The beginning of the end

The racy cartoon feature "Dirty Duck" was released in movie theaters in 1974.

I got a telephone call at my desk in the newsroom in the late summer of 1974. The male caller, an adult, demanded an apology from WTVR news.

Why? He was offended, he said, by the use of a Yiddish word on our noon newscast earlier that week.

One of the steps I had taken to add some spice to the noon news was to hire a movie critic. He was Jerry Williams, a VCU theater graduate I had known socially for a few years. He was a real movie buff and saw everything that came to town. He had become my personal go-to guy for advice about movies.

"Dirty Duck," a racy cartoon, debuted in movie theaters in July of 1974. In his on-air review of the feature film, Jerry gave it a figurative thumbs down. "The dirty duck is a schmuck," he told viewers. I took it as a clever line and thought no more about it.

But my irate caller wanted us to apologize on the air for using "schmuck," the Yiddish word for "penis." As I listened to the caller chatter on about being offended, I leafed through the unabridged dictionary I kept on my desk. The first definition for "schmuck" was "slang; fool, jerk, oaf." The dictionary went on to note that the strict translation from Yiddish was, indeed, "male member."

I interrupted the caller to tell him what I had found, but he wasn't buying it. I told him that I was sure that Jerry, who did not speak Yiddish, was using the word in its slang sense. The caller, however, insisted that we apologize because we had used the word for "penis," regardless of its slang definition.

The caller never raised his voice or yelled at me, but he was far from satisfied when I told him I didn't think we had anything to apologize for. Clearly unhappy, he nevertheless thanked me for my time and hung up.

None of us knew then that the caller wasn't about to let go of his grudge against WTVR news. He nursed it for more than three years. And then he made another call -- a call that would end my career in broadcast journalism.

Down at the WTVR cat corral

Managing WTVR news reporters and photographers was like herding cats.

It's really hard to control those who resist control. Journalists are an independent lot. That's one of the qualities that makes them good at their jobs.

They also question everything: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." That old chestnut sums up what a good reporter should do. But it means that newsroom managers better have a good explanation for every management decision.

I was reminded of this today as I was looking through the too-narrowly-named WTVR News Style Guide from my tenure as news director. It covers points of English grammar and usage, but it also ranges far afield, covering topics as diverse as overtime sheets and where to buy gas for the news cars.

The Style Guide was actually a collection of memos to the newsroom staff, preserved chronologically in a Richmond Robins notebook. (The Richmond Robins was a pro ice-hockey team that made its home in Richmond from 1971 to 1976. The notebook must have been left over from the team's inaugural press kit.)

Some of the non-style topics are funny. On Aug. 6, 1974, word came down from the front office that no reporters from other TV stations should be seen in WTVR news film. None. Management also wanted us to stop shooting news film that showed other station's logos on microphones and cameras. The dictum was absurd because it's almost impossible to implement. When you're shooting news conferences or breaking news, other stations will be at the scene with their cameras and microphones. You just have to live with it. The rule was honored in the breaching of it, but time and again management would raise the issue.

There are also memos in the Style Guide about parking in the spots reserved for reporters under City Hall ("See, guys, you actually have to be covering something in City Hall to park there"), how to handle traffic tickets ("Please don't throw them in the back seat"), being on-time for work ("Being late is inexcusable, especially when you get caught"), and telephone courtesy ("Be cool when you're really hacked off at the idiot on the phone who wants to know why Bob told Nancy that his ex-wife Lisa was coming for Thanksgiving dinner on 'As the World Turns'").

I had forgotten a memo in the Style Guide about how CBS would cover terrorism. It was dated April 14, 1977, and warned that "the story should not be sensationalized beyond the actual fact of its being sensational." Spoken like a true apostle of journalism ethics.

