapes.  We saved many shooting tapes from important stories and “stock” tapes of footage from places we knew we would have trouble getting into again, such as factories, military installations, schools, jails; places that could keep us out if we wanted to do a story not to their liking.    All these tapes added up.

By the time I left TV-5 we had in the archives between 10 and 15 thousand tapes!  Not to mention 25 years worth of film!  That’s a lot of tonnage.    I spent a lot of time going through all that film and tape for various special projects.  As an example, PBS in Washington asked for film from the Robert Garrow case for a special on legal ethics.  We had owned that story when it transpired.  I was able to go through our archives and offer them over four hours of film.  It formed the backbone of the special.  I was able to dig up a lot of film and tape for the Alexander case, back to footage of him as a brand-new candidate for city council and his first inauguration as mayor.

And, morbid as it sounds, I used to keep “obit” reels of people of local interest.  They came in handy when (police chief) Tom Sardino and (Onondaga County Executive) John Mulroy passed.  I was also able to track down local visits of national and international people.  The night Princess Diana died, we were able to track down the visit she and Charles had made to Kingston, Ontario in time for the 11.

Every year for a dozen years or so, I put together a reel of significant stories from the past year for the Syracuse Press Club to donate to the Onondaga County Public Library to add to their local history collection.  In the cause of full disclosure, Channels 3 and 9 also submitted tapes.

A sidebar:  Besides all the film and tapes that were up in the attic, I found a cabinet drawer that contained all the airchecks from WHEN Radio for the entire four days of the Kennedy Assassination. Unbelievable treasure!  I was able to give Ron Curtis Jr. a cassette of his father doing a downtown MOS (man on the street interview) from Nov. 23, 1963. Along with the air checks  I found that someone had saved every foot of Associated Press wire copy from the moment Kennedy was pronounced dead until he was buried.  Astounding treasure.

One day many years later we ran a story about an auction at Sotheby’s where eight feet of AP wire copy from that day had been auctioned off for something like 15, 000 dollars.  I took the wire copy home and measured it.  We had something over 900 feet of priceless history.   I wrote a memo to the Chief Engineer explaining that at that rate we had nearly a million dollars worth of paper in the archives.  That got their attention!  The wire copy went into the safe the next day.

It can get personal: One day in 1990 I was flipping through the file cards for December 1970.   I read one card and froze. The story slug read: “The parents of SP4 Steven Haight receive his posthumous medals.”  Steve Haight had been my roommate for a time at Manlius.  He was in my class.  We had been in the same company.  And I hadn’t known that he had been missing and declared dead in Vietnam for 20 years!

So what now?  I have no idea what might have happened to all this carefully preserved history.  One big problem is that the stories are on four or five different formats: 16MM film, 3/4 inch VHS, 1/2 inch BETA, 1/8 inch DVC-PRO, and whatever they have been using recently.  The stories are there, but there is no way to retrieve them. All that history and no way to access it. That is the real tragedy.

John Ellis is now retired and enjoying travel with his family.  Thank you for your fascinating story, John.

Tagged as: news, television