An excerpt from
"Adventures in a Box of Lights & Wires"  A book-in-progress by Dan Gingold           
                        

         "This instrument can teach. It can illuminate, yes and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box."
                                   Edward R. Murrow


May, 1951. The phone rang about 2 in the afternoon. It was Elbert Walker, my teacher and mentor and a busy staff director at KTSL-TV in Los Angeles.

Much like KTLA, KTSL had begun years earlier as an experimental television station, W6XAO. It was owned by prominent L.A. Cadillac dealer Don Lee and its modest facilities were housed in Lee's car dealership at 7th and Bixel downtown. The studio operation would eventually be moved to its transmitter site atop Mt. Lee, just above the Hollywood land sign and its call letters designated KTSL, the initials of Don Lee's son, Tommy.

By the end of the 1940s, as television set ownership expanded, demands for more and better programming forced the station to once again move its operation. The new home was a large, modern radio studio building at 1313 N. Vine, headquarters of the Mutual Don Lee radio network, another property of the Lee family. Its most imposing architectural feature was the pair of huge bay windows at the front of the building facing Vine St., each of which displayed the latest model Cadillac. Inside, on the ground floor, were four large audience studios and several smaller stages, plus the Mutual Radio broadcast booths and the network's impressively showy glass-enclosed Master Control in the main lobby. (As radio studios, the larger audience theatres had wooden floors and when television cameras and their heavy pedestals were introduced to them, every dolly or truck shot produced creaks and groans that would drive the audio engineers up the wall. It wasn't long before management was forced to invest in new floors of heavy-duty linoleum.)

The upper floors housed the growing numbers of administrative, production, technical and sales personnel required to run the TV operation. A penthouse apartment continued to be maintained in the name of Tommy Lee even after his suicide some years earlier. KTSL utilized 2 of the audience studios and 3 smaller ones on the north half of the building while the south side was leased to yet another commercial station in the burgeoning L.A. television market. Originally designated KFI-TV, it would come to be called KHJ-TV, channel 9, sister to KHJ radio, the local voice of the Mutual network. Channel 2, KTSL, was soon purchased by CBS and its call letters changed to KNXT.

And so it was, in the Spring of 1951, that I arrived at 1313 Vine to
begin my career in this wonderful, dizzying cauldron at Fountain & Vine. I had become Elbert Walker's "gofer," a part-time volunteer job while I was still attending the Don Martin School of Radio & Television. (I had recently returned to L.A. after a stint as a radio announcer and deejay at KORE in Eugene, Oregon, and was anxious to get into TV.) I worked closely with Elbert and came to know him quite well. I was used to his frequent phone calls, usually coming at mid-morning. He liked to sleep in, often after partying or a hot date. Always apologetic, he would sheepishly ask me to bring him coffee and donuts from the Hollywood Ranch Market, an open-air, round-the-clock hangout for many radio, TV and movie people. It was situated kitty-corner from the Don Lee building, easily accessible at any hour of the day or night. One of the things I liked about the coffee-and-donut ritual was the sense of "belonging" I felt with the Ranch Market "show business" crowd, plus it gave me valuable quiet time with Elbert to talk about shows, production and the creative aspects of directing. In time, he would allow me to do advance prep for him at the station while he re-charged enough to handle his directing assignments for the day.         

This particular day in May, however, would be different and, for me, a baptism under fire. Elbert was suffering from an especially wicked hangover and was in no mood for the demands of live television. "Why don't you do the show for me tonight?", he suggested. By "the show" he meant the live, evening news broadcast "World News Tonight," a 15-minute broadcast at 7:30 pm. By "do the show," he meant DIRECT it. I had sat beside him in the booth countless times and was always blown away by the adrenalin rush I got watching him "calling the shots." It was not unlike a symphony conductor but enhanced with verbal commands, sometimes shouted under the stresses of live production, to the small army of technicians and others in the control room and on the stage. Elbert was a master showman and though he inspired me to be a director ONE day, I wasn't all that sure it should be THIS day. At this stage of my embryonic career, I was hardly a larvae, far from emergence as a butterfly. It seemed not only beyond my capabilities, it scared the shit out of me! May Day, indeed!