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BEING FIRST Contines



    Days quickly turned to months and our penetration in the market always for full speed ahead. November came and Bob B said, “What are you doing for election night.” I replied with mystandard “We’re working on it.” But I was thinking OMG here we go again - what the hell are we going to do now.    

    So with Mike our News Director we planned a full night of “coverage” and said HOW would come later.Our first Election Night was another was a big hit. In the past the only TV coverage for Atlantic City was from Philadelphia stations that aired phone call-ins from our local political headquarters. I created an “illusion” of big time coverage. And to do required “all hands on deck” - including some volunteers from Frank’s insurance office and some of his political cronies. We sent crews to both party headquarters. Mike and I were going to host the two hour minimum show and his staff booked some current elected officials to stop by and that was the easy part as all politicians will be available to get their mugs on TV.

    Before the show Bob called me into his office and handed me a tumbler of vodka and said, “Here takes this, you're going to need it.” And he was right - I was a basket case of nerves. (Flop sweats as Imus in the Morning would call it) When I sat at the news desk which had been rearranged and decorated with bunting and a taped on new logo, I was indeed very relaxed and Bob’s nerve settler bolster my courage to go on - and that's when I got the idea that made us talk of the town. I conjured up and illusion of “live”. Because we didn’t have microwave trucks connect with our location crews like the big stations we had volunteers racing back to the studio from the election night locations with tapes of interviews from all of our newscaster crew. I had asked Dan, our chief engineer, if we had telex communication ear pieces. Sorry was his reply. So I put a portable radio ear phone connect to nothing my pocket in my ear. And I said to Ben, our director, go with me - I don’t have time to explain.

    Mike and I opened the show and he set the scene and it soon time for our first interview recording. I stop a comment in the middle of a sentence…”Yes…Ok, we have an update from the xyz headquarter. Ben rolled the tape and it looked like we were “live”. Mike looked at me and said, I’ll be damned - Iszard you are too much!” Or something like that. And the rest of the broadcast we “pretended” we were “live” all over the area. Nora even sent her crew back and forth to several adjoining towns and our “coverage” magically expanded. We my little “white lie” we had double the coverage of the Philly big time stations.

  The next morning I was greeted by Bob and Frank as I walked in the studio - they handed me the Atlantic City Press. Our biggest competitor had a front page story above the fold - “WWAC PRODUCES WIDE RANGING ELECTION COVERAGE” and the story went on to recap our guests and production values in glowing terms. Frank said, “We are the talk of the town - Great job Cal!” (This was the first compliment from Frank about our programming and proved to be the only one).  From that day forward during a brief journey in AC I was invited to countless community clubs as luncheon speaker and got a free drink in most of the local watering holes that surrounded us.

    We were now number 1 and the only one in TV election coverage and to my surprise I was now a star - that day I was recognized buying a coffee at the WaWa across the street from WWAC. (More to follow as the TV Titanic goes full-speed on its fateful journey)


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