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

Sirs, Madames,

1997, Geneva, Switzerland. Computer f---ed up. Phone in room toast. Dictated 3,000 words from hotel lobby.

YHS, etc

 

I'm in Oregon where it snows about once a year...maybe twice. Usually when snow drops much at all the schools shut down their events, wait a day for the rain to wash it away and reschedule.

Well, we get a good-sized storm coming through...usually it's as much ice as snow. And I never worry about getting the car ready for such driving because it usually just means hitting the phones and staying home.

Well this night, I keep calling the coach, the AD, the assistant...no call backs, so I'm assuming this league playoff game is going to happen regardless of the weather. I drive in slowly and carefully and go to turn onto the side road leading to the school and smack my car right into a snow drift...probably a small one compared to what many on here deal with, but still enough to bring my car to a stop.

I get out and find a couple high school kids to help push me out, drive up to the parking lot and there are just enough cars there to make me get out and walk into the gym. Sure enough it's game on. Cover the game, send from the coaches room and drive home very carefully.

 

This was Fall 2006. Headed to cover a prep football playoff game some 2.5 hours from home base.
Cover the game and it is a brutal, devastating loss for the road team. The game goes on forever and the coach does the hug every senior bit, so I have to bail and quote his postgame speech. Head to the car and bang out my story, then try to connect to the school's wireless network (which was available and solid pregame). Just getting can't connect messages now. The school is in the middle of a neighborhood, and this is the era before wireless passwords became the norm. So I start driving with my laptop leaning on the shifter, one eye on the road and one eye scanning for networks. I find a few along the way, but once I pull over the connection always dies/is not strong enough. Five minutes before deadline I'm suddenly in a shopping center and find a password-protected network at a Moe's. It's closed, but the girls are cleaning up. I bang on the door, explain the situation to two girls who clearly had no idea there was a wireless network. They call the manager, who gladly gives it to me - and then spends 10 minutes after I file proudly boasting about the network he just installed and how it's the first one in this center.
These two teams always seemed to meet in the playoffs, and usually up there. Seems like we ended up filing two or three years running from this Moe's.

 

Ah, the fun of trying to find a single-line phone jack from which to send. Those were the days ... which make me thankful for free wi-fi at McDonald's, Super 8 lobbies, etc.

 

So many stories, so little time ....

But here's one: American Legion World Series, 1986, Rapid City, S.D. I discover the phones everywhere -- press box, press trailer, hotel -- have cables as thick as hot dogs running from the phone to the wall, and they could not be disconnected to plug in the cable for a Tandy computer (the next model up from the TRS-80). So, how to file? The acoustic couplers were on the fritz, so I called the local Radio Shack to see if they sold them.

Told the guy the story, and he asked, "Where are you staying?" Howard Johnson, I said. "Front part or back?" he asked. Back, I said. "Look out your window," he said. "We're in that mall." So I walked over and met with him. He let me file my practice-day story from a phone in the store. Then he said I could come back each day and file if I needed to. My games were not on deadline, so I did.

On the last day I was there, a guy watched every move I made, then asked me what I was doing. I explained it to him, and he ended up buying a computer just like mine. So, the store got a sale from helping me out, and I felt good that I'd earned my keep, in a way.

 

These stories remind me of a lot of crazy ways I got games on the air on radio before the era of cell phones. I mean, now, if worse came to worst, you'd just call a game on your cell for a few hours. Back then, with all the jack compatibility problems and the like, you'd have to be unbelievably creative.

For example, I remember once broadcasting an American Legion baseball game via MARTI to a receiver in an office a few hundred yards away (a MARTI would typically have a range of about 30 miles, so using one in this manner would be the rough equivalent of killing an ant with a sledgehammer), then putting a landline phone handset up to the receiver's speaker, dialing up the station and putting a "Don't touch!" note next to the whole Rube Goldberg setup. If somebody had hung up the phone 15 minutes into the game, I never would have known. That didn't happen, but after the game I asked how it sounded and I was told, "like you were calling the game in a barrel."

I miss Louisiana, JD.

 

My media internship and my first job out of college were both in radio. At the internship, there was a MARTI unit that probably would have made it much easier to broadcast home games but for some reason, the owner decided he didn't want to use it any more. He owned a cell phone dealership as well, so he just sent me out with the bag phone for home games.

Except at this time (1991-92), this little town didn't have particularly good cell phone service yet and I had loads of trouble broadcasting home games. I could hear over the radio I was using to listen to myself that the cell signal was subject to horrible interference. One game, I just gave up and used the press box phone to call in after scores.

