Tale #2.

I am an old-timer in radio news and TV. I sang on the radio when my mother took me to an amateur performers hour on a Saturday morning in about 1931 (cq) at WJKS, Gary, Indiana. Then later, I built "cat's whiskers" radio sets, with a tuned crystal to pick up the one or two stations in the area.

Fast forward to college, Indiana University, when I co-produced a radio series in 1948-49 which reproduced historic events in history with actors and sound events. This effort won a national award from The Society of Professional Journalists, which I later (1981-87) served as Executive Officer.

My first TV production was a one-camera once-a-week news program, reviewing major events of the week on a brand new TV station being built in Bloomington, Indiana (I was attending IU, majoring in journalism). The station was based there at first (it's now licensed to Indianapolis), WTTV. I had arranged for the J-School's photography professor to assign his students to stories and by Friday mid-day, to give me large prints of the stories with a caption printed on the back of each print.

I then wrote a script, and on the live 15 minute show each Friday early evening, had the one camera operating at the station pointed at the flipchart with the title shot and the 30 to 40 prints, while I read the script and personally flipped the mounted photos. It all worked.

After Army service in Japan (1951) on the Pacific Stars & Stripes, I began my broadcast career at a news writer at WRC-TV and WRC-AM, the NBC owned and operated stations in Washington DC, in October, 1951. Within two years, I had my own daily WRC radio ten-minute"news features" show at 12:05 PM M-F, and in 1953, was given two of the four TODAY Show cut-ins, to write and broadcast, five days weekly. It was on one of those shows that the other cut-in broadcaster announced that I had become a father for the first time, on April 21, 1953; his grand-father, who did not know I had taken my wife Audrey to Georgetown Hospital late the night before, heard about his grandson's birth on that cut-in.

Later that year, I was given a five minute pre-movie on Saturday nights, The Safeway Theatre, of which Frank Blair was the announcer/commercials reader. The next year I was given a three-minute, no visuals/graphics lead-in to an entertainment show at 1 PM, produced -- in their first TV exposure -- by two very young and inventive husband and wife team, who used puppets. They were Jim and Jane Henson and, of course, their Muppets are known throughout the world.

In 1955 I became supervisor of the NBC network newsdesk in Washington, working with David Brinkley, Frank McGee, and other pioneers in TV news. After working the desk M-F, I added Saturday morning radio network news shows, for the extra income, as anchor of the World News Roundup, and inserts on the program that preceded Monitor. Later, when Monitor came on line, I did news inserts on Saturdays for that show.

In 1961 I was transferred to New York to begin a 20 year hitch with NBC, first as manager of news operations for the network, then through a series of titles as news expanded its time on the air. Over 15 years, I produced or managed news coverage at the national political nominating conventions (1956 through 1980), the first space flights (Shepard, Glenn, etc, through the Gemini series), and trips abroad of Presidents (Eisenhower around the world, and to South America, Nixon to Russia, Kennedy to Central America, then to Ireland and the Berlin Wall) and Pope Paul VI to the Holy Land.

I then became VP and GM of the NBC Radio Network, to devise the first full-time news network, The News and Information Service. NIS was in operation less than two and a half-years, because changes at RCA's top management occured after the service was on the air for a year-plus and the new top managers ordered it off the air, though it was meeting its growth in affiliated stations. But the planned losses were in the multi-millions and it died an early death.

I returned to network news as VP of Public Affairs, in charge of Meet the Press, the network's religious programming, and contacts with affiliated TV stations, staying in that position for five years. In 1981, I returned to my native Midwest, to Chicago, to head The Society of Professional Journalists, the first non-print journalist to be chosen as Executive Officer.

I left that position after almost seven years to become Midwest Director of the Executive Television Workshop, Inc., a natioinal communications skills training firm, and in 1996, set up my own company, consulting with corporations and government agencies, including NASA, where, over the past 11 years, I have trained dozens of the Astronauts on how to appear on TV news shows. I have seen many of these Astronauts answering questions while they flew in space.

It's been quite a ride. And I'm still at it. And still love it.

Russ Tornabene, Evanston Illinois
Russaud@aol.com