Page 96 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

On the cold morning of January 12, 1962, I woke up to see our landscape coated with a
dazzling coating of ice. Jacksonville had just received 16 hours of freezing rain, only
the second ice storm in the city’s 120-year history. When I started to go to work, I
couldn’t unlock my car because of ice in the car’s keyhole. I had to pour hot water on it
to unlock my car.

While living in Riverview, we had visits from my mother’s sister, Hazel Woodfield and
her husband, Ed, who lived in Wanamassa, NJ. My grandmother, Mary (Mamie)
Cranmer, visited us in Murray Hill when Frankie was born and a second time after
Steve was born at my mother’s apartment on Dellwood Avenue near Riverside Park.
Because of working shifts with the Weather Bureau, I missed spending time with some
my visiting relatives, but Virginia filled me in on the family news when I came home.

CHAPTER 28 - Changing Career Path
This chapter calls for a little historical background in Jacksonville broadcasting. In
1949, the television station, WMBR-TV, was added to WMBR, a Tampa 100-watt AM
owned by F.J. Reynolds, Inc. that began operations in June of 1927. Reynolds relocated
WMBR to Jacksonville in January 1934 and set up offices and studios atop the 13-story
Carling Hotel (subsequently known as the Hotel Roosevelt) on West Adams Street.
The Washington Post Company sold off WMBR-AM-FM in 1958 but kept the
television station, whose call-sign it changed to the current WJXT. In 1951, Windsor
Bissell, who had been in radio, became a cameraman and then the producer for
WMBR.

When I began my career at WJXT, Windsor was unfailingly patient and knowledgeable
as he instructed me on assembling graphics for the weather segments of the news and
offering me advice on how to use film, slides, and videotape in addition to my delivery
in front of the camera. From his special programs, like “Government by Gaslight,” I
was impressed how he created a unique reality of the city in the studio. When a
background was inserted on a blue, or green, screen in the television called
Chroma-Key, we perfected the presentation by pre-taping the segment of a satellite
picture and inserting it into the live weather program.

According to Windsor, when Bill Grove was hired by WMBR-TV in the fall of 1952,
there was no news department. Any form of news was in broadcast interruptions as
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