Chicken Truck turned into ABC News edit van
It was on this day 104 years ago that Anwar Sadat, the third president of Egypt, was born. I remember him well from a 1977 Christmas visit I made to Egypt for ABC News in the continuing effort to find peace in the Middle East.
I was recently cataloguing some old photos from that trip 45 years ago and ran across a few memorable images. We were at Ismailia on the western bank of the Suez Canal. Sadat invited some of the media, including myself, to his vacation house.
There we were offered very strong hashish and a special variety of Egyptian bottled beer. At first, we were nervous about the hashish since there was a death penalty sentence for possessing it in Egypt at the time. But since it came from the president himself, we became comfortable with it (especially after we got very high).
The beer was excellent, until one of Sadat’s aides told us they had finally perfected putting the caps on the bottles without creating broken glass in the beer. Earlier attempts at bottling had put drinkers of the beer in the hospital. That comment stopped us cold!
Sadat was completely charming and welcomed us to his country royally. But viewing the images from that time, I realized it was also a very different age.
We had come with huge amounts of gear — so much that it boggles the mind today. At the time, it was less than three years into the ENG (electronic news gathering) revolution. The networks mainly abandoned 16mm film for electronic video in 1975 and back then most were still renting crews and electronic gear from freelancers like myself.
In those days, a video equipment package for network use was huge and cost more than $100,000 per camera system. And because the gear was so unreliable, backups and sometimes triplicates were needed for essential components.
This trip began in late November, 1977 at the time when Sadat invited Israeli Premier Menachem Begin to Egypt in their continuing efforts to find peace in the Middle East. The meetings were not held in Cairo, but at Ismailia. It was the middle of the desert and the television networks had to scramble to find facilities to get on the air.
ABC News rented an old chicken truck from a farmer and painted it blue on the outside, covering the rest with ABC stickers and wrapping material. It was be turned into our mobile edit bay for the peace talks.
Inside, the editing equipment came from my company, Television Matrix, based in Miami at the time. The edit controller was the world’s first Sony RM-440, delivered only the day before myself and the other crew members left on the flight for Egypt. I remember reading the manual to learn how to use that controller on the flight over — praying it would work. (It did!)
Note in the image inside the “edit van,” there’s a Microtime Time Base Corrector. It was a huge piece of rack-mountable gear back then. All time base correctors were so unreliable at the time that several units were always brought along to protect against failure, since time base correction was essential for feeding video from remote locations.
In later years, I learned why time base correctors were so unreliable. Microtime had no shaker table to test their gear at the factory. They built it to sit in racks, not for rough and tumble air travel like we were doing.
When they finally got a shaker table, they confirmed what networks crews around the world already knew. The units would fail every time. It was an “ah-ha” moment for the engineers building the gear. Today, time base correctors are forgotten, now reduced to a single chip costing pennies inside a camera.
Modern “one-man-band” video crews also find it astounding how much gear was once necessary for even a simple network-level video shoot. We always traveled with at least twenty Anvil cases and usually more, depending on the trip. In one photo, our gear was being taken to the airport in Cairo after the Begin-Sadat talks for the flight home.
In those days, airlines took pity on news crews. Rarely were we charged excess baggage for all these cases.
Crews always flew First Class and the networks purchased a second First Class seat for tube-based television cameras. The reason was to keep the tubes in registration so the camera would be ready to use when we hit the ground.
How times have changed!
Inside the chicken truck
Going home