The "Gopher"
As my eighth grade year was coming to close, Ms. Haines asked me if I might be interested in doing a summer internship. I had no idea what that meant. She said she had some pull with one of the local television news stations and might be able to get me in as summer help.
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Internships, in the formal sense of the word, are typically reserved for college students seeking credits through some real-world work in their field of study. I was 15 years old, however, and in junior high school. Haines somehow managed to persuade the bosses at the station to take me on for a couple months to run small errands and observe the operations. I would be called a "gopher" -- not an intern -- in keeping with my less formalized responsibilities.
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I wouldn't be paid, but I didn't really care. I was excited just to do it. Being around big cameras and video and seeing how everything was put together for television was enough for me. A couple years earlier, during a late-summer rodeo at the Fort Smith Fairgrounds in town, I did my best to photobomb a live shot being broadcast by Channel 5, a popular news station in town. I walked into frame a couple times with an evil grin, annoying one of the reporters there standing off camera who shook his head disapprovingly and waved me away.
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I wouldn't be working for Channel 5 as a gopher, perhaps fortunately. My station would be Channel 40/29. There was a third station in town in the mid-80s, Channel XXX, which I had some familiarity with already. During that eighth grade year, I managed to get an interview with one of its on-air reporters for a class assignment on careers. We did the interview at the station, which was pretty exciting. I learned pretty quickly that reporters, in real life, are really busy and stressed out. She smoked a lot of cigarettes during the interview.
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I didn't know much at all about Channel 40/29. Channel 5 was perhaps the best known among the townsfolk. Its logo was a really big, fat number 5 which seemed to smile at you whenever it popped on the television screen. I never watched a lot of news as a kid. But Fort Smith was a hot spot for bad weather and whenever there was a weather warning (which was all the time it seemed), you turned on the local news to see what was going on.
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At some point around 7th grade, I started to get really interested in weather. This may have had something to do with discovering The Weather Channel on cable. I became fascinated by this weird channel, which talked endlessly about weather and little else. It had really cool maps and computer graphics, some of which looked they could have been designed on my Commodore 64. There was a curious DIY quality to The Weather Channel in those days that endeared me to every element of the channel.
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Of course, most of us kids back in the 80s watch a LOT of MTV. I watched a LOT of MTV. But I also watched a HELLUVA LOT of The Weather Channel. That was not something I told people. I became a true weather geek. What's more, I was a broadcast weather geek. FOMO for me was whenever Oklahoma City would get bombarded with severe weather and we, in Fort Smith ... some XXX miles to the east ..., would go nothing [not fair man!]. Tornados would always avoid my neck of the woods, and I was convinced it was Mother Nature trying to screw with me and my expectations.
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I think the thing I was looking forward to most working at Channel 40 was getting to see the weather gear, meeting the weather guy, and learning how they make all those computer maps. Television is a series of magic tricks, tricks that were getting much more dynamic in the 1980s. In computer programming, the fun was always getting access to a game's program and code to see how all these commands made stuff happen on the screen. Now, I was going to get to pull back the curtain and see how they did all those nifty effects on television.
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It must be said that there was absolutely no awareness of ego or pride in getting this opportunity. I wasn't cocky. There wasn't a chance to document my experiences on an iPhone and plaster selfies all over Instagram or on a Tic Tok account. That ability to design a personal brand or even a trajectory for myself via social media just did not exist then. If anything, the entire experience, for the most part, would be below-radar. The experience would be mine, and mine alone.
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