Becoming a junkie

The Virginia State Capitol was designed by Thomas Jefferson. This picture was taken before the recent renovations.

Just before Christmas of 1969, WTVR news director Bruce Miller gave me what was to be one of the biggest breaks of my career. "I want you to cover the General Assembly session that starts next month," he said.

"You'll be responsible for everything from the inauguration of the new governor to the end of the session. I'll want a two- or three-minute package for 6 p.m. every night and a separate three- or four-minute package for 7 p.m."

I agreed immediately -- of course! -- but, to be perfectly blunt, the prospect scared the hell out of me.

I'd been out of the country for three years. I had never followed Virginia politics closely. I didn't have a clue about how I'd be able to bring this off. All through the Christmas holidays I worried about it. I also started to read every scrap of news I could find about what might be the big stories at the General Assembly.

I needn't have been quite so anxiety-ridden. Right after the first of the year, John Gilbert threw me a lifeline.

John was the political reporter for WSLS TV, our sister Park Broadcasting station in Roanoke, and he'd been covering Virginia politics for decades. He knew all of the players, from senators, delegates and appointed state officials to lobbyists and the women who operated the snack bar -- known as Chicken's, because that was the nickname of the woman who ran the place. (Some of the most intricate political deals were hammered out in Chicken's, and the women who worked there knew everything worth knowing.)

John would be staying in Richmond for the duration of the session and shipping his film back to Roanoke via bus twice a day.

When the session started, John took me under his wing. Part of me was in awe of the fact that I was covering the oldest legislative body in the New World. John, however, was long past all of that. This was his field of expertise, and he knew as much about how Virginia politics and government worked as any TV reporter in the state.

He was a good teacher. He introduced me to the major players, warned me each day about whether the action would be on the floor of the House or Senate or in a committee room, and he made sure I met the clerks of the House and Senate and all of the state employees who actually made the wheels grind. For the first couple of weeks, I rode his coattails.

And, oh so gradually, I realized I was beginning to understand a bit about Virginia politics.

Filling so much air time on the evening news was hard work. I tried to be everywhere at once and worried constantly that I'd miss something. Every morning I'd read the newspaper to see if the Times-Dispatch reporters -- and there were a handful of them, compared to one of me -- had a story that I'd missed. Thanks to John's guidance and my own growing knowledge, I was rarely surprised by what I read in the paper.

The other Richmond TV stations elected not to have reporters assigned full-time to the Capitol. They'd swoop in for the big stuff, but they weren't in it for the long haul. The legislators knew that, and when they wanted access to television, they came to John and me. (It didn't hurt that WTVR was the dominant station in Richmond.) John had told me that they'd all be watching my nightly reports, and they did. For a young journalist, it was a heady experience. I had thought I'd be sucking up to them, but it was often the other way around: They sucked up to me because I controlled who got facetime on WTVR's evening news.

It was also one of the most exciting periods in my TV news career. We also had some fun times, John and I. Some nights we'd be invited to this or that legislator's hotel room for drinks. We picked up some good stories that way. I also quickly discovered which senators and delegates threw the best parties, and John and I made sure we were there, even though it made for some l-o-n-g days in and around Capitol Square.

Two occasions stand out clearly in my memory of that 1970 General Assembly session. One was how I covered a bill introduced by Henrico's venerable Senator William F. Parkerson. The other was a trip to Tidewater with members of the legislature for the opening of the Hampton Coliseum.

Sen. Parkerson had introduced a measure attempting to define obscenity. I got a copy of his proposal from the clerk's office, read it and interviewed the senator. But I realized that the specificity of the language in the measure meant I couldn't quote much of it on the air: It was fairly blunt in its description of what the senator thought should be judged obscene.

Or ... maybe I could. I got back to the station early enough to arrange a videotape session in the studio. I sat on the news set and read the bill aloud, word for word. Then one of the videotape engineers and I bleeped the soundtrack of the videotape wherever there was a word that we couldn't use on TV. The result was hilarious. We aired that bleeped reading as part of the story that night, and the newsroom roared with laughter.

The next day, I ran into Sen. Parkerson in Chicken's. He caught my eye from across the room and headed my way. Okay, I thought, he's going to chew me out good for making fun of his bill. But that wasn't the case. He had loved it. Thank goodness the senator had a sense of humor. As a result of that caper, he became a valuable source for me.

