[BC] unreliable old equipment query

[Alan Kline]

I was an intern at WMT-TV Cedar Rapids on the day President Reagan was 
shot. Naturally, that was the exact time we lost our CBS line from AT&T 
in Chicago. The projectionist threw up the first reel of film he could 
put his hands on (an old episode of "Bewitched") and most of it aired 
before the newsroom could find someone to sit in front of a camera and 
read AP copy. By then, telco got it figured out...

On one other occasion, telco was supposed to switch our circuit from CBS 
to a special Jerry Lewis Telethon network at 8PM on Sunday of Labor Day 
weekend. They made the switch at about 8:30. We weren't off air, but the 
talent in the studio had to vamp for nearly 30 minutes, during which 
time the CE, GM, PD and the mayor of Cedar Rapids were all standing over 
the MC engineer's shoulder...

Years earlier, I was growing up in northern Illinois one Saturday 
morning, watching the network cartoons from the local CBS affiliate. At 
10:00 that morning, the video of a cartoon started, but the audio was 
the CBS Radio hourly newscast. Just then, we had to go somewhere, and my 
dad had a CBS affiliate on the car radio. Might have been WBBM. The 
audio was from the cartoon. Long Lines strikes again!

ak

On 12/27/2011 10:05 PM, Milton Holladay wrote:
> But the worst was the infamous program loss and the slide which said
> CABLE TROUBLE.  Sometimes there would still be audio but no picture.
> These cable trouble incidents would usually last for quite some time,
> often the better part of an hour, while the techs at AT&T or whatever
> their carrier was, got network video restored.   Much rarer were the
> times when only the audio failed.