A few memos talked about the groundbreaking ways in which TV journalism in Richmond was changing. One announced that WTVR had hired the first African-American female anchor in Richmond. Another cautioned against using courtesy titles for women. (Men were referred to by their last names, and women should be too, so we dropped the Mrs., Miss and Ms.) Still another cautioned against using "black" as the only description of a suspected criminal ("The real question is whether the story will stand without reference to color; most times it will").

And one or two of the memos read like they were addressed to two-year-olds. "When you're loading a box of paper into the teletype machine, please be sure to remove the packing material first."

"Herding cats -- don't let anybody tell you it's easy." That's what the cowboy said in that very funny Super Bowl commercial for EDS 10 years ago.

In case you've forgotten, the commercial featured real cowboys, along with about 60 cats with help from 13 cat wranglers. With the magic of computer graphics there were thousands of cats on the screen swimming across streams, winding around the legs of horses, and roughing up the cowboys.

Substitute "journalists" for "cats" and you've got a good picture of what it was like to manage a TV newsroom.

Just a visitor now

With eight days to go before the grand opening, this video shot April 23 shows the landscaping of the new VMFA 3 1/2-acre sculpture garden, which covers the top of the museum's parking deck and slopes down to ground level. Video running time: 63 seconds

For the past four years, the view from my office at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has been of a construction site. Finally, the expanded VMFA will open to the public May 1.

Friday was my last day working for the museum. I shot this video from the loading dock of the VMFA Pauley Center, which is where my office has been since 1999. (I had to stay on the loading dock, because the construction site is a hard-hat area.) It'll give you a taste of the last-minute work being done to create the E. Claiborne and Lora Robins Sculpture Garden. By opening day, most of the garden will be green.

My true retirement date from the museum was April 1, 2004, the date I wrapped up 30 years on the job as assistant director of marketing and communications. But a month after I retired, the museum called me back to work as a part-time contract writer. By last Friday, I had wrapped up all I could before the grand opening this coming Saturday, so I called it quits. It was a good, long, ride, but there are other trains and planes to catch now. Life is finite, and there are other things that I want to accomplish.

There are places I want to visit or revisit -- in Richmond, across Virginia, and around the world. I also want to write, for myself for a change. And there are so many books to read, on the deck in the summer and in front of the fireplace in the winter.

I was invited to three previews of the new, expanded museum. One was the media preview, another was the black-tie special members preview, and the third was the regular members preview. I declined all three invitations.

On Saturday, May 1, I'll join the crowd for the public grand opening. After more than 30 years on the inside, I'll be just a visitor. I think I'll like that.

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.

One helluva team

The Louisa County Courthouse

Thursday, Feb. 13, 1975, began as an ordinary day in the Channel 6 newsroom.

At mid-morning, there was no clear lead story on the horizon. The half-hour noon newscast went well, but still no compelling story surfaced. I ate lunch at my desk and monitored our radios and the scanners.

It was a telephone call just after 2 p.m. that changed all that. A source at the County Courthouse in Louisa -- about an hour northwest of Richmond, straight up Route 33 -- tipped us that a judge had been shot to death in his courtroom.

I had one crew that had just wrapped up an assignment. I sent them racing to Louisa. By the time they got there, a little after 3 p.m., we had worked the phones and filled in the story. The shooter had walked into General District Court at 2 p.m. with a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun concealed beneath his coat. In front of about a dozen courtroom spectators, he raised his shotgun and fired once, hitting a wall. Judge S.A. Cunningham rose from his seat behind the bench, and the shooter fired again, hitting the judge in the head and killing him. A deputy sheriff on duty near the judge took a minor hit to his side from the second blast.

An eyewitness said the shooter moved quickly next door to the clerk's office, where he shouted "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch" and then shot Sheriff Henry A. Kennon in the arm as the sheriff drew his gun.

The deputy sheriff who had been shot in the courtroom gave chase as the shooter fled the courthouse in a pickup truck. The deputy fired at the truck and told colleagues he thought he had hit the shooter. The deputy grabbed a sheriff's car and began pursuit, but he lost sight of the pickup. He called for police help.