The opening of the Hampton Coliseum was pure, unadulterated fun. The entire General Assembly, including the reporters who covered it full time, piled onto chartered buses for the trip to Tidewater, where we were treated to a magnificent dinner and then the grand opening performance. Topping the bill was Jack Benny, whose act that night still stands out as the greatest live performance I've ever seen.

As the 1970 General Assembly session drew to a close, I was one very worn out TV reporter. I would cover many more sessions over the years, but that was the one that counted. I had started knowing close to nothing about Virginia politics. I finished with the confidence I needed: I knew that I could do this job. And I enjoyed it immensely. No longer was I a political neophyte. Now I was something I never expected to be. I was a political junkie. And I still am to this day.

John Gilbert is no longer alive. But I owe him a debt of gratitude that mere words can't express.

The first day was a trainwreck

Desktop computers were far in the future in December of 1969. We wrote our stories on typewriters. In the WTVR TV newsroom, the typewriters were unusual: they had only upper-case letters, so that our copy would be easier to read on the air.

WTVR TV's news director, Bruce Miller, taught me a lot about commercial TV news. He was demanding of his reporters, but he was gentle with his criticism.

On my first day in the office, he took me along as he went to Gov. Mills Godwin's office at the Capitol, where he interviewed him about his past four years as the state's chief executive. Come January, the first elected Republican governor since Reconstruction, Linwood Holton, would be inaugurated. (Godwin, a Democrat, switched parties during the Holton administration and was re-elected as a Republican to succeed Holton.)

I had never met a Virginia governor before, and Bruce rightly thought it would be good for my career to begin to familiarize myself with Virginia politics. I was there merely as an observer, but Godwin was gracious and pleasant.

When we got back to the newsroom, Bruce had an assignment for me. Somebody had been stealing Christmas wreaths from the front doors of houses in Richmond's West End and leaving them on the doorstep of a large and well-known River Road church. The police didn't have a clue about who was doing it -- or why. Bruce wanted me to interview a police spokesman and the church's pastor and then do a story for the evening news.

"And do a standup either at the beginning or the end," he said.

When the film photographer and I headed off for the West End, I had one question: "What's a standup?" I'd never heard the term before. "It's when the reporter stands in front of the camera and summarizes part of the story," he told me. Okay. Got it. I can do that.

The photographer and I did the interviews, shot film of the Christmas wreaths on the church doorstep, shot my first standup, and headed back to the station, where I wrote the story, gave the photographer the interview edits, and put together a 90-second package for 6 o'clock.

Just as I was finishing, Bruce got a call from somebody up in Caroline County: a northbound freight train had derailed in a remote ravine. It was coming up on 4 p.m., and Bruce was grumbling because he didn't have a photographer he could send. Turn-around time would be tight, too. It was about a 90-minute round trip to Caroline County. All of our photographers were already processing and editing film for the evening news, and even if everything timed perfectly, we'd still be hard-pressed to film and put together a story for the 7 p.m. portion of "News/90."

"Bruce, I can shoot film," I said. "You can?" I told him I had learned how in the Air Force. What I didn't tell him was that my experience was limited to one instance of shooting film from the cockpit of an F-102 flying over Spangdahlem Air Base. (I didn't mention the part about throwing up in the cockpit.)

One of the photographers loaded 100 feet of color film into a hand-held Bell & Howell Filmo camera and gave it to me. Bruce handed me the keys to one of the station's news cars and gave me directions to the site. And I was off to Caroline.

When I got there, I found a scene made for television. Three freight cars were off the track and on their sides in the ravine. They had been loaded with grapefruit, which now lay alongside the tracks in random piles as tall as I was. The site reeked of citrus. Railroad workers were trying to right the freight cars and clear the tracks. Onlookers lined both sides of the ravine. I shot the whole roll of film in about 20 minutes and then took notes as a spokesman for the railroad explained what had happened.

On the way back to the station, I mentally composed my story and prayed that my film would turn out okay. Was the exposure correct? Was it in focus?

I raced into the newsroom and handed off my film to be processed and edited. By 6 p.m., the film was out of the soup and my fears were put to rest. Exposure? Good. Focus? Crystal clear. I wrote a 60-second story and recorded my narration. At 6:45, it was done, and the story aired at the top of the 7 p.m. newscast.

