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."