Some of this we knew before our crew got to the courthouse. (Ours was the first TV crew to reach the scene.) They learned much more as they filmed interviews with eyewitnesses and the wounded sheriff himself. The crew then filmed establishing shots of the courthouse and the scene and were ready to head back to Richmond, where we waited to get the film processed and edited in time for the 6 p.m. portion of "News/90."

But before he left Louisa, our reporter heard from police at the courthouse that the shooter had been found holed up on a farm not far away. Dozens of state and county police were moving in.

That created a problem. Should I bring the crew home so we'd have film for the 6 p.m. newscast? Or should I send them to where the shooter was cornered and take a chance on having no film at all until 7? I decided to bring them home and send a second crew to the farm. It turned out to be a good call.

The second WTVR crew got to the farm just after 4 p.m., not long before state police opened up on the shooter. The Channel 6 crew got dramatic film and audio as the shooter exchanged gunfire with police. A police dog was sent in to help subdue the wounded shooter, and he was taken into custody.

Our crew got film of the shooter being loaded onto a police helicopter to be flown to Richmond's Medical College of Virginia Hospital. Then they headed back to the studio, where we hoped to have film of the capture in time for the 7 p.m. portion of "News/90." It would be tight, and we'd have to make a special processor run, but we thought we could do it. It was almost 6 p.m. by the time their film hit the processor.

Meanwhile, I sent the night reporter and photographer to MCV to get film of the helicopter arriving with the wounded shooter. In the photo lab, photographers were frantically editing the courthouse film for the 6 p.m. newscast. In the newsroom, I was pulling a script together as the reporter from the courthouse wrote his story and recorded his narration.

Just before 6 p.m., the crew from MCV radioed in to tell us they were on the way back with film of the shooter's arrival by helicopter. I was rapidly adding up times to see if there was any way we could get it on the air at 7 p.m. At this point, I was juggling lineups for two different broadcasts, the 6 p.m. and the 7 p.m., and beginning to think about the 11 p.m. I decided to take a chance. I scheduled another processor run for the 7 o'clock show.

Just before 6 o'clock, the film lab rushed the edited courthouse story up to the master control room, where it was barely loaded onto a projector before the broadcast started. I handed new scripts to the anchorman and then watched the show from master control. Our coverage looked great. The anchorman tagged the story with new information about the capture of the shooter, promising film from the scene at 7.

By 6:10 I was back in the newsroom, just as the crew from MCV arrived with their film. The lab tech loaded it into the processor. In the newsroom, the courthouse crew updated their story for 7 p.m., and the crew from the scene of the capture wrote and edited their new story for the 7 o'clock show. If luck was with us, we'd be able to tag it with fresh film of the shooter arriving at MCV.

Into this newsroom madhouse walked Preston Glazebrook, our veteran crime-beat stringer, waving his camera. "I've got film from MCV," he said. I told him our crew had already started processing film of the helicopter arrival and the shooter being whisked into the emergency room. "I've got something better," he told me. "I shot film inside the hospital while they worked on that son of a bitch who shot the judge." Preston hadn't stopped filming at the ER door. He'd followed the shooter's gurney right into the emergency room and continued filming while MCV doctors worked on him. Several minutes passed before somebody noticed Preston and kicked him out.

"Tack Preston's film onto the end of the processor run and let's see if we can get it on the air at 7," I told the lab tech. At 6:15, Preston's film hit the soup. At 6:45, the "News/90" director was screaming for scripts and film. All I could do was give him anchor lead-ins and tell him I'd be in the control room with him: "We'll wing it."