I had been too busy to see the 6 p.m. newscast with my stolen Christmas wreath story -- and my first standup -- but I watched the 7 p.m. newscast with the rest of the news staff, who were winding down in front of the TV in the station's conference room.

When the derailment story ended, one of the photographers told me the film was "not bad."

"You've done this before, right?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," I lied. "Many times."

Eifel Mountains travelogue

I hadn't been back in Richmond for a full 24 hours before my parents grew frustrated by looking at my slides of Germany using the small hand-held viewer I had brought home from Bitburg.

To remedy the problem, my dad bought a Kodak Carousel slide projector and a screen. Soon my parents were inviting relatives and friends to stop by the house to take a look at the places their son had been. It was a chore to set up and take down the projector and the screen, but the viewing experience was a lot more impressive.

The problem was that nobody had ever heard of Bitburg, let alone Spangdahlem. Neither town is big enough to be included on any but the most detailed map. I spent a lot of time explaining that both are in the Eifel Mountains, in western Germany, near the Luxembourg border.

But I could easily show them photographs of the Eifel Mountains region. I had taken hundreds of images while I was in the service. The video above is a sample of what that slide show looked like.

By the way, if you'd like to see what Bitburg's main street looks like right now, you can click here. It's a webcam site that shows a fresh image every 5 seconds.

Earning a civilian paycheck again

This publicity shot of me was taken in the WTVR news studio in 1970, just weeks after I returned to Richmond from Germany.

Even though I had voluntarily left WTVR TV, WMBG AM and WCOD FM in 1966 to join the Air Force, I was fairly certain that I'd have no trouble getting a job with the station group when I got out of the service. I had the power of the U.S. government behind me in the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act.

The law, which was enacted the year before World War II began, protects the job and benefits of a service member who leaves his or her civilian job because of military orders for training or active duty, voluntary or involuntary, in peacetime or wartime. When service members return to their civilian jobs, they're entitled to pay raises, promotions, and other seniority benefits, just as though they had been continually employed.

Six months before I was to get out of the service, an Air Force "separation counselor" gave me a copy of the act and told me to send it along with a letter to my former employer saying I'd be coming home soon.

I wasn't too concerned, but there was one complication. Wilbur Havens, who owned the station group, retired and sold the three stations to Roy. H. Park Broadcasting of Virginia in 1967, while I was in Germany. Park, who had been the man behind Duncan Hines cake mix, was then building a broadcast and publishing empire, and WTVR TV was to be his flagship station.

There was also another catch: I wanted to switch jobs. In my letter from Germany to Bruce Miller, WTVR TV's news director, I told him I'd like to come back as a TV news reporter, not as a radio deejay. He wrote to tell me to call him when I got back to Richmond.

When I reported for my Monday morning appointment with Bruce, he offered me a job as a TV news reporter. I didn't know it, but my return coincided with the station's plans to beef up the news department. "Can you start tomorrow?" he asked. "Sure," I said. I couldn't have been more delighted. My civilian career as a broadcast journalist was about to get under way. To this day, I have no idea of whether the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act played any role, but I suspect it did. There was no shortage of applicants for any TV news job.

Although the station group now had a new owner, I was happy to see most of the old familiar faces that had been there when I left. But much had changed. In 1966, the station had broadcast only the occasional show in color. Now it was all color. The evening newscast had been 15 minutes long when I left. Now it had a new name, "News/90," and it was beating all competition in the ratings. WTVR TV's local news now aired from 6 to 6:30 p.m. and from 7 to 7:30 p.m., with "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" sandwiched in the middle. The WTVR TV late news had expanded from 15 minutes to a full half hour. And while I was gone the station had added a half-hour newscast at noon that was pulling 70 percent of the TV viewing audience, thanks to the strength of the CBS daytime lineup of soaps and game shows.

In short, the airtime to be filled by the news department had quadrupled. As a reporter, I'd have no trouble getting lots of exposure.

That meant I had to scramble to get some new clothes. Everything in my closet was four years out of date. If I was going to be on TV every night I needed dress shirts, ties, sports coats, pants and a couple of suits. The first order of business was to head for Miller & Rhoads department store downtown to buy some new clothes.

