One of the best business moves I ever made was to fake my way into television. The other was investing in the stock market but that’s another story and just as unimaginable a success for an oddball high school dropout like me. A Rolling Stones, ZZTop concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas hooked me on video and a few years later tv news would be my way in. Looked simple enough. Find the on/off switch and point the right end of the camera towards the action, hit record, have a blast, get paid. What, is that it?? Surely there was more to it than just those things and there were but a lot of the rest of it had me wondering if it was even remotely possible that this is all there is to doing this.
When I figured I had enough in savings to buy one of those big cameras I started calling around tv stations to get a feel for my chances of making any money before writing a check for every penny I had. At first no one would even talk to me. To get rid of my persistent calling and leaving messages for whoever the grand poo-bah was (the poo-bah thing was for you Mike at NBC5 to keep you anonymous for having laughed at me for even thinking I could just walk in and do this, oops…) that did the hiring, I finally got 5 minutes with the “anonymous” NBC5 guy who was anything but encouraging but just telling it like it was.
Other than to ask what my experience was (I had zero) and what markets I had worked in (there are markets?), the goal was clearly to let me know, this ain’t how it’s done. I was a 10th grade dropout and was working in a warehouse at the time driving a forklift and apparently there just aren’t many openings for uneducated forklift drivers in the television business. Who knew.. The message I was given to remember was this, “son, if it were that easy to just walk in here and do this because you want to, there would be a line outside our door around the block.” Exact words and thanks NBC5, you’ll never know (well you do now) how much of a fire that lit under my ass to find a way.
The naysayers were swarming out of the woodwork and for a few moments I will admit, they almost had me convinced this wasn’t doable especially for me. Long story short, 25-30 years later I made enough, invested enough, and retired early while I’m certain some of them, are still working in the most tarnished and disrespected profession that has ever fallen from heights of the Cronkite era when truth, facts, respect and dignity were the counterpoint in every newsroom.
The camera in this photo was my first, a $36 thousand dollar Sony BVW 300A. Was 4:3, shot tape, and standard definition before high definition. That $36 grand was every penny I had to my name and I risked it all against sincere attempts to dissuade me from more educated and experienced professionals who knew more than I thought I ever would. That camera before it’s unceremonious retirement many years ago made me approximately 2 million dollars over the years of its life and I still have it as a souvenir along with my fake media credential I printed off the internet to get into scenes and learn how everything was done. Several cameras, network shoots and shows, corporate gigs and travels around the world several times later, here is this photo I found taken by who the hell knows at a time when broadcast media was a respected and useful profession. I had bucked all the odds and because I was too unsophisticated to know I wasn’t qualified, I just went ahead and did it anyway.
I still have that hat around here somewhere. Never let your lack of education interfere with your success and NO actually means, oops, I need to take another route.
All this nonsense enabled me to discover that I had a lifelong dream I didn’t know I had. To finally make my mom proud. And she was. Things, money, travel, nothing compares to knowing she was proud of me before God took her hand and led her away to be with him. What an incredibly strange and weirdly rewarding life this has been.
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