One road game I couldn't broadcast because the phone line in the press box that was supposed to be live wasn't and there were no phones in the locker rooms that I could hook up long extensions to.

Pre-season basketball tournament, two gyms, one phone line and we played in the gym without two of the three nights. Luckily, the gyms were close to each other and I had enough extension line to lead from the line to the auxiliary gym via a connecting hallway that wasn't open to the general public.

The unit that I used for road games (and any home games where the other team didn't have a radio station with them, allowing me to use the courtesy line) was made in either the late 50s or early 60s. It ran on a lantern battery. I had to bring a phone and connect it to the unit with a cord with 1-inch jacks at each end. And it was much more efficient than the cell phone kit.

If it wasn't for the insane owner at the first job, I'd probably have a lot more of those kins of stories to tell.

 

i've been out of the business a long time now (more than a decade) but i remember near the end of my career crawling around a basement-level, cinder block room after an alabama state basketball game in montgomery desperately trying to find a phone jack because the SID at the time didn't have a clue where there was a good phone jack. my other favorite memory is after the turkey day classic in montgomery, dutifully trudging from the press box to the nearby hotel for the asu coach's "press conference" (at a hotel bar with raucous boosters and fans) then marching back to the stadium press box to write and file.

 

The night of the World Series earthquake in San Francisco, I wrote my column sitting on the ground in the parking lot while our baseball writer, Mike Paolercio, repeatedly flicked his lighter so that I could see my (non-backlit) screen. I'm not sure the column arrived in English, but I was fortunate to find the patient and empathetic sports editor, Greg Noble, on the other end of the phone line.

 

1) One night - in the middle of nowhere South Jersey - I covered a JUCO game and they kicked me out of the gym before I was done writing because the AD wanted to send the janitors home and they were the ones that locked up the building. Had to go out to the car to finish writing and then drive around until I found a phone booth and managed to hold the computer and acoustic couplers until the story went through.

2) Phoned in dictation of a 15-inch story because I didn't own a laptop and the newspaper was out because all of the company laptops were signed out by other reporters needing to file stories.

 

I've probably forgotten more bad experiences than I care to remember. A couple still sit in my head.

Covering a fb game about 2 hours away the plan was I'd leave the game drive about 40 minutes to a bureau we had in a small town. Spoke with the the bureau guy John Doe, who said he'd leave the key at the police station as the police know him well and the bureau is nearby. Cool. I drive in, go to the station to get the key. They said John Doe never came by. Yikes.
I was going to use the bureau because it had a better computer and we could send via a modem (still slow but better than the "portable computer" I had that we had to hook up to a bulky "mobile phone" in a bag). Police people are sympathetic and since they know John Doe allow me to stay. It's a two-desk station, and both desks were occupied. So yeah, I worked in the jail cell. The whole time I kept thinking they can close this cell and take off at any moment and I'm SOL. Fortunately they didn't, and I was even able to connect through their phone lines (still a pain, but better than the unreliable mobile connection).

The other was covering a game even further. Everything is fine, but our town experiences a blackout. I had no idea, and they this was pre-cell days. I sent the story and tried to call several times to check, but no power meant on our stupid system no phones in the newsroom worked except for one separate from the rest of the system. I don't have that number. I have the ME's home number and I call it hoping at least to get his wife if he's not there. Nothing. No clue if my story ever made it. Despite having a hotel reservation, I have no choice but to head back. I make a few stops along the way to try to call, never get an answer. After a nice littler 3+ hour drive back I pull into the office around 2:45 a.m. Everyone is walking out. That's when I learn about the blackout, and they said my story came over fine.

 

Rather than rehash much of the same stuff that I've had to do -- dictating from payphones on rural roads, using the 7-Eleven phone, getting locked in stadiums -- I choose to appreciate just how amazing our capabilities are today.

Consider: I covered a function last week that didn't really have a place to file from. No worries. I got in my car, sat in the parking lot, plugged my laptop into my cigarette lighter power adapter, cued up my interviews on my phone recorder (which I played over the car audio system using a bluetooth connection), wrote my story and filed using my aircard. All from my driver's seat and without breaking a sweat.

As stressful as this job can be, especially with the shitty 24-hour cycle, to some extent, it's infinitely less stressful than it used to be. And this thread is the proof.

Keep them coming. Enjoying the reflections.