The next morning, I reported to work in WTVR TV's newsroom in a new coat and tie, ready to work in commercial TV journalism.

I also started to grow a mustache -- not because it was trendy (and it certainly was in 1969) -- but because I had always been plagued by a tendency to break out in a sweat on my upper lip under hot TV lights. There was nothing I could do about it in the Air Force except to keep a clean handkerchief handy, but in civilian life all rules prohibiting facial hair were gone. This was a good thing, because color TV needed even more lights, making the studio that much hotter.

When my mustache started to grow, my grandmother Nichols told me it looked exactly like her father's. Although my hair was brown, my mustache was ginger -- just as my great grandfather's had been.

It would not be until 33 years later -- long after I left broadcasting -- that I shaved off that mustache for good.

Back in the world

An American flag hung outside my parents' house in Richmond to welcome me home, and my parents flew it on patriotic occasions for many years. (Dale family photo)

Home again. Back in the land of round doorknobs. Back in the world, as the GIs used to say.

It was good to be home. My mom had actually written to me in Germany to ask what I'd like her to cook for my first big meal at home. I had been eating quite well in Germany for three years and learning a lot about new cuisines. But sometimes it's mom's cooking you hanker for, and there was no doubt in my mind as to what I wanted: Swiss steak, spoon bread and green beans Southern style (cooked all day with a ham hock). My request was no surprise to her. That had been my favorite meal for years.

I was always fortunate: my mom was a good cook. Given the right incentive -- and that might be as simple as a polite request from one of us kids -- she'd make yeast rolls, spoon bread that would rival any soufflé chef's prize dish, Sally Lunn bread, biscuits that would melt in your mouth, fried chicken as good as my grandmother's, beef stew that would fill the house with mouth-watering aroma, and every kind of pie and cake from lemon meringue to German chocolate. Usually she worked without a recipe. She had been cooking so long and so well that the science of it had probably been absorbed into her DNA. She used what was in-season, what was on sale, and what she grew in her own fairly sizeable garden in the back yard. I don't believe she ever used a store-bought pie crust.

I arrived in Richmond on a Thursday evening in December 1969. My mom and dad and my sister Dianne all stayed home on Friday to hear about my adventures in Germany. We talked forever about what I'd seen and learned. Relatives and friends stopped by to catch up and welcome me home. My father bought a bottle of good bourbon and made a little ceremony of offering me a 'highball" before dinner. I suppose he was acknowledging what he saw as my adulthood.

On Saturday, my father and I scoured the want ads looking for a good deal on a used Volkswagen. We found what I wanted, a 1965 Beetle, light green, at a used-car lot in South Richmond. He went with me to inspect it. "You know more about Volkswagens than I do, so you handle looking at the car, and I'll handle the part about making sure we get a good price," my dad told me. (My dad drove only Chevrolets.) Both of us did our jobs well. I got a Beetle in good shape, with fairly low mileage, and my dad jawboned the dealer down to a good price. I drove that VW all over Virginia and to New York City and back during the next few years.

By Sunday night, I was all talked out about Germany, and I was ready to begin some kind of normal civilian life. The first step would be going back to work. That journey was to begin the next morning, Monday, December 15. I had an appointment with WTVR TV news director Bruce Miller.

Bis Später

Bis Später means "see you later" in German. It was an appropriate way for me to say goodbye to the Eifel Mountains of Deutschland. I knew I'd be back.

In early December 1969, after three and a half years in the Air Force, I packed my belongings, sold my 1950 VW, and left Germany. Three days later I was back in Richmond, just in time to get ready for Christmas.

In 1966, being drafted by the Army and then joining the Air Force had filled me with trepidation. But I enjoyed almost every day of the experience. Sure, there were some tough days in basic training. The duty as first a medic and then a broadcaster wasn't all moonlight and roses. However, both specialties taught me things that would be handy in my life, probably just as much as I learned from simply living in Europe. The Air Force and Europe taught me more about growing into an adult than anything I ever learned in a college classroom.

On the flight back to the States, I was excited about the prospect of being at home again with friends and family. But I was sad, too -- about the good friends and good times I was leaving behind.

