Behind the Scenes
Tom Meyers
If you judge people by numbers, consider during the 10 years in the KCNC-TV Western Bureau I shot 2,148 news stories, edited 519 field cassettes and drove 427,243 miles.
If you prefer to account by celebrities interviewed, admire instead the toddlers facing death at Children's Hospital who outshine the superstars I've met. If you long to be an American idol, go ahead, lampoon me with another "Put me on TV!" But if you are one of those curious sorts who sneak up and ask me, "How did you get into this business?" Then read on as I reflect back to a garage sale, a rainstorm and a Spanish poet.
When I was 13, old man Niersteimer died across the brick street we lived on in Bloomington, Illinois. His son held a garage sale where I gathered up used 35mm film equipment priced nicely within my newspaper boy budget. As I was about to leave, he asked if I'd be interested in 100 ft roles of Tri-X film stashed in a freezer since the Korean War. Doubting their quality, I offered him a quarter apiece and made off with all 8 canisters.
Late at night in the closet of the upstairs bedroom I shared with my grandmother that year, I book loaded countless rolls of film. Under an amber darkroom light I printed stacks of black & white photos, always careful not to spill the trays of chemicals as I shuffled to the bathroom in the dark. Here, to the sound of an old woman snoring, I learned to photograph day in and day out, to shoot and print and work a camera under every conceivable circumstance, to develop a photographer's eye.
It was the summer after high school when a gray drizzle rolled over Ivan Light's cornfield, ending for the day any hope painting his hay barn. For the lack of anything else to do, I packed up and drove over to Illinois State University where I'd heard there was a TV studio on campus. Being all about things photographic, I knocked on the locked studio doors in the pouring rain. A buzz cut engineer popped a door and invited me in. I discovered a short-staffed student crew about to air a black & white cable access news show. The instructor thought I was a communications major and asked if I could run a floor camera. I said sure. One student was cueing up video on a portable Sony reel-to-reel deck. Slips of paper were stuck in the reel of unedited tape. He fast forwarded to each story, stopping whenever the next bit of paper flew out. Thus cued up, he rolled the tape deck when directed and pictures appeared on TV. It all looked like fun to me. And it sure beat painting barns.
Luckily I landed a college internship at CH25. Laced with cigarette smoke, rattled by teletype machines the newsroom instilled Midwestern news values. The walls, desks even typewriters were covered in odd snapshots, newspaper clippings and favorite quotes of satire. I recall to this day a tiny poem by Tony Machado taped to a reporter's phone. Our news director strictly enforced no free gratis, not even a free bottle of Coke was accepted by the working press. Cameramen were expected to be unobtrusive and a conduit not a composer of news events.
I'd shot a wide range of film cameras by then including a laser for holography. But as I worked in a newsroom for the first time I realized pictures also came from typewriters. The combined impact of matching declarative sentences with raw video was spawning electronic journalism, the bard of the baby-boomers, and I was a part of it. Borrowing etiquette from newspapers, broadcast news required the new photojournalist to treat the public with respect, especially those who we recorded for our own use. Thirty three years later these ideals still apply.
Each day I look through my viewfinder with a personal philosophy best summed up by that poetic warning from long ago. It read:
The eye you see
Is not eye because you see it
It is an eye
Because it sees you