by Lisa Napoli
The field where men labored to save Kathy’s life now served as his living television laboratory. Positioning his mobile truck for a perfect line of sight toward the mountaintop transmitter, he then begged a worker from the electric company to let him hitch up to a power line. No such thing as a portable television camera existed, so the men hoisted studio cameras that weighed hundreds of pounds onto tripods, then jury-rigged some gear in order to transmit pictures and sound simultaneously—no simple feat. By the time they were ready to go live, rival station KTTV, co-owned by the Times Mirror Company (owners of the Los Angeles Times) and CBS, pulled onto the scene.
Absent a news staff, Landsberg pressed veteran sports announcer Bill Welsh and an eager young staffer named Stan Chambers into service. But what was there to say? No one had ever broadcast live from the scene of a developing story. The rescue operation was slow and repetitive, and there wasn’t much to see above the ground. The two men asked their boss how to fill the time.
“Pretend it’s a sporting event and give them the play-by-play,” he advised. Landsberg helped by observing the crowd and feeding human interest bits to his newly anointed field reporters. They, in turn, sought out interviews with bystanders, conversations which provided more emotion than fact. But the emotion was precisely what made this compelling television.
Four miles east, in Temple City, a twenty-five-year-old man named Clyde Harp found himself captivated by the images flickering on his brand-new $450 RCA receiver. With alarm, Harp noticed that the workers were digging in a way that could cause the trapped girl harm. A father himself, he rushed out to his car, drove over to the scene, and jumped the fence to join the rescue team. Within moments, another of the crew was admonishing Harp to quit swearing—the viewing audience could hear his foul language.
Suddenly, a TV didn’t seem such a frivolous luxury; rather, it was a crucial lifeline to the community. People dragged mattresses into their living rooms so they could stay up all night for what they hoped would be the happy conclusion of the ordeal. Television stations usually ceased broadcasting by midnight or so, but given these circumstances, they couldn’t possibly. Curious onlookers gathering in front of appliance store windows begged shop owners to please stay open, or at least leave the set on, so they could watch till the story’s end. Even Kathy’s anguished parents sat in front of the television at a neighbor’s house before their terror overwhelmed their desire to peer in on the operation. Then, they retreated to the cocoon of safety in a police car to wait for word in silence.
During this aching interlude, they were hardly alone. Anxious citizens jammed the switchboards of the nation’s newspapers and radio stations—some back-seat driving the rescue crews, others, mostly, expressing plaintive concern. “I hope you don’t mind if I keep calling you through the night,” one man told the operator at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I’m the father of three little ones, you know, and this story about poor Kathy really hit me.” The Dallas News received a million calls; the Albuquerque Journal said it hadn’t had such reader interest since the first atom bomb had been exploded in the state four years earlier. Wire service reports trumpeted the girl’s plight around the world, elevating this private tragedy to international concern.
Not everyone found this media frenzy enthralling. A journalism professor from the University of California declared the marathon of coverage “in bad taste.” The state news agency of Czechoslovakia refused to run the story, deriding it as “purely sensational” and “without educational value.” “Czech Press Cold to Kathy’s Fate,” scolded the headline in the Baltimore Sun. Those communists had no heart.
The collective eyes and worries of the planet weren’t enough to save the poor little girl. Forty hours after she’d disappeared, and twenty-seven hours after live television coverage began, the aching wait yielded a terrible conclusion. At six p.m. on Palm Sunday night, the crew determined Kathy was dead, and likely had been for some time.
To convey this crushing discovery to the family, police turned to KTLA’s Welsh. They were certain that his was a voice they’d find comforting. Then, the Fiscus family doctor—the same man who’d delivered Kathy into the world a few years earlier—delivered the tragic news to a world of onlookers. The crowd gasped. Grown men wept. Stan Chambers signed off shortly after nine p.m., apologizing to viewers for his failure to have delivered a better outcome.
