The Best Worst TV in Texas
(Page 3 of 4)
W. W. White is one of those edge-of-town roads, lined with buildings of neon, glass, stainless steel, and formica. At the edge of the road is a strip of gravel, a ditch, and then parking lots. A grim setting in which to lie injured, waiting.
Ramming down the road at 50, Ronnie and the rider could see in the extreme distance, a quarter to a half mile away, the ambulance's flashing light coming in the opposite direction. It wasn't far from where the wreck must be. When ambulances stop, the victim can be gone in less than a minute. There's no story unless you beat them there.
Ronnie had slowed to 30, not by choice but because two cars driving side by side had filled both lanes. The ambulance turned into a parking lot about eight blocks away. Ronnie pulled left to pass the two slow cars but had to duck back in again. "This right here is the kind of stuff that costs you stories." Thirty is 90 miles per hour less than 120 and seems very, very slow.
Then he was around the two cars, back up to 50 and finally pulling up short at the scene—a Stop n' Go parking lot.
If the remains were any indication, the wreck had been bizarre. An Oldsmobile, its front crumpled to half its former length, languished in one corner of the lot near a minor intersection. Ten yards away, in the center of the lot, a Ford Galaxie, the twin of Ronnie's car except for color, had landed with all four doors askew, one whole side pushed in, and its front crumpled very much like the Olds'. The Ford, after colliding with the Oldsmobile, had rammed the back end of an innocently parked Dodge pickup. The truck's bed had been crushed and its cab shoved almost into the store.
In a single motion, Ronnie grabbed his camera, popped out of his car, and started running toward the center of the lot where two ambulance drivers were kneeling by the body of a fallen man, evidently the driver of the Ford. Five or six policemen stalked about the scene questioning witnesses and making gestures to keep small groups of the curious at bay. As Ronnie ran, he flipped on the arc lights attached to his camera. A few feet from the injured man he stopped and trained his camera, shooting with the man's feet in the foreground, his head at the top of the frame, and the two ambulance attendants flanking him on either side. The man, already pale from shock, looked translucent under the arcs. He had a full head of white hair, a big chest, and thin arms with white peppercorn hair. One worn black shoe was still on, the other somehow pulled off exposing a thin blue sock. The rain, now only a fine mist, sparkled along his body catching the light like specks of glass. The ambulance attendants had wiped his bloody forehead clean.
With Ronnie's white lights making everything look staged, the attendants lifted the man to a stretcher and wheeled him toward the waiting ambulance. They were just pulling him into the back when the kid from 4 arrived, having come the opposite way up W. W. White. He was out of his car and next to Ronnie shooting in the back of the ambulance before the doors closed. Immediately Ronnie went around to the side of the ambulance, the kid following, and both of them shot through its thin, tightly stretched curtains. The ambulance pulled away. Ronnie switched to shooting the crumpled Ford which was dangerously leaking gasoline across the parking lot. The kid started shooting the Ford, too; then he thought better of it and moved off to shoot something different. At that moment Larry Lightmeter arrived. He was probably only 50 seconds off the pace, but the victim was gone, the ambulance was gone, he'd missed everything. He turned around. There was no use even getting out of the car.
What madness! In San Antonio something like this has been going on since 1949, when a radio show titled "So You Want To Be A Cop" invaded the airways one Sunday night at nine. Similar in format to Walter Winchell's "Nightbeat" show in New York, "So You Want To Be A Cop" was an immediate smash. Each Saturday night an off-duty San Antonio policeman, an announcer, and some radio technicians pulled into a specially outfitted station wagon and, monitoring police radios in much the same way television newsmen do today, they cruised the streets looking for action. They would rush to the scene of a crime or accident and record interviews with witnesses, victims, police, or anyone else who might be interesting.
Recording equipment was still unwieldy in 1949. The back of the station wagon carried a Brush recorder four feet by two by three which was powered by hand winding. Attached to it was 300 feet of microphone cable on a reel. The engineer sat in the back of the wagon while the interviewer, ranging as far as his cable would permit, ran after the story. One interviewer, Miles Hirsch, had a potent, though simple, technique. The witness would be telling his story of blood and carnage and come to what was apparently the end. Miles would pause dramatically, then breathlessly inquire," And then what happened?"
