It'll Never Show On Camera
On Top Of The World
 don't really remember ever wanting to be in broadcasting so I don't suppose I
thought of it as career threatening when I crashed through the ceiling into the boss's office.
Besides, they had just fired my mother. |
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I had a summer job as part time prop boy at a TV station. The prop boy had to move
scenery from the storage cages and scene dock into and out of the studio for each TV
show in the little station outside of town. I was only sixteen and had just graduated from high
school. The only other real job I'd ever had was as the stock boy at a downtown
dime store for a few weeks at Christmas. There I spent a lot of time in the
basement bringing up additional paper bags for the counters and hauling heavy cases of
waxy chocolate creams and endless boxes of tinsel upstairs. |
| What I really wanted was to be a special effects man for the movies. Or to get laid. Either one seemed like a pretty good goal then, but I don't remember a television career as being on that short list in 1957. |
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can still see the back of that poor man's head with his face
buried in his arms, sitting at his desk with most of his ceiling crumbled down on his shoulders
and the back of his neck. The picture in my mind's eye shows him just below my
dangling feet. Dangling because my elbows had been extended to carry the wide
box and they hadn't cleared the beams. Dangling because the weight of the heavy copper
waveguide had pinned my fingers between the box and the beams.
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| I don't suppose it would have been fair, under the circumstances, to expect him to help me get my hands loose, move the box aside and pull myself back up through the ceiling to his office roof. He didn't. He did raise his head from the debris - very, very slowly - and studied the scene above him for a lifetime. |
| Later, after he had gone home, I cleaned up the mess and tacked his ceiling back up to the two by fours. Both of my aspirations seemed farther away than ever that late-50's summer afternoon in the early spring of my career. |