August 24, 1978 was a day that changed that teenager’s life. It was a morning filled with watching storyteller Hatteberg shoot a story on a fish farmer near Cheney. Then, as happens in television news, the afternoon agenda changed dramatically with a report of an explosion and leak at a Titan II missile silo near Rock, KS and Hatteberg and the teen headed south in Mobile Unit 4 to cover the story.
The next three days were a whirlwind of driving the blue Chevy Nova and 3/4" video tape back and forth from a grassy corner off Highway 15 to the hill on S. Rock Road where Truck 100 could get a microwave signal back to the Holiday Inn rooftop receive site in Wichita.
When the teen’s Skyline High School class ring and right hand holding a microphone made it on ABC’s World News Tonight with Frank Reynolds, Max Robinson and Peter Jennings… he was hooked! It was a life of television news for him!!
That teenager was me.
Thirty years later, I'm the Director of New Technologies for ABC Television in New York. I can't believe it's been 30 years, but it has. It's been a hell of a career. I'm looking forward to more.
Me on the sidelines of a KU football game circa 1980. KAKE would fly the camera up to me on weekends in the helicopter so I could shoot highlights and then ship the tape and camera back to them via the station's helicopter. Photo by David Evans for his Photo II photo story project.
