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Richard Bauer's Old Pictures from KRLD-TV
Part 2

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Please start at the KRLD Pictures Index Page, if you have stumbled across this page through the use of a search engine.

Richard Bauer, one of the original engineers at KRLD-TV, has shared another big assortment of old photos from KDFW-TV.  These latest pictures are not as old as the ones he sent earlier, but they still show a few behind-the-scenes pictures of KDFW employees (mostly engineers) from the early 1990's.

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Click to enlarge, as always.



This shows the installation of the solid state Harris Platinum transmitter at the "new" Cedar Hill tower, sometime around 1987.  This transmitter would prove to be the most reliable transmitter the station has ever had, and the last one on RF channel 4.  (The DTV signal is now on channel 35.)

Left to right:  Bill Honeycutt, H.H. Whittenburg, Warren Farrar, and two unidentified people who were probably Harris engineers assembling the transmitter.


Same occasion as above.  Left to right:  Ronnie C. Basham, unknown, unknown, H.H. Whittenburg, and unknown.


This is Control Room A in the KDFW building downtown.  The person at the video switcher appears to be Bill Bragg.  It seems to be shortly before the noon news, and the color monitor on the right shows Lynn Easton on Camera 2.


The removal of the original downtown transmitting antenna, sometime in the mid-1980s.  It was a six-section antenna (General Electric TY-13F) that had been up there since late 1949.  Only five sections are being lowered to the ground at this point.  Notice the man standing at the top of the tower.


Same as above.


As I recall, the red beacon was broken on the way down.  This might have been when it happened.  The beacon that is now at the top of the tower was a replacement.


Looking at the antenna from another angle.  The removal of this antenna greatly reduced the weight and wind load on the tower.


On the sidewalk below, one of the onlookers was Landy Compton (left), former engineering supervisor.


Left to right:  Larry Dingmore, Tony Santos, Janice Glynn, Walter Evans.


Left to right:  Bill Cunningham, Janice Glynn, Tony Santos.


The mural on the second floor hallway showed the names of some of the most popular CBS programs up until the early 1970s.  When the station became a Fox affiliate, this mural was painted over, along with the giant eye at the end of the hall.

   Added 10/3/2010:

This is the view from the other end of the hall, sometime prior to 1982.  (I saw this hallway for the first time in November, 1981, and the big faces on the far walls had been painted over already.)


Left to right:  Kevin Cave, Steve Halsell, unknown, Charlie Wilson, Jeff Rosser, Ron Dowd, unknown, and James Spann.  Studio C.


Left to right:  Ken Hansen (?), David Johnson, and Don Guemmer.


Left to right:  Mike Burger, Janice Glynn, and Dale Schornack, as seen from the catwalk.


Lots of activity in Studio C.  They may have been working on...


The new (1990-ish) news set, with the "iceberg" glass sculpture in the middle and an interview set off to the right.

Seated:  Janice Glynn and probably Steve Bosh.  The cameraman on Camera 2 (at the bottom of the photo) might be John Risinger.


Left to right:  Terry the custodian, Dayne Campbell, Tom Goodridge.

   Added 10/3/2010:

The same room, about 15 years ealier.  Left to right:  Marvin Reynolds, Dan Smith (foreground), Horace Lyles (background).  The master control switcher (made by Central Dynamics Ltd.) is in the foreground. 


Here's Michael Kidd in the old Satellite Center on the second floor.  Right behind him is a row of microwave radios used for the STL and inter-city links.


This is the rest of Michael's domain in the Sat Center.  In the second rack, there is a controller for a satellite dish on the roof, and an assortment of rather primitive satellite receivers.  The gray audio monitor in the last rack looks like it came from an Ampex VR-1000.

The Sat Center has been moved and refurbished twice since then.  It is the sub-control room where the signals from live vans, helicopters and satellites come in.  Almost all video pertaining to the newsroom goes through the Sat Center, or (as some call it), the Technical Operations Center.


Bill Hathaway at the CDL switcher in Control Room A.

Looks like Don Adams in front of an ACR-25B.  To his right is an ACR-25 and a VPR-2.  With his right hand, Don appears to be typing on the keyboard for the Identification Data Accessory, which was a rather rare option for the ACR-25B.  Two other odd things are shown in this photo:  The protective cover plates on the front of the ACR-25 "carousel" sections have been removed, making it easy to lose a finger, although nobody did.  (As I recall, this was done because the carousel didn't always stop in exactly the right place, so a slight downward pressure was needed to make it line up well enough to load a cassette.  Just a temporary fix, of course.)  Also the two ACR-25s were known as VT-7 and VT-8 back then, and someone put a WFAA 8-ball logo on VT-8.  It was a bit of humor that was not well received by the management.


Way off to his right, there was an area for playing back video clips durng the news.  A few years later, the station used a Betacart machine to perform the same function, with mixed results.  The only other notable feature here is a Quantel frame synchronizer (the brown box) connected to a 3/4" tape machine.  The film library key is hanging on the right.

The baby blue racks were said to have been accidentally selected. The apochryphal story I heard was that somebody ordered a whole bunch of racks and checked the wrong color code.


Elsewhere in the same room was the last film projector and the last of those awful four-tube GE cameras.  Richard spent hours every week trying to get the film cameras to look good, but it was hopeless.  This camera was the last one in service, because the rest of them looked even worse than this one.


Left to right:  Raymond Santos and Joe Boschard in the film library.


This the audio board in Control Room A, installed in late 1981 and scrapped in 2009.

Updated 1/17/2012:

This is the weather set in Studio A, about 1982.


This is a youthful Andrew Dart manually color-balancing Camera 3 (one of the relatively new TK-47's) on a chip chart.  This picture must have been taken in early 1982, because I tired of this position quickly and asked to transfer to the videotape room.  The controls at the far left are for the four-tube GE film cameras.  Somewhere off to my right was an old Hallicrafters shortwave radio, which was used only to pick up WWV.

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