Law Line (legal call-in show):
· My first experience:
Caller: Hi. I hit a cow. Whose fault is that?
Lawyer: Depends. Was it in the city or county?
My thought: So city cows know not to jaywalk? This is going to be fun.
· Sometimes after a live remote, engineering would forget to re-patch the phone to on-air instead of headset. That's not good. The crew of Law Line liked to play armchair lawyer, typically imitating a South Park character. This night though I had been sick and was expressing my love of cough medicine. We realized the patching error when Mark from Huntsville asked Robert Lane to let Toni know she should lay off the cough medicine.
· Valentine's Day Show:
Caller: My husband of seventeen years left me tonight.
Don (genuinely concerned): Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.
Robert (Exec. Producer): That's great. It's RATINGS! Uh… I mean, "How sad."
Special-event Shows and Newscasts:
· When another person and I were new, we had a lot of file footage editing for a newscast airing after a Monday Night Football game that ended EARLY. ¾ tapes were flying. Don Phelps gives the other person a tape and says, "This has D-Day footage on it." She incorrectly assumes it's cued. We get into the show, and I relax. We pulled it off, no one at home knows… until the D-Day video or as Don aptly put it, "That seems to be video of the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk."
· During the 6:00 p.m. news, they did a special CrimeStoppers report about a rash of newspaper stand robberies in the Five Points area. While the news was going on, Tracy Slayton's office (right next door to the studio) may or may not have been getting stuffed with newspapers from a sketchy source. (Hey, did we pay for all of these?)
Good Times
Some of my very favorite people are from WAAY. I always thought it was like junior high but with a paycheck. A lot of the pranks have already been mentioned. Other funny moments involve: Ben Acosta and remote-controlled cars; Fantasy football and Sunflowers; Frosties and French fries; the Yankees and Michael Jeter; kickball and the accompanying rap song; Ben Acosta and Mr. Stubbs; WAAY's version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and additional creative works; Tom Barker's telethon commentary and shots Mark Bowling's chickeebum; Bob Dowd's classic line, "What? Do I have a sign on my back?" and more moments caught on tape; adjustments to Tracy Slayton's voice mail and Bill McClendon's office; early morning cookouts and parties; Mike Kilpatrick's Lew Head Series and the works of many talented artists; Brazil winning the World Cup and any other time I won money; Gibson's and post-noon show card games at The Mill; and the first and last trip to Graceland.