Before this morning I’d never heard of
Martha McGee Bell and her famous mill, but by two in the afternoon I was a budding expert on the Revolutionary War heroine. It started first thing, when the assignment manager accosted me at my desk, uprooting me from a comfy slouch with talk of flood zones, map-books and lost treasure. Before I could wrap my mind around what my colleague was babbling about, I was processing through stop lights on the South side of town. Stealing glances at the crumpled printout before me, I dialed the number as I drove. A male voice answered a scratchy connection.
“Hi Mr. Strader, This is Stewart from Fox 8, ya got a minute to talk to me?”I hurtled down Highway 311, listening intently as the warm and informed voice on the cell phone filled in a few centuries of detail. After scratching out directions on notepad, I convinced the concerned viewer to let me meet him later at his place of employment. I hung up and squinted through the windshield at the TV tower in the distance. Yet another jaunt into the Great Unknown, I thought - a strange way to spend Memorial Day I‘ll grant you, but that’s quite simply the gig I got.
A few minutes later Walker’s Mill road ended abruptly. I parked and unloaded, setting my tripod high on the roadside perch. Across the crumbling asphalt, a wide open expanse of rolling terrain stretched out toward a tree-ringed horizon. Sweeping the vista with my lens, I tried to decide where to start. I settled on a burbling creek to my right , honing in and pressing ’RECORD’. While the laser inside burned the water’s image on optical disc, I kicked at the clay and went over the details in my head. According to my new cell phone friend, this was the location of Bell’s Mill, site of a fabled act of loyalist defiance in the closing days of the
Revolutionary War.
Martha McFarland McGee Bell was the wife of a continental Captain William Bell, who owned Bell’s Mill, located near Muddy Creek in Randolph County. While Captain Bell was off fighting redcoats, Mary ran the Mill. In 1781, after
the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, Lord Cornwallis himself rendezvoused with troops there for a two day rest. During their hostile bivouac, feisty Mary approached Cornwallis, and inquired as to whether he intended to burn her mill (as was his habit). Before he could answer, Mary proclaimed she would burn it first to deprive him the satisfaction! Quite ballsy for a woman in the 18th Century, but I suppose fierce patriotism knows no gender. Cornwallis left the mill unmolested that day. It stood for many more years before being lost to history. Only recently had it been uncovered, the hand-stacked stone wall remains unearthed by bulldozers clearing the way for the soon-to-be-formed Lake Randleman.
Scrambling down the ditch bank with camera and tripod, I looked around for things to take a picture of. To my untrained eye, it was all rough terrain, hard-scrubbed land about to be submerged under fathoms of water. I’d covered the
Randleman Dam before, knew that engineers were finishing construction on the mammoth wall upstream that would swell the Deep River and create a much-needed water-source for many Piedmont cities. I just never knew it was going to drown a little history in the process. That’s where Gary Strader came in. A Randolph County native with a penchant for history, he’d e-mailed the station with news of the old Mill’s plight. No doubt he’d be able to answer many of my questions when I met him later. For now though, I had a monument to meet.
The heavy granite slab sat bathed in shadows of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. Runners passing by just feet away would never see it. In fact several jogged by unknowingly as I hunched over my tripod and wrestled with a tricky focus. Slowly pushing the macro button across the breadth of the focal tube, I forced sharp edges on the wavering shapes in the viewfinder. ’
HEROINE’ , it read. Bingo, I thought - just the kind of easily digested visual I needed for my story. When you’re condensing events spanning 250 years in ninety fleeting seconds, you needed all the compression you can get. After bagging a few more iconic shots, I dragged my gear over a low fence and captured footage of all the normal people enjoying their normal holiday off. Some walked family pooches, others jogged to the beat of their iPods. Kid and Grandmas ambled along and teenagers worked up a good hacky-sack sesh. Meanwhile, I loitered in the leafy shade, stalking statues and profiling pedestrians. While I could let that bother me, there’s no time for that now.
Instead, I left the leafy sanctum of the manicured park for the growling exhaust fumes of the urban sprawl strip mall parking lot. At a large garage with a household name on the side of the wall, I found the service technician I was looking for. Gary Strader happily punched out and joined me in the parking lot. Using the only green backdrop I could find, I framed the stranger in front of a verdant slope of fresh cut grass, being careful to crop out the Chik-Fil-A sign in the upper right corner. As the tally light shone from the sanctity of the one inch screen, I found myself liking Mr. Strader as I listened. The self-avowed history buff knew his stuff, using five years of research to answer my series of inane questions.
