No one could fault you for waking up and thinking it was colder. Cold, even. It was time. You somehow knew it. Probably because meteorologists had been telling you this for several days.
So you put on a sweater and then a jacket and then you still remark on the brisk coldness of it all. Knowing, because you’ve been listening to meteorologists talk about the weather, that the real cold is coming tomorrow during the pre-dawn hours.
Because arctic blasts the day after a pitch-perfect, cloudless sky, 72-degree afternoon aren’t enough. No. You need to get into the 20s.
So I’ve been doing what everyone does in the cold: staring at the forecast for the next warm day. This afternoon the Saturday projections started at 75. It dipped to 69. And then it went back up to 72-partly cloud, where the forecast sits now. The signal is clear: Prepare for rain to fall from the ground into the sky.
And now for something completely different. My mother sent me a link to a decades-old newsreel. The lead story was an airplane crash, one that killed my grandfather and 71 other people. There were 22 survivors and five local hospitals were engaged. It remains the worst airplane disaster in Georgia’s history. I’ve written about all that before, but the first 60 seconds of this video are different. This is an accidental documentary on the Tennessee Valley in 1977. (WHNT took the air in 1963, founded by a former WAPI man, Charles Grisham. I also once worked at WAPI. It seems everyone in broadcasting did at one point.)
Anyway, the first 60 seconds of the newscast, the day after the big crash:
Dig that slate! The data says 97 percent of American homes had televisions by 1977, but only 77 percent were in color. Consumers had in 1972 started buying more color than black and white sets. This period is often called the initial “replacement period.” Older 1950s sets are first being discarded and upgraded with modern sets.
Missy Ming in New Hope! She’s going to talk to a survivor who crawled out of the wreckage. She sits on the Commission on Higher Education today. She still gets asked about the story.
Michael Lamothe on the existential beat. Why, indeed. Lamothe is now retired and doing a bit of freelance work. He’d been out of school just two years when he filed that report. His last job was at a Rochester, N.Y. station.
JACKIE KENNEDY IN FAYETTEVILLE WISHES SHE COULD HAVE BEEN THERE BECAUSE THIS STORY HAS NO TEASE AND BAD AUDIO. Someone from Huntsville is going to have to tell us about where Kennedy went. She has that common problem among simple Internet searches: a famous name.
Quick cuts: Fire! A body! The Iron Bowl!
Some things will never, ever change.
A trailer torn apart. A road grader. Really big race cars at Talladega (probably). An ambulance. Jimmy Carter! That guy! From California. Didn’t he used to act? And wasn’t he just the governor out there? Boy, aren’t you glad that’ll never happen again. And, yet, there’s something about him …
A kid swimming! A crop duster! The News Station graphic, supered over the coolest looking fire truck ever. “A complete report of this day throughout the Tennessee Valley.”
Did you catch that great old Arby’s sign in the background of the night-traffic shot? A perp is going to the pokey! Don’t look at the face. And in case you missed that one, here’s John Law cuffing and stuffing another. An accident report. Another person on a gurney. Random golf-track-basketball’s first flop! Don’t forget sports! Did we show you the Iron Bowl!?
What in the name of Uncle Walter is that cubist set?
A little much for 1970s rural Alabama, don’t you think? Oh, sure, they had the rockets, but that didn’t make their DMA cosmopolitan. And yet you’ve got the Action News team standing there just … standing, showing off those sharp blazers.
Their slogan back then was “Keep Your Eye On Us.” That was shot on 16 mm, as all of the WHNT broadcasts were until 1979 (“The News People”) when they went to 3/4. All of the old archives had been lost and forgotten. Someone had stored them away at the University of North Alabama, and now they are back in the station’s hands and some of them are making their way onto the Internet so we can say “Look at those clothes.”
The station’s imaging slogan today is “Taking Action. Getting Results.”
I’m not sure the slogans are important — I always thought there was such a thing as over-imaging, which means I could never be a consultant, since they’ll brand the Action Victim if they thought it would let them get the calls in there one more time — but I reprint them to be thorough.
Things to read …
But first! Another video. This has been making the rounds, via Independent Journal:
Also about Veterans Day: A compilation of heartwarming (and clever) homecoming videos. And did you know that a Birmingham man is a big reason we have that day? True story.
Somehow this doesn’t sound good: Even doctors in dark on health plans. And, meanwhile, Bill Clinton is back, and he’s determined to make all of this very awkward for the current administration. Clinton to Obama: Let Americans keep canceled health plans:
Former President Bill Clinton said that President Obama should honor his oft-repeated pledge and allow people to hang on to health care plans that are being canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got,” Clinton said in an interview at OZY.com published on Tuesday.
Quick hits:
Hancock Bank brings corporate hub, 200 jobs to Montgomery
Growing number of federal workers say they’re unhappy on the job
Alabama investment by Japanese firms tops $4 billion
Google is now bigger than the magazine and newspaper industries
To find real value in digital media, look for the bandwidth hogs
And, finally, here’s a video of a buddy of mine from way back in school. We played soccer together and reconnected online this year. His accent is thicker, but he looks almost exactly the same, half a lifetime later. He’s good people. And now this story:
I like how the reporter, Johnny Archer, let his subjects’ technology work as his visual element. Anyway, I found that video on David’s wife’s Facebook page. My old friend’s bride and son are OK. But the situation in the Philippines is dire. How bad? CNN sent Anderson Cooper’s eyes.
“I fear anarchy happening in Tacloban City,” said CNN iReporter Maelene Alcala, who was on vacation in Tacloban where the typhoon struck and was evacuated to Manila. “It’s like survival of the fittest.”
Tacloban, the provincial capital of the island of Leyte, was ground zero for the typhoon that struck Friday, leaving the city in ruins and its population of more than 200,000 in desperate conditions.
“The whole scene was like something fresh out of a movie. It was like the end of the world,” Alcala said.
The estimates are that the storm pushed more than 580,000 people out of their homes.