Stunned crowds were advised to disperse immediately, out of respect for the devastated family. Telegrams of condolence streamed into the Fiscus home from all over. Local florists ran out of stock. The family implored the public to please route the money spent on such well-intentioned expressions of grief to charitable causes or a fund to pay the volunteer workmen for their time. One of the crew presented his reward money to a home for girls, whose residents in turn purchased a television. They named it “Kathy.”
Landsberg explained to his wife that the saga of Kathy Fiscus was far more than a sad accident. It was television history. Never before had it been possible to watch an event unfold, live, without physically being present.
“Until that night, the television set was no more a threat to serenity than any other bit of furniture in the living room,” wrote one viewer. “Now you have utterly destroyed this safety forever.” That people who had no connection to the family or the area had become so consumed by the drama was a jolting indicator that a mass medium had been born.
Sales of televisions tripled in the immediate aftermath. No one wanted to miss out on whatever one might bring them next. Still, it was impossible to imagine that one day, that box would serve as an open spigot out of which news would pour, endlessly, twenty-four hours a day.
Not far from the well, another little girl died that same weekend after falling into a fishpond at her home. But no one talked about that. It hadn’t been broadcast.
CHAPTER TWO
The Lunatic Fringe
You couldn’t miss the eleven-hundred-foot red-and-white lattice steel tower as you steered into the bleakness of midtown Atlanta. It was nearly twice the height of the city’s tallest skyscraper, the First National Bank building, puny by comparison at just 566 feet. Soaring over the spaghetti junction of highways that tangled the city center, the tower had been erected in 1967 on the tallest permissible spot in the neighborhood, behind the tired old brick building it served on West Peachtree Street. The only loftier nearby perch was a few blocks west across the highway, a now-protected historical site at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Techwood Drive. There, long ago, General Sherman and his Union Army stationed cannons in the months-long battle of Atlanta, ultimately burning the city to the ground before marching in triumph to the sea.
Bill Tush didn’t know any of this local history as he passed by the imposing structure in 1974. Never could he have predicted the role he would play in the revolution that tower would spark. All this twenty-five-year-old radio announcer could see from the perilous curves of the highway convergence called the Downtown Connector was the mighty obelisk, a beacon of broadcasting. And all he wanted was to be a star.
Since acquiring his first record player as a nine-year-old in 1957, Tush1 had dreamed of riding the airwaves away from life in his native Pittsburgh. He’d devour episodes of The Little Rascals and bathe in the sonorous voice of game show host Bob Barker—the smoothest man on television, as far as he was concerned. The characters he followed on screen and radio came alive for him. He was so much more comfortable with them than with the people in his real life.
His father, a truck driver, later sold caskets; his mother considered her job in a factory that made plastic binders a grand improvement over her previous one as a short-order cook. Tush’s destiny in the Rust Belt working-class seemed sealed.
Still, his parents indulged his aspirations, patiently listening to their son as he read the day’s paper out loud, practicing his announcer voice. Each evening, he’d retreat to the privacy of the attic to sign on to his very own low-powered radio station, WJTC—audible to a grand audience o
f one square block—introducing records with cool enthusiasm, as if the artists themselves were about to jam the number right there in front of him. Down in the basement, he rigged a makeshift TV station out of cardboard. Lucky neighborhood kids were invited over to “broadcast” from the studio.
At bedtime, he’d tuck his transistor radio next to his ear and fall asleep to the distant signal of WABC in New York, reflecting over the nighttime airwaves. His spine shivered at the scene in the film Midnight Cowboy, where a bus soars over the George Washington Bridge carrying Joe Buck, clutching a radio himself, into the majestic city. Fade down the soundtrack as the star deejay with the silky drawl, Ron Lundy, chimes in with the station ID, “This is WABC New York.”
That, Tush thought, that could be me.
His school friends laughed at his invented fantasy, especially when he’d gaze longingly in the window of his favorite local station, KQV. “Hey, deejay,” they’d tease, their voices laced with sarcasm, as if appearing on the radio was an outrageously unattainable ambition, like winning an Oscar or flying to the moon. People in Lawrenceville, his predominantly Polish neighborhood, didn’t venture into fancy-pants creative professions. They graduated from vocational high schools and reported for work at the steel mill.