According to him, I’d been standing on top of the mill during my morning visit to the site. That didn’t make me feel any better about my skills of perception, but from the way he described the location in aching detail, I took his word for it. In the end, Strader was a television journalists’ delight - informed, authoritative, and mercifully succinct. He even coughed up a juicy detail to spice up my copy: Legend had it a band of loyalists buried a gold-filled cannon somewhere around the mill. If the area was flooded without proper excavation, the mythical treasure would disappear forever in a watery grave.
Overall, not bad fodder for an evening newscast feature OR a midnight bloggering, eh?
There’s an indelicate term that persists in my business - a two word rhyming phrase used to describe those impromptu camera clusters you see in courthouse hallways and on bad made-for-TV movies. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...the gang-bang. Usually, these lightning rounds of elbow fiesta are played out around accident victims, politicians and the freshly convicted. But today me and three of my camera-swinging buddies rendezvoused at a secret location for a far more important V.I.P. That’s right, we’re here for the dog.
But not just any dog. Sadie, a golden retriever and licensed therapy pet, has spent the past six years bringing joy and diversion to patients from across the Piedmont. From Child Oncology to the Alzheimer’s Ward, this inherently lovable pooch has made very sick folks’ days just by showing up. However, at the ripe old age of eleven, her energy level just isn’t what it used to be. Now, her owner Joe Gangloff says it’s time for Sadie to cut back her schedule and pursue a life of leisure. So he notified the several hospitals Sadie visits and spread the word. You guessed it - the retriever is retiring.
Before the senior pet goes off to learn shuffleboard, there is the matter of the send-off. That’s where me and the rest of the lens-jackals come in. Eager for show-ending fodder, each newsroom dispatched a photog with the same mission. ’Bring back something for the anchors to chortle about while the houselights fade!' No problem, thought all - until we each arrived to find three motley reflections staring back in annoyance. Still, we all played nice, making small talk while the PR ladies insisted we stay hidden. You know, so we wouldn’t tip off the dog…
It must have worked, for Sadie didn’t seem any the wiser when she and her owner stepped off the elevator and into the spotlight‘s glare. She just panted agreeably as we swarmed her with our lenses, microphones and silly questions. With a squint and a backpedal we rotated positions, from the outstretched overhead pan to the move known to millions of chop-socky fans as Crouching Photog, Hidden Hernia. By the time the cameras’ top lights faded, each shooter had what he came for: footage, interviews and a just a trace of warmth in our cold, cold hearts. Of course, we’ll all regain our well-honed callous status the next time we all gather at the edge of some tragedy and chat about something innocuous, like the time we chased that golden retriever through that hospital lobby. What WAS that dog’s name, anyway?
Okay, so not EVERY assignment is an exercise in hustle and calamity. Some gigs are quite tranquil. Take the fifteen minutes I spent in a Guilford County strawberry field last week. Please! I don’t especially like strawberries. Sure, I ingest the occasional Wild Berry Pop-Tart, but I never enjoyed gnawing on this particular brand of nature’s candy. Still, I paused among the back rows of Ingram’s Strawberry Farm late that day, ignoring the screech of cell phone and pager just long enough to officially linger. Before I knew it, I was staring at a berry, lost in thought and enjoying the quiet.
Four rows over a group of migrant workers chortled at the gringo at the edge of the field. When I first pulled up in my rolling billboard, the men among them came alive, gesturing happily at the familiar logo on the side of my ride. They probably hoped a leggy news model would hop out. Imagine their dismay when all they saw was this grumpy schlub, lugging gear and late for the edit bay. I waved from a distance and set up my sticks, wishing they‘d ignore my incongruent appearance. A few minutes later they went back to filling their white buckets with the plump red orbs. When they did, I fell into the viewfinder.
I cut my broadcasting teeth on farm news coverage. Under the tutelage of the great John Spence, I prowled the sun-blotted tobacco field and the hazy shade of the selling floor. I’ve attended countless tractor shows, documented festive hog killings and profiled plucky poultry producers. If it grows in the Tar Heel State, I’ve pointed a lens at it. Along the way, I’ve many an ornery farmer - from leathery landsmen in Depression-era coveralls to their younger men who cannot imagine farming without their laptops and Chevy Silverados. I like both kind, as there’s rarely a trace of subterfuge or fakery among them - qualities I get more than my share of with this thing on my shoulder.