The journalism gods were with us. We led the 7 p.m. newscast with the re-worked and updated version of the courthouse interviews and film. We followed with the dramatic report of the shootout and capture at the farm. The film of the helicopter arrival was loaded on the projector just as it was being introduced. The newscast worked flawlessly. We had every aspect of the story nailed, right up to images of the moment when the emergency room staff ripped open the shooter's shirt and began to suction out his bloody wounds. All told, we devoted 10 minutes to three separate reports on the story. And even though we had taken enormous chances and pushed people and equipment to their limits, to the viewer it looked as smooth as silk.

I've never been so proud as I was that day of what our WTVR news staff could do under pressure. We were a helluva team.

Le Déluge

The below-ground window-well that led to the flooding of WTVR's basement newsroom is now grated and surrounded by a high retaining wall. (2010 photo)

During the time I was news director, I could expect at least one call at home each night from the WTVR newsroom. Usually the calls had to do with news coverage -- a request for advice on how to play a story, a need for overtime authorization, or a squabble about airtime between the news and sports anchors.

Sometimes it was breaking news. I was called in one night to manage our coverage of a small riot at a housing project that pitted police against residents and had possible racial overtones. Another night, I directed our coverage all night from the scene of a massive gasoline fire sparked by lightning at the Little Oil Company tank farm along Interstate 95. It took 19 hours to put out the fire, with help from the Air Force and the Navy. We were there with a full staff, and we fed the network with our film of that disaster.

I even got called out one night when a guy climbed the 800-foot tower behind the station. The cops talked him down when he was about halfway up, and we aired film at 11.

But there was one call that sticks in my mind: "Don, can you come in to the newsroom? We're being flooded." In those days, the news department had its offices and film lab in the basement, where the enormous record library for WMBG radio had once been.

The flood was serious and dangerous. Just after dark, rain started falling like a cow pissing on a flat rock, as my Grandpa used to say. The storm sewer at the southwest corner of Broad and Tilden streets was first overloaded, then blocked by debris. Water rose over the curb and onto the sidewalk. With no place left to go, it flowed into a window-well below ground level on the east side of the station's building. From there, it flowed into the basement.

When I got the call from Ken Srpan, the 11 p.m. anchor, it was about 9 o'clock. Water was rising in the photography lab and covering the lime green carpet in the newsroom. The office was controlled chaos, as reporters and anchors typed their stories with their legs tucked up under them to keep their feet out of the water. Engineers were running up and down the stairs as they manhandled the technical equipment bringing CBS programming into the station, which was intermittently losing its network signal -- during prime time.

In the photo lab, the film processor -- which was on a 6-inch concrete platform -- was churning out film. Ignoring the fact that they were surrounded by electrical equipment in a flooding basement, the photographers were editing and viewing film while standing on drink crates with their pantslegs rolled up to their knees.

The water rose to about six inches, and then the fire department arrived. Firemen snaked hoses from the alley behind the building, through the main news studio, through the finance office and down the back stairs to the basement, where they began to pump out the water as the deluge was ending.

As the 11 o'clock newscast grew closer, we realized we'd still have firemen and hoses in the studio at airtime. But that would be okay. The storm and the flood at the station would be our lead story, "so we'll just turn the cameras around and show the firemen at work," I said to the technical director.

Despite the dangers in the film lab, the frenzy in the newsroom and the firemen in the studio, the lab crew edited and cut the film, the reporters and anchors wrote the stories, and we were pulling a good broadcast together.

But the phones continued to ring all over the building. Viewers were righteously indignant: their favorite prime-time shows had been interrupted all evening as the engineers struggled to fix the problem with the network lines in the basement. Callers complained long and loudly.

Ken Srpan, now in his jacket and makeup -- with his pants still rolled up to his knees -- was ready to head upstairs to the studio. Ken was usually unflappable, but with 5 minutes to go before airtime, he'd had about enough of the constant interruptions from viewers with complaints. Nonetheless, he was too much of a newsman to walk away from a ringing telephone. I heard only his end of the conversation.

