A story from the distant past for your consideration today. The news side of broadcasting was not my only home in on-air television work. While news is where I have happily lived for most of career, there was an earlier part of broadcasting life where news was interrupted by a period where I filled the position at Newfoundland Broadcasting known as ‘staff announcer’. That job was basically both a broadcasting and an on-camera job involved some commercial work and reading audio voice-overs for up-coming TV shows. I will forever remember that while one of the biggest disasters in Newfoundland’s history was unfolding, I was reading into a microphone and was trapped in that voice over world

“Tonight, on The Dukes of Hazzard; Boss Hogg and the Duke boys find that trouble comes in pairs. That’s The Dukes of Hazzard tonight at 9 – only on NTV.”

That is what I was doing during the Ocean Ranger tragedy. I just wasn’t involved in the news aspect of it at NTV. I was doing TV voice-overs. Now to be sure being “the staff announcer “, which is what the position was called, was an honest but unexciting living and I eventually escaped back into the wonderful world that is broadcast television news. While I was staff announcer, though, there was one benefit. There was extra money to be made. Some announce gigs were great, others were just awful.

Once I did a contest for a mainland advertising agency that paid me $1,200 for a single commercial. It was part of a contest called Spin-to-Win, and I was paid for all of the draws and all the wheel spins, but I also was paid for the commercial for the contest. A national agency came in to produce it. The first “take” was the best one but they fiddled with it and worked all day to justify flying to Newfoundland. In the end they used the first take from 8 o’clock that morning. I didn’t care. For $1,200 I would have worked round the clock. This was back in the 1970s when $1,200 could almost get you a new car. It was great. It wasn’t very demanding like news but, I was young and money is money.

Now the dark side of the moon of the staff announcer job happened when a firm came to Newfoundland with a new brand of Vienna sausages to hawk. This wasn’t like Maple Leaf sausages. This was a lesser new brand unknown until that time in Newfoundland. They wanted to crack the local market, confident there was room enough here for both Maple Leaf and them. I won’t name the brand, but you probably wouldn’t recognize the name anyway. It was something like Acme Sausages or Eddies A-1 Vienna Sausages. I’m not even sure they are still in business. Anyway, they got me to do their television commercials. The fee for me as staff announcer was supposed to be a flat $350. It wasn’t a big pay day like Spin-to-Win, but it was still money and, like I said, money is money. The problem was the distributor didn’t actually have much money. He did have plenty of product. He asked if I might consider taking the $350 fee in kind. In other words, this guy wanted to pay me in sausages. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time so I said yes. A few tins of Vienna sausages would never go astray, even if they weren’t Maple Leaf. I obviously forgot to do the math because these tins of Vienna sausages in the late 1970s were retailing for about 30 cents a tin. That means that in one afternoon, for about four hours work, I became the proud owner of roughly 1,250 tins of Vienna Sausages. With 48 tins to a case I had more than 26 cases to get home to my house. It took two trips in a small four-cylinder car. Taking them all in one all would have ripped the guts out of the vehicle. Well, I had no children at the time, but me and wife Judy were eating those Vienna Sausages for a year. We had them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had them on toast, and for snacks and right out of the tin… We fried them with eggs. We baked them into casseroles. We may have had them for Christmas dinner, but I guess that’s a stretch.

You know, strangely enough, it was about five or six years later that I ran into a couple of tins of them that had showed up in an old leather camera bag in our hall closet. I didn’t open them and I didn’t keep them as souvenirs. I just threw them out. The sausages do live on in memory. Once in a while, if I’m out somewhere and I am offered a Vienna sausage, or something like it, I’ll take it. It’s a great memory trigger and with the first bite wherever I am I’ll think of the Duke boys, Boss Hogg, Spin-to –Win and the year I hit the Vienna sausage jackpot.

Such is the world of broadcasting.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca