Saturday, January 07, 2012
Part of my history goes up in smoke....
A friend of mine who lives in Topeka, Kansas let me know about this. It happened Thursday evening:
Fire Officials: Blaze At Former WIBW Building Intentionally Set
I worked at WIBW-AM for three and a half years as a technical producer, meaning I did all the behind the scenes stuff during broadcasts. I ran the control board, microphones for hosts, played the commercials, edited and aired pre-recorded material, monitored wire machines and police scanners, and did live weather reports. WIBW was the Topeka affiliate for the Royals Baseball Network, so there were a lot of listeners. It was my first job right out of college, and I was lucky to get it.
I was at work when the World Series was interrupted by an earthquake in San Francisco and had to go on air and ad lib because we lost the network feed and there was no one else to stall until we could get the signal back. I was at work during the student revolution in Beijing, listening to a network reporter get beaten up by the Chinese military during a live broadcast. Two of my co-workers, Aimee Sporer and Jerry Schimmel, went on to be famous in Denver, Aimee on TV news and Jerry as the voice of the Denver Nuggets (Jerry also survived a horrible plane crash in Sioux City).
The building was said to be haunted, but I never saw any evidence of this other than the local wildlife seeming unusually interested in the area. Deer and squirrels were plentiful on the hilltop and would often peer inside to see what I was doing. Even though the building was vacant at the time of the fire and would have been demolished eventually, it's a damned shame someone thought it would be fun to torch it, especially since a firefighter was injured.
Fire Officials: Blaze At Former WIBW Building Intentionally Set
I worked at WIBW-AM for three and a half years as a technical producer, meaning I did all the behind the scenes stuff during broadcasts. I ran the control board, microphones for hosts, played the commercials, edited and aired pre-recorded material, monitored wire machines and police scanners, and did live weather reports. WIBW was the Topeka affiliate for the Royals Baseball Network, so there were a lot of listeners. It was my first job right out of college, and I was lucky to get it.
I was at work when the World Series was interrupted by an earthquake in San Francisco and had to go on air and ad lib because we lost the network feed and there was no one else to stall until we could get the signal back. I was at work during the student revolution in Beijing, listening to a network reporter get beaten up by the Chinese military during a live broadcast. Two of my co-workers, Aimee Sporer and Jerry Schimmel, went on to be famous in Denver, Aimee on TV news and Jerry as the voice of the Denver Nuggets (Jerry also survived a horrible plane crash in Sioux City).
The building was said to be haunted, but I never saw any evidence of this other than the local wildlife seeming unusually interested in the area. Deer and squirrels were plentiful on the hilltop and would often peer inside to see what I was doing. Even though the building was vacant at the time of the fire and would have been demolished eventually, it's a damned shame someone thought it would be fun to torch it, especially since a firefighter was injured.
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