The Internet has reconnected some of us who served at AFTV-22. Sadly, Tom "Bubba" Quinn and Gary "Yogi" Eodice died too young. But John David Wild, Chuck Minx, Sid Fryer, Peter Neumann and I have stayed in touch off and on. John David and I trade e-mail messages almost daily. I'm on Chuck's e-mail list for his succinct, wry jokes and pithy observations about our world in 2010. I also subscribe to the American Forces Network e-mail list, which began as a way for old AFN radio hands who served in Germany to re-connect but is now a virtual bulletin board for all of us who served in military broadcasting worldwide.

There are many others from the AFTV-22 Class of 1969 whom I long ago lost track of. Their absence leaves a hole in my memories and my heart.

It was on the AFN list that I caught up again with Tom Scanlan, he who decided to put together the secret moon-landing network for AFTV Germany without telling his bosses. He's a frequent contributor to the AFN list and we correspond off-list, as well. He's still offering welcome advice and expert explanations about AFTV Germany and the technical and business side of broadcasting.

I got back to the land of bourbon and dogwoods just as a new decade was dawning, and many of us remember all too well what the 1970s were like. The United States I returned to in late 1969 was so different from the country I had left in mid-1966.

And so was I.

Bis Später, y'all.

"What does that mean exactly?"

In 1968, we decorated the Christmas tree in our dorm with enlisted-rank insignia and other uniform patches. (Don Dale photo)

My friend Walter, whom I have known for more than four decades, has asked about some of the military terms I've been using. Here's a question he asked after he read my moon-landing posts:

"Tom had been an enlisted man, now he's an officer. What does that mean exactly? Are officers people who usually did NOT enlist?"

Actually, USAF officers do not enlist. An officer is commissioned by Congress. By contrast, those in the enlisted ranks do ... um ... enlist. An enlisted man with a good performance rating can apply to be an officer. It's not commonplace, but it happens. Lt. Tom Scanlan was one of those, I believe. They're known in military slang as mustangs.

Non-commissioned officers, or NCOs, are those with the enlisted rank of staff sergeant and above. They are "officers" but without commissions, thus they're non-commissioned officers.

If they're both outdoors, an enlisted man (including NCOs) must salute any officer he directly encounters. Salutes are also required under other special circumstances, for example when officially reporting indoors to a commanding officer. Enlisted men salute all officers. Officers salute other officers who outrank them. Enlisted men also use "Sir" when addressing an officer, and officers do the same for other officers who outrank them.

You can see a listing of all ranks, officers and enlisted men, in the USAF today by clicking here. (The lowest ranks had slightly different designations in the late 1960s when I was in uniform.)

Further, Walter asked: "Why are there Officers' Clubs and NCO Clubs? Is there an enlisted man's club? What is that called?"

I never served on a base that did not have both an Officers Club and an NCO Club. It would seem to be too discriminatory not to have both. Bitburg AB, but not Spangdahlem, also had an EM Club for enlisted men, although in most cases any enlisted man could use the NCO Club. The Bitburg EM Club opened while I was there, and the brass made a big deal of what they were doing for the lower ranks. I spent a lot of time there and enjoyed the place.

The EM Club was nicknamed "The Office." Somebody thought it would make a good answer, I suppose, to the wife at home who called to ask where her husband was: "I'm at the office, dear." In any event, it was the liveliest military club I've ever seen. Good music. Good prices. Good food. Good beer (both American beer and German beer; Bitburger Pils was the top choice).

I've only been in an Officers Club once, other than in the course of rare military duties, and that was as the guest of an old friend. Bill Souder and I were in the same class at Hermitage High School and went on to the University of Richmond together. Bill had always been interested in flying. He earned his pilot license while he was still at Hermitage, and on graduation day, he took me and another friend for a ride in a single-engine plane out of a little airport in Hanover County. It was my first flight.

Bill joined the Air Force before I did, earned a commission and was learning how to pilot a fighter jet when we met up while I was in basic medical training school in Texas. He took me to the Officers Club for drinks and dinner. It was more formal than the NCO Club, but I enjoyed the experience. Needless to say, I wore civilian clothes to the Officers Club. In uniform, I'd have stuck out like a sore thumb.

Bill later died when his fighter was shot down over the South China Sea during the Vietnam War. He was one of a handful of good friends who died in that war.

And then Walter asked: "Why is there air? What's the meaning of life?"

I can't find an answer to either of these questions in my old Air Force manuals. The brass probably didn't think enlisted men needed to know.