A long Spanish soliloquy awoke me from my daydream. Whatever the younger man said amused his cohorts; even the old ladies laughed as thewy stooped over to fill their buckets. I chuckled too, at the absurdity of it all. A high-winding motor wailed in the distance. Shaking off any idling thoughts, I got busy collecting assorted angles of said berries, more than enough to supply the forty seconds of edited video the desk wanted. As I gathered up my tools and prepared to leave, a young man rolled up on a 4 wheeler and began chattering with the workers. I was halfway through packing up my car when I realized they were answering him in perfect English.
I began my shift with a quick jaunt to Mayodan, one of many Rockingham County towns crippled by the loss of the textile industry. As I toured the weed-choked grounds of yet another manufacturing cadaver, I couldn’t help but think of the recently razed Burlington Industries building. But this case is a little different. Shut down in 1999, the old Washington Mill sits on the Mayo River - a winding waterway that the leaders of Greensboro would kill to have in THEIR downtown. But Mayodan’s river walk is overrun with neglect - as is the cavernous mill that many say started the town in the first place.
Now a group of local developers wants to transform the Mill’s rotting carcass into a glitzy showcase. Their 35 million dollar proposal is impressive: a theater, condos, restaurants, banquet halls, spas and more - all built into the sprawling brick structure that anchors downtown. At the center of their plans, the piece de resistance: a North Carolina Gospel Music Hall of Honor. I don’t know a lot about gospel music, but if such a place would help bring this part of Rockingham County back to life, well - somebody pass me a tambourine. Dennis Sparks, one of the developers, showed me around the old mill, answering my questions and carrying my tripod. He didn’t even flinch when I handed my digital camera to his assistant and asked her to take a picture. Nice guy, that Mr. Sparks.
After an hour and a half on site, I had what I needed to file my report. But I couldn’t just stick my raw footage on air and go get a sandwich. No, my raw material requires intense examination, thoughtful contemplation, and one heck of an edit session before it can invade living rooms around the Piedmont. This I bid Mr. Sparks and company a fond adieu and made a beeline to High Point. I’d like to tell you I thought about my assigned story al the way back to the station, but in reality I jammed out to William Shatner’s incredible CD, ‘
Once back at the shop, I found every one of our tricked-out edit bays filled with swarthy photogs, antsy reporters and over-dressed interns. Knowing better than to cross this hostile crowd, I grabbed my camera and my headphones and plopped down at my desk. Sitting there, I rifled through the footage on my disc, transcribing sound-bites, making notes and trying to ignore the producers who were challenging each other’s movie trivia knowledge from opposite sides of the newsroom. Forget exhausting shoots and unforgiving deadlines, the hardest part of my day is staying focused on my story at hand while the night-siders play grab-ass all around me. The headphones help. Perhaps I should have brought in my 
In the third act of my day, I move to the edit bay. Once fully hunkered, I create a timeline on the non-linear editor and begin ingesting footage into a virtual bin. With a click and a drag, I can access the audio narration - words I wrote only minutes before handing the script over to an anchor to voice. Once those dulcet tones are fully loaded, I use them to frame up my ninety second sound structure. Of course there is the inevitable audio tweaking, understandable, since audio is the very lifeblood of all broadcasting. After slicing and dicing anchor track and sound-bites, I had a NPR-worthy aural masterpiece. But this ain’t radio. Scrolling through my footage, I searched for just the right shot to back up each spoken moment. If I’ve done my job right, it all falls together like per-cut pieces to a perfect puzzle.
