Crazy things you've had to do to file a story

I was a 17-year-old kid stringing a game in East F'n Podunk, 300 miles from Timbuktu and my girlfriend who knows about as much as about football as a fish was with me.
We go to the game, deadline is 12, game goes into OT...well, 3 of them to be exact. Ends at 10:15.
I'm finished with my interviews at 10:40 after the manager insists I wait until coach finishes speaking to his team.
Girlfriend waiting in the car, unsuspecting. (by the way, folks, she was 16 with no driver's license...handy info in a minute).
I get to the car and prepare to quickly bang out the 25 inches I was assigned.
Wrong.
By this time it is 10:50ish and I am in East F'n Podunk.
Nowhere has wi-fi. Gas station is closed [at 8p.m., no less]. I still have AOL on my laptop for this specific purpose...
So, knowing where I was, there was no way I would have time to write and drive somewhere to file.
What do I do? Dictate a 25-inch story to a girl who has NO idea about football OR (apparently) the English language.
My dictation went something like this for 40 minutes: "East Podunk then used a 25 dash yard pass to set up their final touchdown period"
I wasn't exactly thinking on my feet or I would have asked to use the field house or school, but I was young and didn't like to ask people for things.
Filed at 11:57 and was one of my better stories of that season. Of course comma the three overtimes didn't hurt period

 

Why on Earth would you bring your girlfriend to work?

 

I was 17 f'n years old and it was Friday night, doofus. And it was a million miles a-fkkn-way. I needed the company. Good thing I did bring her, though. Or I'd have been fired for not getting my story in.

 

I've actually brought my wife along on many an assignment. She never got in the way and she usually enjoyed the games. It also came in handy several times in situations like this where time and lack of a place to file was a factor. She could drive and I could write.

 

Execution of John Spenkelink, 1979

I was a 20-year-old junior at Florida, working at WRUF -- the campus AM station. We were one of Florida News Network's regular affiliates, so I contributed a lot of Gators/Gainesville area stuff to their daily feed.

Background: Once the ban on executions had been lifted in the mid-'70s, Gary Gilmore had been executed in Utah in 1976. Florida had a number of inmates on Death Row at the time -- with Spenkelink being the most likely to face the electric chair, so it was national news. And we were the closest radio station to the Florida State Prison in Raiford.

So when there were updates on Spenkelink's case, I was usually the one to file a report with FloridaNet. I believe Spenkelink had two stays -- I know I went to Raiford at least once, with the knowledge that the nearest pay phone was 20 minutes away in Starke.

However, on the eve of the execution, I got a call from our news director. FloridaNet wanted me in Raiford -- and they had worked a deal with UPI to supply me with a phone on site, under strictest orders not to let anybody else use it. I got in my orange 1971 AMC Hornet, stopped at Krispy Kreme for a dozen glazed and drove the hour to Raiford.

Once I got there, I found the "media compound," which was a mowed field across the highway from the main building. Next to a wooden post in the middle of the field were just four dial phones. One was marked UPI, so I grabbed it and set it on the floorboard of the Hornet. (Of course, it was attached to a 100-foot long phone wire, so it was pretty obvious where it was.)

On one side of our parking area, prison officials had placed the peace protestors, who chanted and pounded drums all night. On the other side of us was a group with a siren, a hearse with a flashing strobe light and a casket with a sign "This is for you, Johnny."

It was definitely a surreal night. I don't remember what was worse: the chanting and the drumming and the sirens and the ringing of the phone, or the mosquitoes that had been stirred up by the mowing.

The phone would ring just before the top of the hour, I'd do a live scene-setter for UPI or FloridaNet or WRUF, then I'd try to shut my eyes and get a nap before it'd ring again. At the same time, other reporters -- who couldn't or didn't want to drive back to Starke -- were pounding on the window, pleading to use the phone. I finally had to put a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the car.

Finally, around 7 a.m., the anchor from the bigger Jacksonville affiliate showed up -- unannounced -- and declared that "I'm taking over the live coverage from here." I called FloridaNet in Winter Park and they had no idea, either. But they decided since he was there, we could "trade off."

