WKRP In Your Dreams

We call them Multi-Media Journalists in the TV news business: someone who shoots and edits video and sets up the equipment for live shots in addition to reporting. Back in 1979, people might have called them "one-man bands." Perhaps that was the spirit my Royal Father was channeling when he took a bunch of stick-on letters and labeled the side of his fairly-new RCA video camera with this:

WKRP-TV
CHANNEL 7
RAYTOWN, MO

The fake call letters for the fake station drew directly from the title of the hit TV show based on the Cincinnati radio station. He even fashioned a CBS logo out a zero and a period.

Was it a joke? A way to get then-new video equipment into places it normally wouldn't be allowed? I think both. Go around with a fake TV news camera, though, and you'll still get real people wanting to be interviewed, which is what Dad had to deal with.

And then he got a little talk from a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park.

I'm not sure if there was a violation or what that ranger said -- remember, I was only 7 years old at the time. However, I remember Dad peeling off all those carefully affixed letters and numbers and the makeshift CBS eyeball right in the beauty of the mountains, disposing of it all responsibly, and never venturing to upgrade another camera with news credentials. Undoubtedly, I'm bound to get a different, official version of this story once the Royal Father reads this.