THE PEAK OF PRODUCTION 


Camera operators Rick Rea, Jimmy Lewis, and Steve Grayson during production of a Publix commercial.
WTVT's Studio B was a non-stop production facility handling production and news.
 
The 1970's brought even more work to Channel 13's studio and remote unit with Jim supervising many of the productions.  The remote unit was used extensively for regional football and basketball and for The L.A. Dodger's Vero Beach pre-season games.  There were inaugurations in Tallahassee and shoots near Daytona for The Merv Griffin Show, not to mention Tampa's annual Gasparilla invasion and parade and coverage of the annual Florida State Fair. 

 

WTVT's 1970's crew included (top left) Linda Rossi (top right) Mike Clark
(lower left) John Sizemore, Marc Wielage, Gil Muro, Todd DeBonis, Mike Clark
(lower right) Richard Bozeman

A new batch of employees joined the station in rapid succession.  Joe Puleo, Dave Markwood, Paula Blaschka, Nick Paul, Linda Rossi, John Sizemore, Booker Lundy, Eric Allen, Todd DeBonis, Richard Bozeman, Marc Wielage, and myself (Mike Clark).  To us newbie crewmembers, Jim was a great leader with his calm assurance and non-critical suggestions.  (I was a particular screw up on occasion and Jim could have raked me over the coals for my crimes such as backing the production department's station wagon into a ditch off North A street.  However, he didn't.) 


Steve Grayson, Paul Koenig, and Gil Muro at Cape Canaveral


The space program continued to be a steady source of remote coverage as the Apollo moon launches continued through late 1972.  The final Cape Canaveral remote covered by WTVT was the Apollo-Soyuz mission in late 1975.  For the next five years the Cape grew quiet in preparation for the new Space Shuttle program slated for the early 1980s. 

 

 


The GMC Production Center (1975)

In 1976 the station converted a GMC motor home into a small mobile unit.  The GMC unit allowed for a smaller crew, faster setup time, and more mobility in remote coverage.  One of the GMC unit's more high-profile jobs was a week of Capt. Kangaroo programs taped at Busch Gardens and several days of production on the daytime drama As The World Turns.   "We were in Longboat Key for eight or nine days on As The World Turns, recalls Jim.  "Half a dozen of us went down and they put us up in the greatest hotel…each of us got a two bedroom loft with full kitchen.  We weren't used to living like that with our ten dollar per diems and eating at KFC.  We worked ten or eleven hour days and they fed us under a catering tent and treated us real well." 

 


Jim in Channel 13's mobile unit about to make a life-changing decision!

It was during WTVT's final Gasparilla remote that Jim, a long-time smoker, decided to give it up cold turkey.  "Everyone smoked in those days.  Andy Hardy always had a cigarette and Wayne Wiggins too.  We even smoked in the control room!  I had tried several times to stop smoking.  At the last Gasparilla parade I directed I had a cold and a smoker's cough and decided to quit that day.  I quit before the parade and got through the whole thing without smoking."  And thirty years later, Jim has not fallen off the wagon! 

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