You’ve Come A Long Way Baby…
On July 15, 2014
- TV History
You’ve Come A Long Way Baby…
With the 1960 election piece just posted, this photo of a stagehand changing the tote board numbers by hand popped into my head. These photos are from ABC’s 1952 election coverage which was pretty much a landslide for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson.
This year computers would play a part in the elections as voter forecast tools at CBS and NBC, but not in the production of the live coverage. That was all still low tech, manual labor literally done behind the scenes. More in the next post. Enjoy and share.
Don, the plastic loops have numbers on them, 0-9. The technician is at the back of the display board where the numbered loops are mounted. He adjusts the strips so that one of the numbers is exposed through a rectangular opening for each digit on the display board. Stats for the numbers are given to him on paper so that he can adjust the display board for the TV audience. From his point of view, the entire board is backwards (left-to-right). It’s about as simple as it can get.
Could someone explain what the gentlemen in the first picture is doing?