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Seeing the Finish Line

The By the Way meetings continued as Frank brought in a series of local entrepreneurs who “advised” me on how to program the station.  Frank insisted that WWAC look like a Philadelphia UHF station that had been on the air for years as I tried to convince them that we should do a few things well and grow our schedule - this was denied. I was ordered to it all and my days turned into days, nights, weekends, sleep times.  The only steady force was Bob who constantly supported and assured me I could do this as he taught me the independent TV business day by day.  So I stopped trying to crawl and began to sprint without worrying about cost, budgets or the outcome of our haste.  What would naturally take a year to do was done in 5 months - this was my “herculean task” that somehow I completed.

By first week in May after wading through literally 150 resumes and 100 phone calls I had assembled the Production Department and Bob handled the salary negotiations (needless to say he talked them to the lowest acceptable salaries as he did me)


  • News Producer - a top reporter from the AC Press

  • Staff Director - a former program director from NY local TV

  • News Reporter - a NJ cable station reporter

  • News Anchor - top morning radio host in the market part time for evening news

  • Sports Reporter - local radio sportscaster

  • Weather “Girl” (Frank insisted on this) - a former Miss NJ 

  • Production Manager/Senior Producer - NJPTV production department

  • Production Department Secretary - our reporter’s sister!

  • 2 News & production assistants - Frank’s partner’s daughters (no experience necessary)

  • 3 camera persons - from NJPTV and local cable

  • Video editor - local broadcasting major graduate (who turned out to be a great editor)


While I was working on programming Bob assembled a sales crew of 4 seasoned Philly TV hustlers and Dan put together an engineering staff (and because of the full program day he needed two shifts). Our payroll was going to have to cover 30+ employees on opening day.  In my spare time I created a 14 hour day - weekly schedule.  Bob and I met with a Paul C. a vice president of Viacom syndication compnay and we negotiated the biggest film deal in the history of independent TV.  We bought $1,500,000 of classic and new movies.  Bob has invented the “Million Dollar” Movie series in Philadelphia.  But with a major difference.  While a typical station could air a “John Wayne or Bette Davis Week” I could aire a John Wayne month of films. My task was to “cherry-pick” the movies we wanted (a term that I learned from Paul) from the entire RKO and Warner Brothers libraries.  This was another daunting task for me.  Every niight for a week I spend hours on the phone with my mother and grandmother checking out titles and to my surprise the had seen most of them and we put together our list of over 250.  An unbelievable film vault for a start-uip like us. Paul set up the deal so we would get about 30 movies and their original press materials each month.

Another oops-glitch - they were new first generation prints from rejuvenated master - great like new quality.  The glitch we didn’t have a telecine to dub the films to our 1 inch tape machines adding stops for commercials.  The budget was increased by $80K and another special rush order was made.  I proposed a plan that solved filling some of my program slots.

My rationale - AC was a 24 hour town so I would air the same movie at a different time each day for a week.  I created a 10AM Movie show - “Surf Theater”; 2PM “Boardwalk Matinee”; 9:PM “Best Bet Feature Movie” - thus getting maximum plays per the contracted movie broadcast rights - which were unlimited for one week per film.

To summarize a long arduous tale - by mid May I had a full schedule that included two newscasts and 5 nightly entertainment shows (including Atlantic City Tonight which will be a post of its own) and several syndicated series.  I had succeeded to my surprise at becoming a v Program Director - but time will tell how good I was when my schedule aired in June...(to be continued)




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