Tales from the attic: Radio news in the 1950s

Sam Smith - My initial task as a brand new radio newsman in DC  -- writing nine newscasts a day -- interned me in a small corner room with just enough space for one window, four news tickers, two typewriters, several phones, reams of yellow copy paper, even more rolls of yellow ticker paper and a maximum of four human beings. It was a summer job following my sophomore year at Harvard.

Each newscast was expected to be different, whether the news had changed or not. Three of the newscasts occurred during evening drive time and were 30 minutes apart. This coincided with the most likely period for accidents and thunderstorms. Since WWDC paid $1 to $5 for every news tip it aired, I would be regularly inundated with accounts of fallen limbs and fender benders as I struggled to write three newscasts in an hour and a half in the late afternoon. Often the copy ended up like this:

Reports of damage done by this afternoon's thunderstorm are pouring into the WWDC newsroom. At least six houses are on fire, nine accidents have occurred and numerous trees and hot wires have fallen across roads. Police and electric company officials say their phones have been jammed. . .

That newscast probably cost $13, representing the number of incidents I managed to squeeze into one double-spaced page -- all typed in caps with the errors blacked out by a soft copy pencil.

The news tip system worked pretty well, although I sometimes suspected that the suburban volunteer rescue squad dispatchers were calling us before they sent out their equipment, since once the dispatch had been aired, anyone with a scanner could call in the item. And on at least one occasion an employee at WTOP earned a dollar for phoning in a news tip that he had heard on WMAL.

One of our regular callers was Dan. Matching Robert Frost's paradigm for the good life, Dan's vocation and avocation had become one. He sat in his apartment surrounded by police and fire scanners waiting for tragedy to strike somewhere in the metropolitan region. He would then call and hoarsely whisper the news: "This is Dan, Sam. I've got a body for you." And another buck went to Dan.

The reports of fallen limbs and power outages we accepted on faith. More serious matters would be checked out by phone, using a criss-cross directory that was sorted by street address rather than by name. You could often scurry up a good taped interview this way. One such eyewitness began coughing profusely as I questioned him about a fire in his apartment building, finally urgently suggesting that the smoke was getting too thick to continue the questioning.

Writing constantly soon became tiresome and I discovered various ways to amuse myself. One was to pick a word for the day and then see in how many newscasts I could use it. It had to be something like evince or piqued because my goal, unlike that of station management, was to raise the general tenor of the WWDC sound. This quixotic effort came to a halt when a blue paper memo from news director Bill Robinson made it clear that he had noticed and didn't think much of my unsanctioned vocabulary lessons.

And then there were the days when no one was around. Like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And you sat in that little room listening to the click and clack and waiting for the news wire to produce some news, but more likely a huge Santa Claus or turkey drawn completely with letters by the equally bored guy at the other end of the machine.  

After the summer of 1957, I returned to Harvard even more determined to go into radio. After all, WWDC had offered me a job when I graduated two years from then. I was elected WHRB's station manager but two weeks later received an official letter stating that "the Administrative Board voted to place you on probation instead of severing your connection with the University." It had been my second unsatisfactory term in part as a result of my infatuation with radio; among the penalties would be the surrender of my new post. Nonetheless, and in the tradition of the station, I continued on the air under a pseudonym and comforted myself with the thought that WWDC had asked me to come back. I toughed it out and eventually graduated without honors but with a job.

Besides, I was making more at WWDC than a Washington Post friend. I was covering everything from murders to White House and my salary was even higher than union scale as set by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

At its peak, Deadline Washington provided two dozen independent radio stations with Washington news. That in itself was a novelty, but even more appealing to these stations was our ability to appear to be their personal correspondents. This was achieved by recording custom tag lines e.g. "This is Sam Smith, WPIG News in Washington, and now back to the studio." Using two Ampex recorders, each story would be fed to stations with its appropriate tag line dubbed on the end.

Before long, I knew Washington and its environs like a cab driver and could quickly compute such arcane calculations as the shortest route from the White House to a six alarm fire in Upper Marlboro. I also knew every press room in town.

My favorite was at the District Building, which one entered through swinging doors reminiscent of a frontier bar. Inside were three desks, a center table and a worn-out sofa. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa and the covering was greasy and black from years of resting heads. After Watergate, a sign was posted above the press room sofa. It read, "Carl Bernstein slept here."

