My News Days #2

     The first thing I found out in my quest to become the next Peter Jennings was.... Television news wasn't as easy as it looked and going to college in New Orleans was quite the eye opener.

     Earlier, I wrote that Table #43 at Tavern on the Park nudged me into going back to college with a purpose and it was my old friend Richard Olivier who nudged me into enrolling in Loyola, New Orleans. Here's a quick sidebar about Loyola University. There are four campuses; Chicago, Baltimore, California and New Orleans. Loyola is a Jesuit college. So, if you drew a line from the Maryland campus to the California campus and then drew a line from the Chicago campus to the NOLA campus,  you've drawn a cross.

     But don't let these Catholics on steroids fool you. They may take anyone into their fold, but once you're there, you better toe the line, academically speaking, or they're happy to show you the door.

     I think I enrolled in Loyola in 1984, about the time most of my high school classmates were graduating with under-graduate degrees. I say it was 1984 because I distinctly remember The World's Fair in NOLA.
     I was still waiting tables for Mr. and Mrs. Sands at Tavern on the Park. I think Mr. Sands had had enough of Del Frisco and bought his interest in the restaurant. I remember all of us were very happy about that because while good steaks.... not such a good guy. His real name is Dale Wanstadt if you ever see him. But back to The World's Fair... Oh, what a time!

     One of my good friends at the time was Reis (pronounced Reese) Hanson from Milwaukee. He had a deviated septum that caused a consistent nasal growl, a wolf as a dog, an old M.G. that he'd hotwire to start and at one point he had a beautiful 1969 Jaguar XKE. The MG was for errands. The Jag was for going out.
      Reis was an engineering student at Tulane. I don't know if he ever did it, but he was working on a patent for a tri-folding crutch. He came up with the idea after a foot or leg injury. He got tired of trying to store his crutches. So, he developed crutches that folded into about 16-inches versus four or five feet.
      Somehow, Reis got the job as the pyro-technics man for a week at The World's Fair. His job was to set up the nightly fireworks show that fired off a barge on the Mississippi River each night of the fair. He'd set up the show during the day, then at night we'd climb aboard the barge and boat downriver to fire off the show. We'd sit on the front edge of the barge in those old school cloth, folding chairs. We'd strap on our walk-mans and listen to "Tangerine Dream". The mighty Mississippi was literally only feet beneath us and the NOLA skyline with the giant Mississippi bridge were the only things in our path. It was pure psychedelic sans the psychedelics.
      I don't know what happened to Reis. We talked many years later, but that was the last I've heard from him.

     The World's Fair was the summer of 1984. So, I must've started classes at Loyola, NOLA in the fall. My declared major was Broadcast Journalism as per the nudge from Table #43.
     I wrote earlier that the Jesuits are happy to have you, but you better perform or they're happy to show you the door. That's absolutely true. I remember my first visit with my counselor. He or she was very enthusiastic about my plans.

     "Here are the courses that transferred from Stephen F. Austin (not many)," he or she explained. "Here's what you need to start with here."
     "Okay. Got it. What's this notation by English?"
     "Well, you can take as many hours as you want, but we require all incoming students to take English."
     "Sure."
     "It's pass or fail," he or she kind of whispered with their head down looking at my transcript.
     "What do you mean?" All of a sudden I'm paying attention.
     "If you pass, you can take more courses. If you fail, you either take it until you pass or you leave."
     "Seriously?"
     "Seriously."

     So, I took English and a few other pretty simple communications courses. I'd had a good high school education and been raised in a home that used proper subject-verb agreement. But now, all bets were off. I had to do it the Loyola way.
     The long story short is: I did fine. Somewhere between my first college days and my second college days, I figured out that if I actually went to class, completed the assignments and participated in class... College wasn't that hard. Who knew?!

     Folks, I feel like I've dug a hole for myself. This post is getting too long and I still have many stories to tell. But first, here's one to end on.... at least for now.

      Radio/TV college work comes with lots of "lab" time. We started with radio. We learned how to write, report, edit and finally we had our own news segment on the college radio station with the call letters WWL-Radio.
      We didn't actually go into the 'field.' Our instructor, in my case Mike Cremedas, allowed us to use the A-P and UPI wires. We'd take those stories, re-write them and then present them in an approximately three minute news segment on WWL.
      In each student's case, the news segments were during another student's music D.J. time. They'd play their music and  D.J. on the campus radio.... And thank goodness that it was aired only on campus.
      My D.J. was a young man from Somalia or somewhere else in eastern Africa. I've forgotten his name but his music was all African. It was pretty good too. Then at a precise point in the hour, he'd introduce me. But because his dialect was so thick, I missed my cue many times. I couldn't even recognize my own name.
     Once I conquered his accent hurdle, I learned that I had my own to conquer.
   
     My sign off was: "For dubya-dubya el, this is Bill Robertson."

     I didn't know until Mr. Cremedas critiqued my tape that the correct pronunciation of a W is really 'double-U,' not dub-ya.

     This is about the same time I realized our nation's capitol is Washington, D.C. not Warshington D.C.  To say I had an accent issue was an understatement.

Bill Robertson, Soon: Roast Beef po-boys from the Napoleon House & the Pope under the tree and then out from under the tree.