Taiwan - New Taipei Garden Area, Pretty Flower #5 / My Channel 6 Interview

My birthday passed not long ago, and lately I've learned to make things easier on the kids by just texting a list of what they should get for me.  This year it was a power cord for the Bigger Cahoona so that we can get serious about time lapse, and a book by David Attenborough called Life on Air.  Only am about ten pages deep, but already am hooked by his sense of adventure and easy style of writing.  And the stories he relates about the earliest days of television and what was done to produce programming had me reminiscing about my own not-quite-so-early days in the medium.

As stated in this post, I was recruited to be on the charter production crew to inaugurate the broadcast of Trinity United Methodist's Sunday service in the spring of 1977, having been recommended by the associate pastor as a result of my experience in radio.  It was exciting to jump from radio to television, and I was eager to learn.  It's obvious by the picture posted on March 23 (2019) that I started on camera, but by the end of the spring I was setting up equipment and had moved up to switching.  The guy from Channel 6 (KFDM) that directed us all was named Ed Smith, who was on their sales team but, like us, did production work when he was young.

Ed and I got along well, and he encouraged me to apply at Channel 6 for a position on the camera crew.  I submitted an application to the programming director, Jeff Pryor, in person so that he would remember who I was, but he informed me that there wasn't anything available at the time.  I said OK, I'd be back later.

And I sure was.  The following week I stopped by again, but still no bite.  A week after that I peeked into his office for a third time, by which time we were getting to know each other...or at least he was getting to know of my tenacity and the fact that I was not going to go away.  Not long after that third visit I got a call to report to the station because they wanted to interview me for a position on the news team.  Wow - finally in!  But what would I do on a news team?