On bananas and budgets

The WTVR TV tower is 800 feet tall and the top of it is 1,049 feet above sea level. It stands directly behind the station's studios at 3301 W. Broad St. Before the new tower was built (1953), the station broadcast from a smaller tower at the intersection of Staples Mill Road and Broad Street. (Don Dale 2010 photo)

When I was in 3rd grade at Helen Dickinson Elementary School, our teacher decided the class would create a newspaper. For whatever reason, I was assigned to do a story on bananas. So the next time my mom went to the A&P, I tagged along and asked her about bananas. Then I went to the school's library and looked up bananas. The result was a forgettable story about bananas, but I was hooked.

Not on bananas. On journalism. I liked telling stories. I wanted to know more about how that worked. I started reading beyond the comics pages in the News Leader and Times-Dispatch. I began trying to figure out who these people were that reported the news and how they did it.

When I was a young teenager, I wrote a letter to James Jackson Kilpatrick, who was then the editorial page editor of the News Leader. I asked him what I should study in school to become a reporter. He very kindly wrote back at some length.

He told me to be a generalist. Don't major in journalism. If you have to, you can minor in journalism, but pick some other major that interests you. And take every elective you can fit into your schedule. Learn about anything and everything that interests you. To be a good reporter, you have to know how to learn a little bit about everything and you have to be a quick study.

And write. Write anything. But keep writing until it's second nature to tell a story.

I took his advice. I worked on the high school newspaper. In my senior year, the T-D picked me to be a high school correspondent. I actually got paid for writing a handful of stories that were published. (The weirdest was about a classmate who had perfectly preserved the skeleton of her dead pet cat.) I worked my way up to being news editor of the Hermitage High School newspaper.

At the University of Richmond, I decided to major in English literature and minor in journalism. In the early 1960s, a liberal arts education at UR required 24 hours in your major field, 18 in your minor, the second year of two foreign languages, and additional studies in math, history, and social science, along with your choice of biology, chemistry or physics.

I also managed to rack up 18 hours in religion and 12 hours in speech, along with a third year of Spanish and one year each of Italian and Latin. (German was my other language, and I took both years of it after I returned from Germany.)

But I never had a class in television journalism. Most universities taught print journalism, not broadcast journalism, in the early 1960s. The closest I ever found at UR was an education course that focused on field work at Richmond's educational TV station. It was a summer course. I took it and loved it.

I worked my way into television journalism through the back door. I paid much of my way through college, as I've written before, as a radio deejay. Then came the Air Force and the lucky break that led me to American Forces TV in Germany, where I got my first real chance to be a TV reporter and anchorman.

WTVR TV hired me back when I got out of the Air Force and put me in the TV newsroom. A few years later, I was named news director.

It was a job I loved and hated at the same time. I loved the journalism aspect of it -- making decisions about what stories to cover and how to play them on newscasts filling 2 1/2 hours of airtime each day. I loved deploying staff and working the phones hard on a slow news day. And scoops -- I lived for the days we beat the competition cold, especially if that included the newspapers too.

I hated the administrative work, firing staff (hiring wasn't so bad), and -- this was a big hate -- budget details.

But what I missed was just telling stories. I missed covering stories, working with a reporter's notebook and a pencil. There was very little opportunity for me to do that as news director. It was a surprise to discover that although I had achieved a career goal, I was paying a price for it.