But Billy Tush was resolute. As a high school junior, he landed a job as a jack-of-all-trades utility player—announcer/newsman/deejay/engineer—at a dinky low-power station in nearby Latrobe. The man he replaced had been deployed to Vietnam. Tush reveled in his laundry list of responsibilities; he admitted years later to an interviewer that he didn’t know what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. He was on the radio. So dazzled was he by the work that he declared he was finished with his formal education. His mother put the kibosh on that. College might not be in his future, but that didn’t mean he could ditch high school.
Her interference proved wise. Though Tush fared well as host of the daily polka show, he got axed for wreaking havoc on the local agricultural community by miscuing the taped farm report one time too many. This experience hammered home the immense power of broadcasting. People did tune in to even the smallest stations, and they responded to what they heard. There was, it turned out, more to this medium than the thrill of broadcasting your own voice. There was power attached to this job, and responsibility.
After he graduated, Tush landed a coveted job at WEDO, but his plans were derailed that very afternoon, when he returned home and discovered a draft notice on the mail table in the hallway. His affinity for communications saved him from the front lines. Instead, he was dispatched to learn Morse code from the safety of an office. Once his mandated military service was complete, Tush resumed course and marched right back to the station to claim his slot. Adding an additional gig over at KQV, he chose the plain-vanilla on-air name “Bill Williams” to appease his employers, each of whom wanted to claim him as their own.
When the union representing talent called a strike in the dead of winter, Tush joined the picket line. Marching in the freezing cold inspired his dream of a balmier climate. A woman he’d been dating declared that Atlanta was “happening,” so he ditched the protest, hopped into his ’72 Fiat Spider convertible with his roommate, and headed south across the Mason-Dixon line.
As they pulled into town, the first thing that caught his eye wasn’t the city skyline but that soaring television tower. The first thing to catch his ear was the oldies music, his favorite, playing on the car radio. Just as the announcer read out the station call letters, Tush’s gaze veered across the highway. As if by magic, there were those letters, emblazoned on the side of a building: W-G-S-T. Emboldened by the coincidence, Tush drove in that direction, marched in the front door, demo tape in hand, and declared to the front-desk attendant, “I want a job.”
Luck was on his side. A deejay spot had just opened up on the afternoon shift. Dazzled by how the stars were aligning, he got back in the car and pointed north, collected his belongings from the family row house on Willow Street, and said goodbye to Pittsburgh. In the rearview mirror, he spotted tears in his father’s eyes.
* * *
One sleepy Atlanta Sunday about a month after his arrival, a co-worker invited the newcomer deejay, with his sly sense of humor and mop of straight hair, for dinner. As she prepared the meal, an old black-and-white movie crackled on the television. The fuzzy picture didn’t deter Tush. He loved old movies as much as he loved oldie music. Each time a commercial break interrupted the scratchy film, he thought to himself that this station was so low-rent, even he, with zero television experience, might be able to land work there. Channel 17, WTCG, it was called, said his hostess—that station attached to the soaring tower. Tush’s larger fantasies fluttered. Didn’t everybody on radio long to graduate to TV? Having a recognizable voice didn’t stroke the ego nearly as much as the fame attached to a recognizable face.
His awareness of the location emboldened him. The next day, armed with his résumé and reel-to-reel demo tape, Tush stopped off at the old brick building straddled by the tower on West Peachtree. Up close, the soaring labyrinth of steel seemed even more foreboding. And yet, it was anything but majestic. A tired, sorry pall was cast over the property, which was in as awful shape as the on-air product. Old tires were layered atop the building, giving it the look of an auto junkyard. A decaying carton that once held videotape propped open the back door from the parking lot. A sign warned visitors, “NO BARE FEET ALLOWED.” A funeral home behind the property, and a cluster of mature oak trees up front, added an eerie element of foreboding.
Tush waltzed into the station. He had nothing to lose.
“I’d like to apply for a job as an announcer,” he said.