The novelty of the station's news coverage was its collection of still rare battery operated tape recorders. These devices were about three inches thick, five inches wide and ten inches long. The microphone, a small rectangular piece of plastic, was permanently attached by a cord just short enough to complicate the task of securing the mike to a stand at a news conference while simultaneously resting the recorder itself on the ground.

The recorders were so new that the engineer's union had initially insisted it send a member out with all reporters using one. Fortunately for the future of news radio, this particular piece of featherbedding was scotched. The tape recorders, however, presented a number of other challenges -- including a deep sensitivity to temperature. More than once I returned from an outdoor winter taping -- a burial at Arlington cemetery or a fire -- only to find my recorded voice sounding like Porky Pig as the batteries returned to full power once back in the studio .

Whatever the machines' faults, there were fewer than a dozen stations and networks in Washington that had them, so even a neophyte reporter such as myself had easy access to the most senior politicians.

The mike stands to which we secured our recorders often belonged to the networks. It took a combination of diplomacy and deference for a young newsman to safely affix his toy machine to the phallic symbol of CBS News, but over time these men became accustomed to such intrusions.

The stories I covered for WWDC ran from Eisenhower news conferences, to an interview with Louis Armstrong, to the murder of the former head of a Illinois college who was found "stark naked, beaten and dying" in a room of the seedy Alton Hotel, murdered by a male carnival worker.

In the summer of 1957, I covered the Senate investigation of the Teamsters Union. Among those seated at the long panel table was young John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. His brother, Robert, served as a counsel for the committee. At one point, a prostitute witness made some off-color comment that brought guffaws from the audience; and Bobby's own giggles were amplified by his mike. The humorless chair, John McClellan, rapped his gavel and told Kennedy that "This is not a joking matter." It would be the only time I ever saw a Kennedy look chastened.

In February 1960, four black college students had sat down at a white-only Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states. In April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

By the end of June, I was covering the desegregation of lunch counters in Northern Virginia after sit-ins by groups led a Howard Divinity School student, Lawrence Harvey. Harvey then took his troops to Glen Echo.

Although I saved few recordings from that period -- tape was expensive and usually recycled -- I still have the raw sounds I made that day. On it a guard and Harvey confront each other:

Are you white or colored?

Am I white or colored?

That's correct. That's what I want to know. Can I ask your race?

My race. I belong to the human race.

All right. This park is segregated.

I don't understand what you mean.

It's strictly for white people

It's strictly for white persons?

Uh-hum. It has been for years. . .

You're telling me that because my skin is black I can not come into your park?

Not because your skin is black. I asked you what your race was.

I would like to know why I can not come into your park.

Because the park is segregated. It is private property.

Just what class of people do you allow to come in here.

White people

So you're saying you exclude the American Negro.

That's right.

Who is a citizen of the United States.

That's right.

I see.

As a biracial group marched outside with picket signs, Harvey led a group inside to sit-in at the restaurant and mount the carousel horses. The case ended up in court and less than a year later, the park opened for all.

At the time, I saw these stories as separate events but it seems now that maybe it wasn't a bunch of stories I covered back then, but rather the end of one big story, a story that Americans such as I had been raised to believe, a story about perfectibility and how close we were to it and how easy it would be to go the rest of the way. At the end of the story was not what we had been told to expect. At the end of the story, it turned out, was Jimmy Hoffa and guards keeping people out of amusement parks and coffeehouses being shut down by cops who thought poets were dangerous. It turned out that the end of the story I was taught was that much of the story hadn't been true.

I couldn't have put it as directly then. I was only 23 and my mind was on other things -- such as getting into the Coast Guard before my draft board got me. But I know those months changed me even as they changed the country. I no longer thought of the Capitol as a cathedral, the exciting had turned a little tawdry, the right choice was less certain and the important no longer peremptorily apparent.

I had stopped noticing the shine of the marble. The floors of the House and Senate office buildings became harder, the hallways darkened, and the doors that lined them seemed to conceal more than they invited. Even on foggy and rainy evenings, the Capitol dome no longer floated in the sky but sat lumpy and leaden on top of the Hill, waiting for a new story to begin.