Well, he took the phone to his car, they threw the broadcast to him and he started a long spiel about "Old Sparky" and the gruesome history of its use. I went off for a walk, ate the last of the donuts, and eventually returned about the time the warden and the pool reporter were ready to fill us in on the events of the morning.

I made one final call back to WRUF, then returned to the station with the recorder, cut up some actualities and voicers, then drove back to the apartment and collapsed into bed around 1 p.m. I have no idea what happened to the phone, or the guy from Jacksonsville. For all I know, he's still out there, jabbering away.

I think UPI paid me something in the neighborhood of $250.

 

My wife used to tag along at times thinking it would be quality time spent together, then she saw how busy I was AND realized she doesn't really care about watching prep hoops and decided a movie night with the girlfriends would be more fun

 

Had one a couple years ago where I forgot to bring my power source for the laptop and the battery was on its last legs, so I was only getting a couple hours life out of it. So I set up in the press room with about 50 percent power, as I begin my story and pulling photos over. It was a true DEADline. I hit send before the laptop goes down or I'm out of luck (would have dictated over the phone).

Send the photos over first, then finish out the story, hit send on the email and not 30 seconds later my screen goes dark. I call over to the sports desk to make sure everything came through...sure enough it did. Talk about timing.

 

That's a great story.

 

Hearing about all the TRS-80 stories makes me thankful I never had the "opportunity" to use one. I almost took a job at a place that had them in, I think it was 1998, and I couldn't believe those things were still functional.

In my "good old days," I faxed. But I had to hand write the stories on tablet paper because we didn't have any sort of laptop and I didn't own one myself. One of the stories got messed up because the lines on the paper blended in with the strokes on some of my letters, turning "Birk" into "Rick" and "Fergus" into "Eecgus." No one called to double-check, so they printed that way. Fortunately "Eecgus" only appeared in the box score but "Rick" was a starter and I think she was referred to by both "Birk" and "Rick" in the story.

A couple of years later, at the state track meet, I drove to a Kinkos and rented computer time to compose and send in an e-mail via AOL.

 

One story which comes to mind: 1998, I'm in Clinton, Tenn. to cover a substate boys basketball game with Tennessee High and Clinton. Tennessee High upsets Clinton, which was unbeaten, and earns a trip to the state tournament. Clinton (the school) had nowhere to send, not even the fax machine. So with deadline bearing down on me, I ended up driving to a convenience store, told them a big story about how I would be in HUGE trouble if I didn't get it in on time ... and used their fax machine to send it.
Boy, has McDonald's made it easy to send from the road these days.

 

This is an "old-timers" story. Back before cell phones and e-mail and all this fancy newfangled stuff, I was off at a high school basketball tournament in a college gym about two hours from the office. Called the basketball coach at the college, whom I knew and he said there was a phone in the press box (the box was up over the bleachers) and I would have no problems. Oh, this was in the days of manual typewriters and sending pages by telecopier.

Uh, the one thing he forgot to tell me. You couldn't dial anywhere off campus with that phone. And by the time the games were over, the switchboard was closed, so I couldn't even get a campus operator.

Fortunately, I checked the phone when I got to the place and realized the problem. A security guard told me where the nearest pay phone was, so I dictated on deadling that night.

Ran into the coach downtown the next morning. After I told him what had happened, he said he would come past the field house that night. Danged if he didn't give me a key for his office, an office that had a phone where I could dial out. So I didn't have a problem that night.

= = = =

Anybody remember the old Texas Instruments devices that used thermal paper for printouts? I spent 2 weeks covering NCAA basketball tournaments on the other side of the country and early in the second week, I realized I was gonna run out of paper. Called the office and they overnighted another roll or two.

= = = = =

Then there was the time when we were just starting to evaluate portable transmitting devices and I covered four weeks of post-season tournaments - conference, first round, Sweet Sixteen and Final Four with a different type of unit each week. Took one for the team that month.