The other day I was sitting around with some younger broadcasters telling war stories about the crazy things that happened way back in the day. I started a story about how the telephone circuit between the WCOS studios in the Cornell Arms Apartments and the transmitters on Edgewood Avenue was accidentally interrupted in the middle of the night by someone working on some cables. I was telling them about how I called “Toll Test” to report the problem. I was interrupted with the question what is “Toll Test?” I must admit that for a split second I was thinking “What do you mean ‘what is a toll test?’” Right then and there, the avalanche of technological change in communications fell down all around me.
Have mercy, where do I begin? I started by sharing that back before there were satellites and the internet, most audio and video signals were moved from one place to another by the telephone company across copper wires. In the case of audio, a twisted pair of copper wires, similar to what was used to bring telephone service to homes and businesses was used to; for example, connect the audio output from the studio to the input of the transmitter. In the case of video, a co-axial cable was used with a center copper wire surrounded by a copper shield and insulated from the center wire by white plastic.
Left: That AT&T Tower with the big microwave horns. Just imagine a city wide plate of spaghetti (wires) connecting everything together. That would be a nightmare to maintain. So some smart people came up with using the “hub and spoke” concept to connect all these places together. The buildings that housed these hubs where the phones are connected are called Toll Offices. Inside these building is where the telephone operators used to connect callers using that iconic patch panel that we remember Lilly Tomlin’s nosy telephone operator Ernestine worked to comedic delight. In those same buildings were similar patch panels for those special audio (and video) circuits like the one that carried our signal to the transmitter. In the case of WCOS, there were two legs, the first from the Studio to the Toll Office at 1651 Hampton Street. You know the one with the big tower behind it with all those big microwave horn antennas that has everyone in town buzzing about “what are those things anyway!” But that is another story. From that toll office another circuit carried our signal to the transmitter.
Left: a typical toll test patch panel In a different room from the operators was a room called “toll test” where the Southern Bell and AT&T technicians maintained all the special circuits used by radio and televisions stations. This is who we called when problems occurred and those geniuses in plaid shirts and pocket protectors quickly got it all working again.
Back in those days, television networks consisted of signals originating in New York City and then linked to the next city I.E. Philadelphia via the same AT&T Long Line microwaves as long distance telephone calls. From Philadelphia the signal was sent to Baltimore and then on to Washington, DC and so on. In each city, the toll office would split off the signal to the local TV station before passing it to the next city. So instead of a spoke and hub circuit we had long circuits crisscrossing the country carrying the main shows for each of the three commercial networks. That worked well for the regular programming despite the fact that somewhere in the network, someone had to tape and delay the shows so that the 6:30 network newscasts didn’t play at 3:30 in California.
But wait a minute, you say; what about Sunday Football? There were usually two live games each Sunday, but not the same games everywhere in the country, how the heck did they do that without satellites and the internet. This is where the network and AT&T technicians really earned their pay. They broke apart and rewired the network and put it back together twice each Sunday. This required a lot of coordination among the network, AT&T and some of the local stations. This was done in the most important TV show that never aired on a local station.
Each Sunday at noon, I would sit in the master control room at WIS-TV and watch the national teleconference from the NBC Network Control Room in New York City. The Network and AT&T Long Lines managers would stand in front of large maps drawn on Plexiglas panels and step by step draw out how the network would be broken down so we would see the game designated for our part of the country. It would take almost an hour for them to lay out the network changes that would be required that day, two of them plus the realignment to the normal configuration at the end of the day. Each local toll office had to make changes on their patch panel to make it all work. At five minutes before the first game, the technicians would disappear and the “slates” would appear on the network monitor to identify which game we were about to see. It was my job to check that slate ID with my program log to make sure we had the right game. In the rare cases we didn’t we had five minutes to figure it out. That is where those maps came in handy. Oh, and one more thing, this insanity was going on simultaneously with at least one other network. Amazingly, we never lost a game due to switching errors.
These days, with satellites, instead of coordinating hundreds of technicians, I hear the satellite coordination managers have to work with only two, one to illuminate the correct transponder on the satellite at the same time another has to turn off his uplink. Oh, there is a technician at each station that has to make sure that they are receiving the correct transponder on that satellite. In case you are wondering, back in the local master control, they still cross check the slate before punching the network button on the switcher. And - no, I’m not gonna get into TV automation systems.
As John Travolta said in the movie Broken Arrow, “Man, what a rush!” Oh MY!
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