Clack-clack!

There were three of them, all lined up on the wall of the short hallway leading from the lobby to the news booth. Back in the ‘60s, when you entered the studios of WUSC-AM off the third floor hallway two things assaulted your senses, in a good way. The first was the unmistakable smell of vinyl records coming from the record library. The second was the constant clack-clack from those three teletype machines; one from United Press International, one from The Associated Press and the last but not least from the Weather Service.

Left: typical set of teletype machines similar to the one we had at WUSC-AM. Those noisy, dusty, messy machines were the main source of news and weather for the station back in the day. The other input was the old Mutual Radio Network that was the source of the five minute news on the top of the hour. It seemed that most of the time at least one of them was banging ink onto paper. There was a door between the teletype hallways and the news booth that we often left open to get the clacking sound on the air. In fact, most radio stations favored having that teletype sound running on the air underneath the news announcer. So much so that if you couldn’t hear it live, there was a recording attached to the news sounder tape. The thinking was that it added a sense of urgency and “authenticy” to the news presentation.

Paper for the teletypes came in two forms. The AP delivered boxes of yellow paper fan-folded into cardboard boxes that were placed under the machine and then threaded up to the printing mechanism via a slot in the bottom of the machine. UPI’s paper was white and came in similar boxes. The paper for the weather teletype came in rolls that mounted on spools on the back of the machine.

At all the stations where I worked, one of the duties of the on air DJ was to make sure that those teletype machines did not run out of paper or ribbon. To help keep the paper loaded, there would be a strip of red ink on the edge of the last few feet of each box of paper or the end of a roll. We hated to see that because on top of everything else we had to do, we then had to open up a new box of paper and replace the feed in the teletype. If I was lucky and the song long enough I could do it during one song, but most of the time, it was a two-song task.

Ribbons were much worse. You had to put on these cellophane gloves to change them or you would have ink on your hands for days. Ribbons came in cellophane packs containing a full reel with the other end already threaded on the take up reel. So all you had to do was to grab both reels and lift the ribbon between them out of the print mechanism and drop them into the waste paper can that held all the news copy that you didn’t need. But, there was a big problem loading the ribbon into the print mechanism. Those gloves made it very difficult because the ink ribbon was very slippery when handled by them. There was time pressure on this too; all the time you were changing ribbons the teletype was off and you were missing news. I tell you, more than once, after the third song, I would discard the gloves and put up with ink on my fingers. Mike Rast, our news announcer at WCOS had perpetually stained hands from all those ribbon changes.

Those teletype paper boxes create a lot of cardboard, but we had uses for it all. At Christmas time, the boss would bring in all the Christmas music in one of those boxes and place it on the floor of the control room in front of the cart machines. I remember gleefully swinging the air chair around and diving into that box in search of my favorite holiday music; Gene Autrey, Bing Crosby, Darlene Love, The Ronettes, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, The Crystals, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Supremes and Smokey Robinson, they were all there. I was in heaven.

Those boxes were great, for carrying all my stuff out to Doug Broome’s restaurant for the Nightbeat Show. The wire rack containing the “Top 60 in Dixie,” later the “Fun 40” records, along with carts with the new commercials, my headphones and the weather and news copy, if necessary, for the night fit nicely into a teletype paper box. After about a month of wind and rain, the box had to be replaced. It was never a problem to find a new box lying around. Heck, I even had stuff stored in those boxes in my bachelor apartment.

Those teletype machines created a phenomenon known as “rip and read,” mostly in top 40 stations where the announcer doubled as the news reader in the local newscasts on the top and the bottom of the hour. “Rip and read” meant that when the announcer ripped the news copy off the teletype machine and trimmed it down to the newscast with a large pair of scissors, he or she did not actually proofread the news copy itself. Of course this often led to unexpected results. The usual culprit was that during the body of a story, the teletype feed would be momentarily interrupted mid word and something completely different would follow. That usually resulted in my stuttering and stammering while I tried to figure out just what in the heck I was reading.

My worst case occurred when I was a brand new DJ at WCOS doing the all night show. It was a cold and rainy winter’s night and I padded into the studio in my stocking feet just before the “News at 55” newscast at 1:55 that morning. I played the news sounder and started into the 5 or 6 stories that hour. The third story was the one that got me. It said, and I quote “Dallas – An unusual winter storm has dumped 4 and one half feet of heavy snot on the West Texas Panhandle.” Now the internal “rip and read” editor in the back of my brain changed the offending word to “snow” and I read on for a couple of lines before that same internal editor screamed at me; “What did that say!!!!!???” At that point I was a goner. I first started to giggle, and then it got worse. I turned off the microphone and guffawed as loud as I could. I remember pounding on the desk trying to regain composure but alas it would not come. I finally gave up and played the commercial scheduled for that newscast and somehow muddled through the weather and got the first record of the hour started. Needless to say the phone lit up like it was Christmas with people wanting to know if I was OK. At the end of the record, I came clean with the audience and told them that it was not snow that the story talked about and they could use their own imagination. I heard about that one for weeks afterwards and it is probably the funniest and most embarrassing moment of my career.

I mentioned earlier that I sometimes carried news copy out to Doug Broome’s for nights when Mike Rast was occupied recording jazz shows with the station owner, George Buck. As I was packing up the teletype box with my stuff, I put the news copy I would need that night into the box and left it on the table near the exit then I went into the control room to gather the records and commercial carts. One fateful night, Mike realized that I didn’t have the latest news copy so he removed it and went over to the teletype room to get the latest and greatest for me. Unfortunately, he got sidetracked and I left the station without any news. At 8:30, I played the news sounder from the remote location and dove into the box for the news copy only to realize with seconds to spare that there was none there. It is a good thing that it was radio and not television as the expression on my face was priceless. “What the heck do I do now, this is a sponsored newscast.” In inimitable DJ style the answer came, ad-lib the news!! Fortunately my short term memory was better back then than it is now. Helping me out was that it was a “headlines only” news cast, so I didn’t need to recall the details. I managed to muddle through without sounding like a total idiot.

Teletype systems are mostly gone from today’s broadcast newsrooms as the AP, UPI and Reuters news comes in over the internet these days and can be transferred automatically into the Teleprompters and copy printers used in television today. Formal newscasts are almost extinct on radio these days, especially locally. I miss them and rarely miss the South Carolina Public Radio Morning Headlines done by my friend Linda Nunez Mondays through Fridays. Just listening to her read the stories reminds me of those days when news was a part of radio. My mind always goes back to the days of teletypes; “clack clack” noise, paper, ink and all. And a small smile spreads across my lips. Oh MY!