It was during my time in New Orleans that I developed my taste for network news and the additional money they paid for contributors of interesting local stories. And since I worked at the ABC affiliate, WVUE-TV, they were the likely pay check.
Money was the catalysis at first, but there was also an ego involved.
I started first supplying closed circuit feeds to the other ABC affiliates across the country. It was called ABCDEF (American Broadcasting Company Daily Electronic Feed – clever).
Then all kinds of shit happened – explosions, floods, oil rig and high-rise fires, desegregation, plane crashes, riots, extreme weather and a Southern version of the Woodstock rock festival. I was in the middle of it all.
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I survived the first incarnation of Peter Jennings then Frank Reynolds, Howard K Smith and Harry Reasoner.
It began with establishing myself as a dependable reporter – a few extreme weather stories and oil rig disasters here and there and soon the New York assignment desk came to rely on me as a freelance asset.
That’s the way the Columbia, Louisiana story came about.†
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I got a call from the New York assignment desk one day asking if I knew about the schools in the home parish (county) of Louisiana Gov John McKeithen being segregated and outlining the story they would like. I checked with my boss, news director/anchorman/New Orleans legend Alec Gifford, about my availability, which was all right by him because he would get the story for his newscast.
credit: 64 Parishes
We didn’t carry the ABC Evening News for some reason.
I packed an overnight case, headed to New Orleans International airport bound for Monroe, Louisiana to meet an ABC news crew from Atlanta – producer, cameraman, soundman, and lighting man. On the flight I read some background to the story, talked to no one, and once there, checked into the Howard Johnson hotel (I was coming up the world from the Penn Hotel in my first soiree in Monroe) and met the crew in the bar. This must have about 11 o’clock at night where the producer told me he had a rented car and be ready to go at 4am. Then they proceeded to drink for the next hour with me checking my watch every 15 minutes for the lights out signal.
It took about an hour to drive to Columbia on Highway 165 and that time was enough to recover from lack of sleep. We pulled up outside the all-white high school and were met by the sheriff standing outside his cruiser, thumbs in belt, who said, to the best of my memory: Hey, I heard you was coming. How I can help?
Well, you could have knocked me over with surprise at the intelligence the sheriff had of our movements. But I kept my jaw positioned in normal mode and I told the crew to let me handle this. I morphed my voice into a northern Louisiana southern drawl to explain to the sheriff where I was from and what we doing there.
I left out the bit about ABC Network news so it appeared we weren’t ‘outside agitators’ there to cause trouble. Network was a buzzword for trouble. Just in case you think I was being overly cautious, you probably haven’t seen Mississippi Burning – things were a certain way back then. You played by the rules, even if deception was your game. I was locked and loaded with facts, but not so much that I wouldn’t change ammunition if the facts changed.
The sheriff seemed to believe me and gave me a nod, adding that if he could help, he would.
So we gathered the evidence. We filmed a busload of black students driving by the white high school. Interviewed the school’s superintendent, who said it’s a freedom of choice system because the system doesn’t get federal funds and so doesn’t have to desegregate. Interviewed the black high school principal who says he’s glad about the present system. The school board said integration will ruin schools.
We continued with television news stuff, like making sure we had enough film of scenes we could use, doing a stand up (piece to camera) and, for me, learning first-hand, learning how to work with a network crew. Take the stand up: the producer offered scribbled notes for me to use. I wrote my own instead since I was more comfortable saying my own words, then I bent down to pick a microphone. Big mistake! The sound engineer grabbed my hand, and increasingly putting pressure, whispered from between his teeth: “Don’t ever touch the mic! I’ll hand it to you. When you’re done, I’ll take it from you.”
And I thought we were all getting on famously.
With me now understanding the network news work rules, we wound up story-gathering, rented a private plane so that the producer and I could go to New Orleans where we proceeded to put the story together – the film processed, the rest of the story narrated, film shipped to New York.
(The rest of the crew took the rental car and drove back to Monroe. I later found out one of the perks of being in a network news crew was that they had to fly first class on airlines. If they couldn’t get first class, then they didn’t have to go, or they could go tourist, but they would get the difference in fares in their pocket. Network news correspondents, the stars in front of the camera, had to fly tourist class, such was strength of the two unions, AFTRA and IATSE)
About week after the story aired, I got a letter from the sheriff, handwritten (he had saved my business card) thanking me for a good, balanced story.
I could have cried.
†[Vanderbilt University Television News Archive (Columbia, LA) Columbia practices separate but equal schooling; school system receives no federal money. [Schools Superintendent Edward RICHARDSON – says freedom of choice plan in operation; don’t have troubles other areas have.] [All black Mississippi principal W. P. MOORE, Senior – doesn’t know why haven’t desegregated before, glad to be last.] School Board predicts peaceful desegregation; thinks it will ruin education. REPORTER: Louis de la Foret. Broadcast Type: Evening News Segment Type: News Content. Program Time: 05:38:30 pm – 05:41:10 pm. Duration: 02:40. Record Number: 15170. Link to this page http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl?ID=15170]