I love to edit - and not just because it involves sitting down. Sometimes it’s like conducting the world’s most perfect orchestra. Other times, it’s like crash-landing a wounded helicopter. Either way, each edit session is a lesson in good and bad decisions in the field. With the advent of computer editing, a whole new realm of visual storytelling is at hand. Difficult effects that used to require bribing the control room gang down the hall is now just a click or two away. I’m far less articulate than other editors in my shop. Friends of mine can recite 17 level edit-moves backwards and forwards and their work shows it. But me - I’m more of a Zen Master than dry technician. I feel the focus should be on storytelling, not technique. Of course that doesn’t stop me from screaming for for a Edit-Master’s council when the need arises.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me when he clung to the idea, quickly turning it into the latest installment of 
I’ll take that, as I am a great lover of books. Here’s just one of my many shelves now, stacked to the rafters with tomes, accounts and chronicles. Tattered copies of science-fiction classics and lurid paperback novels rescued me from a childhood filled with playmates who only wanted to ‘play ball‘. With adolescence came Stephen King. For years I counted my hardbacks of ‘
With Monday’s 
From Tripod Row, the view’s indeed a little scary. Squinting civilians peering into tiny lenses, breaking bedrock principles of camera-handling with every unnecessary sweep and pan. No one expected the democratization of media to be pretty, but the attendant lens abuse is enough to break this cinematographer’s heart. But that ship has sailed, a nautical phrase as apparently outdated as Wide-Medium-Tight and Steady Sequenced Video. What use are lofty production values to the herky-jerky nature of today’s internet footage? Does proper composition really matter when the end product is viewed on a one inch screen? Of course it does - but only to us broadcast dinosaurs. This new hybrid breed of digital scribe gives little thought to such matters, instead relying on quick image uploads and push-button publishing to make up for his lack of camera acumen.
It’s enough to make those of us in the media scrum to talk of the End Times. Years of shoulder mounted betacam security are grinding to an unceremonious halt and crashing onto the shores of shrinking technology. With phone companies morphing into video portals and infidel consultants preaching the power of the One-Man-Band, it is simply not a good time to be a TV news photographer. One hasn’t got to look far into the cameraman’s past to recognize a similar shift. In the early Eighties, videotape quickly surpassed film as Television’s medium of choice. Suddenly journeyman photogs found their hard-earned tenure as film-processing auteur simply didn’t matter. Videotape was cheap, instantaneous, and far easier to use. Though the gear was bulky, there were plenty of underpaid young upstarts willing to take up the new dumb-downed format. As they did, thousands of veteran film crews laid down their lenses and for a long while afterwards, the evening newscast suffered.
Now, a new revolution is about to be televised. Tiny lenses are popping in the most unlikely of devices, powerful editing is just a laptop away and personal websites are racing towards critical mass. How long before my oversized fancy-cam looks like an early 80’s bag phone? About the same time the six o clock news begins looking like it was shot by a hopped-up junkie with a twitchy digital, I‘m guessing. The next ten years promise to feature a rapid breakdown of my chosen craft. Whatever new paradigm takes hold, it’s a safe bet the two-person news crew is an endangered species, driven to oblivion by technology and methods that are faster and cheaper, but not necessarily better. Hopefully by that time, I’ll have found more fulfilling ways to make a difference and a paycheck. Until then, I’ll be here in the media pack, one eye buried in a viewfinder, the other one keeping steady watch over a nation of digital interlopers. Now tell the accountant with the handy-cam to get the #&%% out of my shot...
‘
Besides, I love this kind of spectacle. Some lament this loss of living history while others merely marvel at the technology of the take-down. Me - I leave my opinions at home. I bring my wireless microphones, blank discs and extra batteries to every assignment, but my true thoughts on the matter stay in the dresser drawer at home. It’s a little thing I call journalism.
Broadcast journalism, to be exact - the kind using cameras, cables and capable colleagues. I’m lucky in that department, as everywhere I looked this morning, I saw a weathered co-worker on the prowl for highlights. Apex predators all, the veteran news-gatherers with El Ocho logos slunk through the crowd, bagging shots and capturing sound as the demolition experts prepared to turn a piece of Greensboro’s past into the site of yet another upscale strip mall.
As the implosion crew took souvenir snapshots, stooped men in ball caps thumbed through yellowed photos of Textile’s past. Mothers pointed children to the hulking structure in the distance and radio deejays babbled into handheld microphones. Nervous Rent-A-Cops paced about while the real sworn officers gossiped by the barricade. I wandered through the teeming masses with one eye hidden, sizing up shots and hitting ‘Record’. Every couple of minutes I’d glance at Danny Spillane, able captain of the ‘Santa Maria’ - his derisive nickname for our aging satellite truck. The half-worried, fully-annoyed look on his face told me things were right on schedule - at least as on schedule as live TV can be.
