Remembering the past

[DennisinMH]

I have a knack for remembering certain activities, dates, events. This weekend, there are 3 of them, although 2 are not as significant as the 3rd.

1. Friday marked 5 years being employed at Jason's Deli. Orientation was held that night for all employees, with a tour of the kitchen, videos from the founder/owner, and passing out of uniforms. I did not intend to be at this place for 5 years. But you take life for what it is.

2. Saturday marked 6 months at WMBD/WYZZ working with the early morning news. I've pretty much got my body clock adjusted to getting up at 2:30 am every weekday morning, but between that job and Jason's, I'm averaging 9.5-10 hours a day of work. Must be why I'm so sleepy on the weekends. The job there is fun at times, with anchors Marc Welp and Shelbey Roberts. There are times I have to hold my laughter inside, so as to not be heard on the mics; when I run the teleprompter, I'm right behind the backdrop where the chairs, coffee table, and flowers are. Editing is easy, using 2 different softwares at the same time, including Adobe Premiere, which I've been using since January, 2001. Yeah, that long. I'm grateful to be able to keep my editing skills sharp.

3. Finally, today marks a really "Been THAT LONG?" moment. In 1980, I started my first video production job at age 20, while attending my last semester at ICC, and working at Burger King as well. I had also been working for Continental Cablevision popping Hollywood movie tapes into big hulking 3/4" Umatic VCRs to air over a subscription service called Cinevue. But Continental decided to drop Cinevue at the end of August in favor of Cinemax. In the next room, a local photographer named Steve Huey was branching out into video, and was producing and airing shows on the local channel. Since we knew each other from him being a counselor at Edison Junior High, and later in learning photography at the Pekin Boy's Club, he brought me on board.

The 40 years comes from probably my first assignment as monitoring the channel as we aired the Marigold Parade live. He had a van with a flat top where Bruce Doud, then vice-principal at Edison, ran the camera. I believe we had commentators, don't remember who. Cables were run inside Continental Cable's doors back to where I was sitting. Later, since I had taught myself how to edit on those big VCR's while running Cinevue, Steve had me be the main editor and director as we taped and aired Pekin High School Boys Basketball, Wrestling, and Morton High School games. It was all one camera, but I had to use stopwatch to allow time to go back, insert commercials later. Sidenote: the guy who voiced those commercials for those games? Charley Early, aka Chuck Collins.

Keep in mind, I wasn't the only PT employee. There was Mary Ann Lutz and Jeff Oesch as well.
I worked for Steve, helped build a video edit room upstairs at his photo studio too. We made a great team. I enjoyed doing those broadcasts, as well as producing my first TV pilot in late 1982-early 1983 featuring a band performing at a nightclub. (It's on Youtube) I had hoped to syndicate it around the Midwest at other Cable companies. That didn't really pan out, as MTV became popular, and there was still a recession. Then I got the PT job as Station manager for the Public Access station in East Peoria. And working for GE Cablevision, all part time.

All this was before I landed my 1st full time job at PCCEO.. You know the rest of the story.