“I’m temporary,” answered the receptionist lazily. “I don’t know who you need to see.”
After some goading, she picked up the phone and made a call, and soon a guy emerged to escort Tush back through a crowded warren of hallways to another man, who squired him over to the production manager, R. T. Williams, the almighty Oz of channel 17.
In the corner of Williams’s tiny office sat evidence of his own ambition—a director’s chair, its back adorned with the words “Brilliance Is a Heavy Burden.” Tush shifted about as he waited for this person who held his fate to listen to his reel. His timing, once again, turned out to be fortuitous. The staff announcer had just walked out the door, and Williams needed someone to record station IDs and announcements. Come in for an hour once a week, he said. We’ll pay you fifty bucks.
Tush couldn’t believe his good fortune. First the radio gig, now a foot in the door in the vaunted medium of television. He started to believe some unseen power had guided him to Atlanta—he didn’t usually buy all that mystical hippie stuff, but how else could you explain landing two jobs so effortlessly in a place where he knew no one? It all felt destined, surreal.
And that was even before the young man from Pittsburgh had officially come to know the scrappy, unpolished, unprofessional world of WTCG; before the space-age innovation that would elevate it, and him, into a national sensation while, in the process, disrupting the entire business of television.
* * *
The flea-riddled bunker that housed the television playground Tush found himself invited into had served an earlier bit of Atlanta television history. Built in 1949 at the dawn of commercial television, it had first been home to Atlanta’s second-ever station, WAGA, an affiliate of the CBS network.
By 1966, the neighborhood around it deteriorated into a sketchy, southern-style Haight-Ashbury known as the “Tight Squeeze,” and WAGA abandoned the building for larger, fancier quarters north of the city. The old location didn’t deter local coal impresario Jack M. Rice Jr., who found 1018 West Peachtree Street ready-made for his newly licensed plaything, a TV station he anointed with his initials, W-J-R-J. On channel 17, the independent station inhabited a virtual address on what wags called “the lunatic fringe.”
All television was not created equal. By the sixties, the plum broadcast real estate, stat
ions numbered two to thirteen on the powerful VHF, or “very high frequency,” of the airwaves, had been doled out. Dials on most older televisions—that is, most televisions in operation—stopped at the number thirteen. Stations issued licenses later rested on the UHF (ultra high-frequency) band and had been assigned higher numbers—closer to God, quipped FCC commissioner Robert E. Lee, a major proponent of the technology. On newer sets, those high numbers were segregated to a separate dial that had to be precisely tuned in order to catch the signal. Depending on where you lived, even a loop antenna positioned just so on top of the set might not help reception.
So financially risky and “predestined to failure” a venture was UHF that another insider called it a “plot to bankrupt Jewish dentists,” for it seemed well-to-do non-broadcasters were the only fools willing and able to plunge into that slice of the airwaves.
Besides their more powerful signals and desirable locations, those VHF stations possessed another advantage. Most had aligned as affiliates with one of the three mighty networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC, which had evolved from their stranglehold over radio to dominate the newer medium of television. Network affiliation equaled access to star-studded programs with higher production values than stations could produce on their own—including a nightly national newscast to complement the local headlines. It also meant adhering to the network’s schedule—a worthy trade-off, for the audiences these shows commanded translated into bountiful ad sales for all.
Nonplussed, Rice was primed for his independent corner of the exotic business of entertainment. To give his weaker television signal a boost, he erected that mighty eleven-hundred-foot tower out back, one of the tallest in the nation, a phallic reinforcement of his might. At four p.m. on September 1, 1967, WJRJ debuted. A photo in the next day’s paper captured the moment—Rice and his executive team grinning like Cheshire cats at the dedication ceremonies, flanked by their honored celebrity guest, Lisa Baker, the latest Playboy Playmate of the Year. The film chosen for the honors of the station’s debut? A 1964 Joan Crawford picture, Della. The programming day would run from four in the afternoon till around midnight or so, at which point channel 17—and the rest of television—signed off till dawn.
