My encounter with the Secret Service

I can’t remember exactly when this happened, but I guess it could be pinpointed in time if need be. Late 1950s anyway. I was going to college and was a teenager working my first job at a television station in Fresno. I started out as “Assistant to the Art Director” because the guy who got me the job was my high school art teacher and happened to know the TV station’s boss. My art duties consisted mostly of putting together ads for the two TV listings magazines of the era, TV This Week and TV Guide. If I were to see those ads now, I would probably shrink away in embarrassment. I remember once when the station’s General Manager asked me, “Can’t you do anything but cartoons?”

Soon I was assigned duty in the Floor Department, part of the Production Department. Floor duties included hauling props into the studio, setting up commercials, running microphone lines, aiming lights and holding cue cards for the announcers. Everything was live; videotape for local TV stations was still on the horizon. It was a hoot, and I loved the in-the-moment intensity of it all.

One day we had a remote broadcast from the Rainbow Ballroom in downtown Fresno. The occasion was Vice President Richard Nixon speaking about some farm stuff. (I never paid attention to the significance of an event, only its production values.) It was a rainy day. We set up our black-and-white camera at the opposite end of the ballroom from the speaker’s podium. The camera had four lenses on its turret; a 50mm, a 90mm, a 135mm and a nine-and-a-half-incher. The 9.5 was the one that really was a “tight” lens and could frame just about anything at a distance. But it wasn’t enough. We needed the seventeen. I was told to run out to our remote truck in the alley behind the ballroom and get the 17. The 17 was huge. About five inches in diameter and over a foot-and-a-half long. I picked the 17 out of its velvet-lined box, tucked it under my official KJEO Channel 47 jacket to keep the rain off, and darted back through the rear door of the ballroom.

It’s hard to recall exactly what happened next. I was thrown against the wall by two big men. One of them jerked the lens out of my grasp. A voice demanded “WHAT’S THIS?!” They thought I was running in with a bomb. They quickly figured out who I was and what I was doing, but despite that one of them told me in no uncertain terms, “NEVER run when the Vice President is here!”

Lesson learned. I have never since run in the presence of a vice president of anything.