Our top stories tonight...

I labored in the field of television news for almost 18 years, as a graphic designer. Sixteen of those years were in Pittsburgh, at KDKA-TV, a station that was #1 for most of the time I worked for them. When I first got there, it was one of the crown jewels of the Group W (Westinghouse) 5-station empire. It eventually became a CBS owned and operated station. I arrived around the time Pittsburgh was the #13-sized TV market in the country. By the time I left, it had shrunk to #20 or so (yes, I drove them all out of town). But all of that is just background information for the story I'm about to tell. My real reason for this post is some of the classic TV stories I heard while I was there.

We had our own "tales of the tube," as I called them in Innocent Bystander #1 & 2. KDKA had one of the legendary Pittsburgh anchors in Bill Burns. Bill was a bit advanced in age when I arrived at the station and was crotchety as all hell. His pet peeve was Pittsburgh's pigeon population, specifically those residing in Market Square, and one day he came up with the perfect solution. He suggested, on the noon news, one of the highest-rated news shows in the country at the time, that we kill the damn birds, freeze-dry them and send them over to Ethiopia to feed all the starving people there. He was barely off the air when the phones started ringing off the hook. To my recollection, he never apologized.

When Bill worked the night shift, he had a producer who would deliberately stick things in the script that he knew Bill would NEVER read. Puns, minor double entendres, the like. One night, the producer wrote the following tease copy to be read before a commercial break: "Coming up next: Emperor Hirohito flies back to Japan after his historic first-ever visit to the United States and weatherman Bob Kudzma says there's a nip in the air tonight." But Bill read that one and acted like he didn't know what was wrong. That one made it into Playboy.

Bill also once teased the soap opera after the noon news as "The Young and the Breastless." No one's sure if that was deliberate or a slip of the tongue. Anchors sometimes trip up and say the very thing they're deathly afraid of saying. During a newspaper strike, we added a 7:00pm newscast, which was followed by a syndicated show titled Top Cops. Sure enough, one night the anchor teased, "Coming up next: Top Cocks." Overnight ratings weren't available, but I imagine the audience at least doubled.

Patti Burns, Bill's daughter, anchored the noon show with him for many years. They were the country's only daddy-and-daughter newsteam. Patti moved on to anchor the nighttime shows, and one election night she did what I think anchors all over the country do at least once in their career on election night: Call it "Erection Night." Both Patti and Daddy are now gone, sadly. Bill finally retired and died soon after. Patti died of cancer a few years ago, She was only in her forties when she died.

Not all the stories I heard came from my station. There's the famous one about a hero dog who saved his family from a fire by barking until everyone got up and got out of the house. The local news stations flocked to "interview" the dog, but unfortunately as one of the news vans left the driveway, it backed up over the dog and killed him. Hero today, gone tomorrow, I guess.

We had a reporter once who was very challenged with certain things, like thinking. Once she interviewed the Archbishop of the Catholic Diocese of a nearby city. She went into his office saw a picture of 2 children behind him on a table and asked him, "What beautiful children...are they yours?" One time she was going to be sent to New York to cover a story and was told she'd be flying into Newark's airport. She heard this a number of times and finally just lost it. "You people have the laziest speech I've ever heard! It's NEW-YORK, NEW-YORK, NOT NEWARK." When she was told there was such a place called Newark (a magical place at that) and that was the airport she was indeed flying into, it took her a while to get that info processed.

We had a weatherman who was the most arrogant man on the face of the earth. He took the weather as seriously as a heart attack. One day his wife gave birth to their 4th child, and as is the peculiar whim of news directors everywhere, we covered the story as an addition to our little "family." There's the weatherman sitting on the bed, holding the little bundle of joy, surrounded by his 3 other brats and the beaming mommy. He introduces the baby with her cute little name, and his other 3 children by name and EVERY TIME HE INTRODUCES HIS WIFE, THE MOTHER OF HIS CHILDREN, HE FORGETS HER NAME. This is all on videotape, and the cameraman cannot WAIT to get back to the station and show it to everyone. It takes arrogant weather guy 5 or 6 tries until he can get his wife's name right. Said wife gets bitchier and bitchier with each take. Watching that tape was like watching a classic comedy routine. It just built and built and built, and each take was more hilarious than the previous one. People were rolling in the aisles of the newsroom.

I don't envy anyone who works on an early morning news show. The hours are brutal. One time, around Christmas, our morning news anchor announced to the weather guy, "I got you a present...here, open it." And affable weather guy (not the same as above arrogant weather guy), opens it. It's a smokeless ashtray, the kind that ventilates the cigarette smoke inside it. He looks stunned. This is all on the air, mind you. When they go to commercial break, he tells her, "Look, I appreciate the gift and all, but my family thinks I've stopped smoking, so please don't mention my smoking on the air." He walks away to get ready to do his weather report. The director is counting down in everyone's ears. All of the sudden a wail comes up from the anchor desk. "YOU'RE SO MEAN TO ME!" the anchor cries. She is balling her eyes out as the director counts down "10-9-8..." They come out to the weather guy who has to basically anchor the show for the next few segments while the other anchor composes herself in the little anchor's room. Merry Christmas!

There is legendary stupidity on the air each and every day, and even though in the past more actual journalists were on the air, stupid still was as stupid did. Another Pittsburgh station had a woman anchor who had 2 immortal slip-ups on the air. The first involved the one, the only, Groucho, when he was on his deathbed. One night she read, "Groucho Marx has taken a turn for the worse. In fact, he's dead." Another night she filled in for the two lead 11:00pm anchors, guys by the name of Hank and Jack. She started the newscast with: "Good evening. Hank's sick tonight and Jack's off." It was all downhill after that.

One of my favorite TV anchor stories comes out of Denver back in the late 80s/early 90s, when a new hot-shot anchor demanded a fact-check on a story. She was anchoring both the early morning and noon newscasts at a particular station. On the early show she read the rather humorous story of a truck overturning and spilling its load of bananas on the road. Over 2,000 pounds of them. At noon she read the same story, but it was written as over one ton of bananas. In the commercial break, she went baliistic, yelling at the producer, "Goddamn it! Can't you people get your facts straight? This morning it was 2000 POUNDS of bananas now it's ONE TON!!! Which is it?!!!"

I once heard the story about a new reporter whose name was too long to put on-screen. You know, all the stations super-impose the reporter's name over them when they're covering a story. Let's call her Ann Shostakovichmeyer, for the same of argument. The news director went to her and gently suggested that she MIGHT want to consider a name change for the sake of brevity. She thought about it briefly and said, (in all earnestness, I'm told), "I don't know...I'm really fond of Ann."

It ain't rocket science, folks, but it sure ain't pretty either.