With only minutes left until detonation, I closed in on my quarry. David Griffin, vice president of the D.H Griffin Demolition, wore my wireless microphone along with four such others. Framing him up in my one inch screen, I kept worrying he’d sneeze, set off a set off a ripple of RF signal and bring the abandoned landmark down before everyone could get clear. That didn’t happen, thankfully.
Instead, Griffin answered questions and hugged friends, working the crowd like a master politician turned conquering astronaut. I got the impression this particular takedown was something of a victory lap for the local company - a high-profile, relatively easy drop for a homegrown organization gone big-time. Their set-up looked complex to me, but this job had to be a cakewalk for the demolition crew that tore down the ruins of the World Trade Center. At least that’s the impression I got after stalking him all morning. Whatever the case, I have to say the Griffins are awful nice people. Just don’t park a building in their way. They’ll get all Wile E. Coyote on your ass…
Finally, after much double-checking and constant warnings to the eager crowd, the demolition crew was ready to get down to the business of structural takedowns. As warning sirens wailed in the distance I leaned into the eyepiece, filling the screen with Griffin and his mother as they hunched over the detonator. I would hold that position until the countdown ended and wait for the all-important reaction shot. No matter that dynamite and wires were about to erase history just over my shoulder, I was honed in on the candy-like button that would bring it all down.
Lastly, I must veer off the straight and narrow news path to observe an occasion I’m most proud of. Back in 1990, I brought a series of bad decisions to a screeching halt by asking the most incredible woman in the world to marry my sorry ass. Back then she was a promising student at the University of South Carolina and I was a budding derelict trying to erase all visible signs of 
By three p.m., it had already been a long day. Having traversed the Piedmont from Lexington to Summerfield, all I wanted to do as I plopped down at my desk was process the footage I’d recorded and go home to cut the lawn. But before I could grab my mouse, a familiar shadow fell over my desk.
So I did what any good photog would do: I popped off a few shots of the confusion and dialed the station. Once I told the suits back at the shop they may want to re-think their lead story, I stashed my gear inside my news unit, jumped in the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. Three minutes, a couple of curses and one jumped-curb later, I found a much better vantage point. As people poured out of cars and buildings to stop and gawk, I set up shop on the sidewalk. Zooming in to the squat brick building at the base of all the smoke, I hit ‘Record’ just in time to capture a tower of flames shoot up through the building’s roof. A chorus of oohs and ahs rang throughout the crowd gathered around me as the heat from the blast washed over us. Whatever the building in the distance housed, it was fueling new flames like an off-shore oil derrick fire.
After quizzing a few curious locals, I learned more about the business at the base of the conflagration. A man in a stained wife-beater t-shirt told me the building was ’Happy Living Incorporated’ - a small furniture factory that had been the victim of some vandalism as of late. Seems someone had set a dumpster on fire out behind the business the day before. Now, those gathered around the blaze were already using the ‘A‘ word. It was less than definitive proof of foul play, but as the flames found the stash of wicker, wood and foam inside, the inferno doubled in strength. Squinting through my lens, I realized, arson or not, I had me another new story. 
Much happened over the next ninety minutes. The crowd of onlookers grew in size, turning the my sidewalk post into an impromptu amphitheater. Other news photographers showed up as well, dusty figures on the horizon schlepping cameras and tripods in my direction. Eventually the firefighters contained the blaze, but not before it dazzled the crowd with a display of pyrotechnics usually seen only on old A-Team episodes. Before long, my own back-up arrived, a trusty live truck piloted by one Bob Buckley. Together Bob and I interviewed the owner, who confirmed the possible arson angle. For someone who had just lost his business, Bill Verouden was remarkably composed. I dare say I was grumpier, but the again, we’ve come to expect that, haven’t we?
By the time five o clock hit, I’d cut the footage, set up the live truck and rigged cameras and lights. When the news open ended, Neill McNeill threw it to Bob, who ran down the events like only Bob can. As Bob spoke, the director back at the shop rolled the footage I’d sent them: the plume of smoke, the clouds of fire, and the curious crowd. After a few de facto questions, Neill moved on to other news and our signal was cleared. Sequestering myself in the back of the truck, I began re-editing the footage for our upcoming six o clock report. Bystanders poked their heads into the truck and provided running commentary as I chopped and sliced images from just an hour before. As other news crews set up the gear around us, I chatted with viewers and voyeurs alike. Looking out over the gutted building and exhausted firefighters, it occurred to me I’d probably return to this scene in twelve hours.