His eyes rolled as he listened politely to another viewer go on and on about how she was never going to watch Channel 6 ever again. Then he said, politely and seriously, "I can help you with that, ma'am. Just give me the serial number from the back of your TV set and I'll make sure we disconnect your signal at this end."

ENG

Electronic news gathering -- ENG -- interested Park Broadcasting from the moment it became available in the mid l970s. It would free TV newscasts forever from film.

Raw film stock was one of the biggest budget items in the newsroom. Another significant line-item was for chemicals and power for the station's film processor, a mammoth machine adjacent to the newsroom. On a normal day, we'd process thousands of feet of film in four runs, at roughly 11 a.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. It took about 40 minutes for the first frame of film to emerge from a run through the processor's Byzantine chemical dips and driers and baths and more driers.

ENG was what it was called in the beginning. Nobody much uses that name anymore, since it's normal industry practice today to use portable video instead of portable film. But at the time I became news director here, nobody locally was investing in ENG technology, and very few stations in the country were using ENG routinely.

WTVR was Park Broadcasting's flagship station. We had great ratings in a good market: We were a cash cow. But the company wanted to keep it that way, and it didn't spend profligately. Park Broadcasting wanted to experiment with ENG at WTVR to see how much money could be saved. If ENG worked for us, we could eliminate the costs of film and processing. The technician who ran the film processor could be freed up for other newsroom duties.

I saw ENG in a different light. It was a chance for television news to conquer one of its biggest obstacles -- time. Eliminating film processing meant we could move story deadlines closer to airtime. When an ENG photographer returned to the station, he'd be able to start editing his pictures immediately. He could have his images on the air in no time at all.

ENG pictures also looked better on TV, sharper and more "real." And somewhere in my mind was the cool factor that came with exploring a new way of doing things.

Park flew me to WSB in Atlanta, a station owned by CBS. WSB was an early adopter of ENG, and the station no longer used any film for its newscasts. The news director helpfully assigned me to a producer and a news engineer for several days to show me how it worked. I was sold on first sight.

There were a few tradeoffs. The original ENG equipment was bulky. The cameras were just as big and weighty as film cameras, and the photographer had the additional burden of a separate videorecorder and batteries. The videotape still had to be transported back to the station to be aired. But we had film photographers eager to make the transition. (Routine local use of microwave and satellite live-shots on newscasts was some years away.)

When I got back to Richmond, I outlined my enthusiasm in a memo to station manager Jack Mahoney. A few weeks later, down came the word from Park headquarters in Ithaca, New York: "Go." It took me about a week to make a list of equipment recommendations, and within days we had a new ENG camera and an editing station. Just to be showoffs, we led the news at 6 p.m. that first night with a soundbite -- on videotape -- from Richmond Congressman David Satterfield, who had spoken downtown at 5 o'clock. It never could have been aired so quickly with film.

To drive home the fact that we had it and nobody else in Virginia did, we put a super in the top left corner of every ENG story we aired: WTVR TV6 Colortape." We marketed the concept for about six months. By 1977, all three Richmond stations were using tape instead of film for newsgathering. We lost our exclusive status, but we were still pioneers. (Think back to the covered wagon on the WTVR TV station logo.)

In the 35 years since, miniaturization has wrought seeming miracles. When I go on vacation, I can take along a camera that fits into my shirt pocket and use it to record wide-screen, high-definition color video. I can use my laptop to edit the video into a coherent story, add narration and a soundtrack, and upload it to a server so friends back home can see it.

I can even send live video back home with a smart phone.

My Granny lived from a time when people rode horses to a time when man flew in rockets to the moon.

For my generation, it's been from celluloid to pixels -- at the speed of light.

"Preston to Radio"

Preston Glazebrook was one of the most unforgettable characters I ever met.

When we heard his call -- "Preston to Radio" -- on the two-way in the WTVR TV newsroom, it almost always meant that something was brewing on the police beat and WTVR was about to get film that was dramatic -- and maybe strange or disturbing.