Heavy on schmaltz, alert for the tearful, the crew of "So You Want To Be A Cop" nevertheless reported some stunning stories in their nine years. Once a policeman stopped a speeding car on South Flores. An old woman was driving; her fortyish son had just had a heart attack. The cop called an ambulance. Waiting, the woman pulled her son's slumped body to her chest. Listeners can still hear her voice: "My son! My son!" It was as if the Pietá had come alive.
The program stayed on the air for nine years and might still be on had not Jim Logan, the new news director for Channel 12, conceived a local news show built around first hand reporting of street news. Faced with competition from TV, "So You Want To Be A Cop" withered within a year.
Logan is still news director at Channel 12. A round-faced man with blond hair combed straight back, a short stubby body, and stubby arms, he is an energetic story-teller whose theory of television news is simplicity itself: "This is television. Everything's supposed to move."
To Logan motion in a news show meant film, film of everything: "We wanted to show people in San Antonio what was happening in their own city ." If what was happening in San Antonio included murders, car wrecks, robberies, vice raids, and stabbings, then so be it. That's life in the big city.
When television coverage began, life on the street was considerably more hectic than it is now. In those days the first ambulance—and the first wrecker, too, for that matter—scored the victim. Drivers got paid by the victim and there were as many as ten ambulance companies, and as many wreckers, operating at the same time. Theoretically the police were supposed to call the various companies on a rotating basis. That didn't stop the other ambulances, though. Once at the scene they could always claim they had been called there by a witness. All the ambulances and all the wreckers monitored the police radio and took off at once when anything was broadcast that smelled of blood. It was a wild scene—cop cars with sirens whining, ambulances with sirens whining racing hood to hood, wreckers racing with their skeletal rigs clanging over chuck holes, cars from the three TV stations, cars filled with newspaper reporters and photographers and a careening gaggle of hangers on: crazy teenagers in hot-rods, shyster lawyers, insurance photographers like Ronnie's father—10, 15, maybe 20 cars zinging through red lights, going double and even triple the speed limit, ducking in front of one another only to be passed by someone else, all racing to some disaster they hoped wouldn't be their own.
And at the scene, mayhem. A gunshot victim lying in the street. An ambulance arrives. Out with the stretcher, run toward the victim. Just moments behind, a second ambulance stops right behind the first, blocking the rear doors. The attendants, on the way to the victim with their own stretcher, smash the headlights of the first ambulance.
By this time the newsmen are there, arc lights on, cameras sniffing for blood and agonized faces. The first ambulance crew, uniforms a blinding white under the camera's lights, are ready to lift the victim to their stretcher. He is helpless, but now more hopeful. Help has arrived. The painful wait is over. But...surprise! A member of the second ambulance crew is screaming into the victim's face: "Man, don't let them take you. They got rats in their ambulances. They got no headlights and they're drunk."
Meanwhile, if vehicles were in any way involved, the wreckers are scrapping among themselves and with the owners—whether those owners were injured or not—over who gets to haul which cars. Scavengers that they are, they not only pull away the cars but also rifle through the seats, trunk, and glove compartment and attach a small hose to transmit gas from the car's tank into the wrecker's. A wrecker, seeing that a car wasn't damaged enough to need his services, might urinate surreptitiously just under the front bumper; then he helpfully points out to the owner that his car should be towed rather than driven since his radiator is leaking.
Such anarchy couldn't last forever. Now a single ambulance service is on contract with the city and the wreckers...well, now the wreckers are only as crazy as wreckers need be. Things have toned down on the television screen, too. "We try not to show the faces of dead people any more," Logan says; and the famous early Sixties color close up of a man's chest blown away by a shotgun blast would never be shown today, praises be.
Most people in San Antonio still think Channel 12 shows the most violent news; but that misapprehension—now all three stations show about the same amount of violence—is an unconscious tribute to the strength of Jim Logan's conception of incorporating filmed violence in a local newscast. All through the Sixties and up until last year, Channel 12's 10 o'clock news dominated the ratings. Logan's formula was so successful it seemed at times that San Antonians didn't realize any other news existed.
But tastes change, even in a city encrusted with the past. Channel 12's news has dropped to third. Channel 4, which seems always to be in second place, is still in second place. Channel 5, less than a year after adopting a gabby "happy talk" format, took over first place in the middle of 1972. (The personalities of the newscasters are as important to the success of the happy talk format as a good quarterback is to the success of a football team. 5's anchor man, Gene Tuck, has recently taken a job on a San Francisco station so by now these ratings may have changed.)
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