There was no mistaking the building was a television station. A 200 foot tower stood next to the brick facade, the station identity reinforced by an eight foot high sign, screaming red neon letters, raised on steel pedestals spelling out –
Letters glowing carmine in the night air; visible as bas-relief in daylight.
It was inside that I first came to discover alcoholism. For a young television reporter still to experience political chicanery, corruption, executive duplicity, criminal intent, and the selfishness and depravity of mankind, inside and outside the world of journalism, it should come as no surprise I did not recognise it when I saw it.
Carlton Cremeens was the news director of the television station and also its anchorman and my mentor. A soft-spoken Southern gentleman, fiercely proud of his Irish roots, Carlton presided over a six-man news department, and I do mean ‘man’ – this was long before women were allowed. He had three male reporters, signing me up on the strength of my three months’ experience in Monroe.
One man, Tex Carpenter, handled weather on oversized paper maps he later signed and gave away to school children, apparently hoping to create a new sub-species fixated on highs and lows of the weather variety.
And then there was the sports director, Bob Scearce. It was a euphemistic title because Bob was the sports department, anchorman, editor, reporter and photographer.
Bob had the voice of a concert hall baritone, rich in timbre, commanding attention in its testosterone-soaked maleness. Such a voice meant that, in addition to being sports director, Bob was also the evening booth announcer for the station, originating such famous phrases as: “This is WAFB-TV, Channel Nine“; “Sale ends this Saturday...”; “At all A&P grocers now…“, and “This concludes our broadcast day“, for there was a time when television shut down for the night.
All these words were launched live into the great ether every evening, and probably still are bombinating around the universe to this day.
For all the Chippendale images Bob conjured up in viewers’ minds with his announcer’s voice, most knew the reality of the man who called himself ‘The Old Beachcomber’.
Bob was a legend in his Deep South city, where big, bruising, Bubba collegiate football was king. Legend because Bob was a fanatical outdoorsman, specialising in fishing. A real hands-on, tell ’em where they’re biting, and show ’em how to catch ’em, kind of guy. His only morigeration was to what he liked. In fact, the day the old American Football league merged with the National Football league, the biggest sports story of the year, Bob’s lead story was a vintage fishing film illustrating how the bream or sac au lait were biting.
He looked the part too. Cheeks scarred by too much sunshine, creating a cratered effect, like a spent minefield, set off by a bulbous, scarlet nose that filled screens at home in sensational black and white. His shock of tousled thinning white hair only served to brighten his facial features in person, as well as on the television, gray scale.
Bob was not prone to fancy dress, preferring instead to thread a knit or bolo tie through the collar of his bright plaid outdoors shirts and cover it all with a khaki sports coat. His audience wouldn’t have him any other way.
News was a nocturnal business in those days. Bob worked each night at his manual Remington with his pork pie hat perched on his head, peering over spectacles needed to enhance his late forties fading vision. It was this familiar pose that I came to know Bob and his eccentric character.
Night after night, five nights a week (local television news in the hundred-plus markets was still a Monday to Friday profession back then), with the police radio crackling away in the background, Bob would rip the wire copies stories he needed from the clattering Associated Press wire machine in the corner, impaling the real news stories on the nails protruding from the board screwed to the custard cream coloured walls. He would regularly inform me when the always-hungry machine would need a new diet of continuous paper fed to it. He considered that prompt a part of my journalistic training, which I accepted.
There was a time when Bob would disappear across the hallway to the film editing room, chop up and glue his footage himself, and re-appear to massage his typewriter again. About half an hour before airtime Bob would announce he was going to check the radio in his car for late sports’ scores, then return about ten minutes later, tidy his copy, string a non-fashionable tie around his checkerboard shirt and run a comb through what was left of his hair, settling it neatly on its vermilion base. In those days only the pompous bothered with makeup. Had he been vain, Bob would have required copious amount of pancake to hide the trademark faults on his face.
The night of my encounter with alcoholism came about because the network needed extra time from its affiliates for some reason, an overstuffed movie of the week probably. We were told the news would be late by forty-five minutes or so. Everyone got the message except Bob.
Perhaps it was because he should have known; as the evening booth announcer he kept the station log, the Bible of the broadcast day. This one bit of information led to a night filled with the dread of all live broadcasters – losing control.
On schedule, Bob checked the scores on his car radio and returned to the newsroom to complete his assorted rituals when, one of us, recognising the routine, told him to relax – we were going on late. On coaxing the focussed image of that night back into view, I can remember Bob’s eyes narrowing in anger, his face reddening even more than its usual sun-baked hue.
Then came the expletives. About why he wasn’t “@$!#…” told. About how this “#!$@…” put him off. His meagre copy, flung to the air to emphasize his anger, fluttered to the floor, underlining his gesture of frustration. He stormed out of the newsroom and disappeared, again.
When it neared time for his sports’ performance, Bob returned to the newsroom, his professional announcer voice slurring his expletives now and weaving a course, despite the fact there was no furniture in the centre of the room. His displeasure at not being informed of the delay continued to escalate in volume to the point where Carlton put an arm on his shoulder and herded him out of the room for a hallway conference. Afterward, Carlton informed us Bob was going home to settle down. Carlton, personally, would deliver the sports that night.
I did not need an explanation of what was wrong with Bob. He was drunk. In fact, it was explained to the rookie; Bob was a drunk. An alcoholic who had meticulously detailed his schedule to consume the exact amount of booze it would take to put him in his best form for his appearance on camera. When that formula was disrupted, it put Bob over the edge of that precarious balance between peak performance and being polluted; between sober-faced citizen and sloppy drunk.
Everyone knew except me. They knew what Bob’s coded announcements of checking scores on his car radio really meant. What for me was eccentric, for the rest of the newsroom was routine. What for me was naiveté, for them was real life. I sat in stunned stupidity watching, what I later realised, was my real-life learning curve rising.
Bob returned the next night, contrite and moribund, and resumed his regular schedule. The incident was not mentioned again.
I moved on to other television stations, other newsrooms, wiser in the unspoken ways of the world. Several years on, I remember hearing that Bob had been checked into a private hospital in the bigger city where I worked, in an effort to dry out his liquid demons, courtesy of the television station where I had worked. Such were the times that corporate paternalism was still in force, executives believing then that they had a responsibility to care for their employees in any way necessary.
Some twenty years later, I had occasion to visit my former mentor Carlton, still news director at the old station, although he had long since given up his anchorman chair. The station had been acquired by a media giant and expanded into the fully bloomed broadcast age with larger and grander facilities than the former, single, custard cream coloured room. His guided tour of the new facilities revealed no trace of the former cubicle which was the genesis of this current local broadcast giant.
In the course of conversation, I enquired about The Old Beachcomber. Bob Carlton replied that he was still there and drew me by the elbow to a desk in the corner where the detritus of Bob’s life was on display. Carlton said that Bob had dried out, retired years ago, before the media giant moved in and, by prior executive negotiation, was allowed to come in a couple of days a week and ‘work’.
Bob wasn’t in that day, but as I looked around his modern desk, still with a manual typewriter in a room filled with computer screens, I noticed a strange anomaly: Bob’s desk calendar and desk pad were both dated 1967.
Carlton smiled his knowing smile, seeing I would appreciate the irony. He explained: that was a very good year for Bob.