Preston had been a fixture at WTVR since before I came home from the Air Force. I knew him casually as a reporter, but I really got to know him when I became news director and spent all day in the office.

Preston once brought me film of a shooting victim sitting up against a power pole in the Fan. The victim's wife, who had shot him, was comforting him. As Preston's film rolled, the man died in his wife's arms.

On another occasion, he brought us film of a city policeman dying in his patrol car after a high-speed chase through Northside Richmond. The officer's cruiser had spun out of control and slammed into a very old, very solid tree. Preston got there first and was filming as the first rescue team arrived. His telling images showed the officer's seatbelt buckled behind him to keep the buzzer from sounding.

Preston shot an even more intriguing story one night when a tire store was robbed. It wasn't film of the aftermath. It was film of the actual robbery in progress. Preston thought "those kids looked like they were up to no good," he told us, so he'd followed them and watched -- and filmed -- as they broke into the tire store and made off down the alley with as much high-end merchandise as they could carry. The city's Commonwealth's Attorney called me that night to tell me he'd never get a conviction if we put Preston's film on the air. Balderdash! We used it. Preston was as proud as a peacock.

Preston shot his film with a Bell and Howell Filmo 16mm turret-lens camera. The camera is so solid you could battle your way out of a riot with it and shoot pictures simultaneously. But sometimes Preston would forget to completely rack his lens into place, and the film would look like it was shot though a long tube. Preston rarely sighted through the viewfinder. He'd rest the camera on his immense stomach and fire away. Sometimes the framing was off-kilter, and the images often rose and fell with his breathing.

But Preston's film wasn't about art. It was about news, and it was compelling. His images were full of blood and guts, action, and drama -- and they were newsworthy.

One day he brought me film of body parts -- arms, a foot, a piece of a torso -- that were scattered along the trains tracks in Glen Allen. Preston had heard scanner chatter about some kids finding something. He was close by, and he got there first. The remains were of an escaped inmate who had tried to hop a freight train and missed. Preston's stuff was graphic, stomach-churning film. We used only the wide shots on the air, no close-ups, but you can bet that everybody in the newsroom wanted to see the outtakes.

Shooting film for us was Preston's hobby: He didn't want to make money, but he didn't want to lose money either. So when he hung around the newsroom at the end of the month, I knew he needed an assignment or two to break even. We'd find him something to shoot - a grip and grin, a ribbon-cutting, a simple story that didn't need a reporter tagging along.

We had to be careful where we sent Preston. He often forgot to put his false teeth in, and without them he looked demented. He wore work pants of uncertain age (and color) and an old plaid shirt with the tails hanging out. In the winter, he'd add a moth-eaten green cardigan.

Surprisingly, Preston was wealthy. On days when he was attending some corporate board meeting, he'd wear a blue-and-white checked, double-knit sport-coat, a tie he probably bought during World War II, a white shirt and -- yes -- his teeth. He was heavy into utility and railroad stocks.

One day when my car was in the shop Preston gave me a ride home in the car he used to cruise the streets. It was littered with junk-food wrappers, empty film reels and discarded soda cans. It was also wired with radios tuned to every police, fire and rescue squad in the metro area. The noise precluded conversation. Heck, you couldn't even hear yourself think. But Preston understood every word that came over his scanners. He could even put a name to many of the dispatchers.

Preston led the pack when it came to getting film of a good crime story on the air. He showed a generation of photographers and reporters how it was done, not by intellectualizing, but through a dogged determination to be first on the scene. He always had his camera loaded and ready. He was always hungry for a story, willing to work harder than the competition, willing to cruise the mean streets just a little bit longer.

Preston died in the early 1980s, a few years after I left WTVR TV.

Those of us who learned from his example were better reporters and photographers. His name deserves to be remembered.

Faith, family and friends

The agony of not knowing could be seen in the stoic faces of families near Montcoal, W. Va., this morning after a disastrous explosion in the Upper Big Branch coal mine yesterday afternoon.

My grandfather on my mother's side -- Horace Nichols -- chose wisely when he decided that the way out of the poverty of hardscrabble farming in Southwest Virginia in the early 1900s was through the C&O railroad and not through a job in a coal mine.

I've visited those far reaches of Virginia -- down where Virginia comes to a sharp point aimed at Kentucky and Tennessee and a little farther north where Virginia shares a border with West Virginia -- and life in the mountains is, for many, still harder than most of us can imagine. Jobs are few. Mere subsistence is still a hand-to-mouth way of life for too many. Coal mining, despite the dangers, offers a paycheck for those without many other opportunities.

So this morning when I watched the unfolding story of the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Montcoal, W. Va., the story had a particular relevance.

I heard a Red Cross worker interviewed on a TV network newscast talk about how tightly knit the coal mining communities are and how strongly they depend on "faith, family and friends." I got a taste of that strength in the early 1960s at the University of Richmond. Many of my Phi Delta Theta fraternity brothers were from families whose lives were inextricably tied to the coal mines of Pennsylvania. In most cases, those Phi Delt brothers from coal-mining country were the first to break out of the cycle that had seen their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers go to work in a hole in the ground. Their families had done without, worked hard, and scrimped and saved to give their sons a shot at a better life. Those college friends of mine were tough boys who still retained their covenant with "faith, family and friends," and they were good boys on whom you could always depend.

I covered an accident in the early 1960s -- at a small mine in Louisa County. I remember families, mine officials, police, firemen and reporters standing vigil in the dark near the mine's entrance, waiting through the night for news. It was a tough assignment, but what I felt was nothing like the anxiety the families were feeling.

Coal mining is an arduous, dangerous job, and you can't help but wonder why anybody would chose it. And then you realize: It's all about choices. And sometimes there are precious few.

Huh?

I must have checked the wire-service teletypes 100 times a day when I was news director at WTVR TV. The sound of them clacking away, combined with the noise of police scanners for Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield and radio traffic to and from our own news cars, created a cacophony in the newsroom.

I was lucky to achieve a lifetime career dream when I was 32. Of course, my life hadn't been all that long, but the dream came true nonetheless.

In 1974, WTVR news director Bob Trent resigned, and the station manager, Jack Mahoney, picked me as Bob's replacement.

I've said before that Bob was the best news director I ever worked for. He taught me so much about the nitty-gritty of TV journalism -- the things they don't teach you in school -- and that meant I'd be filling some very big shoes.

Station manager Jack Mahoney was, like Bob, the best I ever worked for, and I don't say that just because he promoted me. (That will become clearer in blog posts to come.) He was a big, florid Irishman, easy to like, thoughtful with his employees, and very upfront about his battles in the past with alcoholism. He'd been clean and sober for some years, though, and he and his wife, Mary, weren't above throwing a beer bash to celebrate a significant win in the ratings or a retirement or a promotion. He'd join in the fun, but he'd spend the evening nursing a Coke or a glass of tonic water.

Jack called me into his corner office to tell me about my promotion. We talked about the direction of the newscast, what he wanted to see improved, and what he thought was working well. We talked about anchormen -- there were no women in anchor jobs in Richmond at that time -- and the need to diversify, to hire women and minorities for reporting and photography jobs. We discussed how to keep the budget in line -- the cost of raw film stock and the chemicals needed to process film was soaring -- and the strengths and weaknesses of our existing news staff.

I had been open about my sexuality since I returned from the Air Force, but the subject had never come up between Jack and me. So as the interview drew to a close and he offered me the job, I told him there was something he needed to know: "Jack, I'm gay."

"That's not a problem, Don. I'm an alcoholic."

To this day, I still don't understand the parallel.

But I gratefully accepted the job that I had dreamt about since I was old enough to read a newspaper.