Quent Neufeld Newsman/Announcer
62 WHEN Radio - Syracuse, NY

"In His Own Words"

I am a retired former network news producer living in Oregon. And I just completed my memoir entitled "My Lifetime in Broadcasting and Growing Up in Minnesota." It details how I started as a teenage radio announcer in South Dakota, then moved on to Syracuse where I worked as a reporter at WHEN. From there to Minneapolis where I was both a reporter the assistant news director. And finally to LA where I traveled the world, first as a producer for the CBS Evening News first with Walter Cronkite and then Dan Rather.

WHEN - Syracuse, NY - 1962-1966

We've never been poorer than when we arrived in Syracuse for grad school. I at least had an assistantship to work with undergrads at WAER (the campus educational FM station), but Bee had to pay full tuition. Then, as luck would have it, we met John Scott, the program director for the local CBS radio station, at our church. He needed a weekend announcer. So, during my year-long Radio-Television Masters Program I supplemented our meager income by signing on WHEN Radio every Sunday morning.

The station had a complicated remote dialing device for turning on the transmitter, something I had no experience with. Nervous about it, I went in extra early every Sunday, then once I was sure it was on, I'd check the newswires and prepare a sign-on newscast. One Sunday I was at the console rehearsing when I noticed I'd accidentally opened the mic. It worried me, but no one ever mentioned it until months later when we were having dinner with one of Bee's professors. He and his wife said they'd been amused, while still in bed, to overhear me mumbling the news before sign-on.

I became a full-time announcer at WHEN after my year of grad school. Again, I did a little of everything, like filling in for the long-time morning man Dean Harris and others on vacation. I was the "color man" during play-by-play coverage of the city basketball playoffs. And I did more and more news, initially just for radio, but since WHEN was also a television affiliate I began doing news for television broadcasts as well.

And once, when both of the regular anchors were out of town, I even got to do the 11 o'clock TV news on a weekend night. It meant writing the entire show myself - something I routinely did for radio on the other side of the newsroom, but which also required that I splice about ten silent film strips of local news events together for the broadcast. Tricky for a first -timer, I got them out of order. I believe I did an adequate job on the air, but, of course, did it without any video. I was braced for the worst on Monday morning, but it only came up briefly when one of my bosses casually asked what had happened. I said I'd screwed up the film order. "Oh, just wondering," he said. It was a different age, indeed.

As in Sioux Falls, radio played second fiddle here too. I was typically alone in the newsroom all morning until the TV guys came in midday. I'd get up at 4 a.m., stop at the police station to check the overnight crime blotter on the way to work, make a few calls, clear the newswires, then write and deliver all the newscasts. So as usual there was no one else around in the morning when the station's general manager called to say, "Robert Kennedy is on his way in for an interview." When I informed him that I was all alone, he added, "Then you'll have to do it." President Kennedy had been assassinated a year before and now his brother was running for the US Senate seat representing New York. Local reporters had complained that interview requests had been ignored by Kennedy on several previous Syracuse campaign stops - perhaps this was a response. In any case, it was a big deal as TV technicians scrambled to light the studio and fire up the cameras. An obviously impatient Kennedy and his entourage arrived before we were ready to start the taping. I was young, intimidated and nervous, and he was uncomfortable making small talk while we waited. I think I asked all the right questions when we finally began, which he answered politely. But the experience did nothing to dispel my perception of him as a ruthless politician. Only decades later did I come to appreciate what his contribution to the country might have been.

In my nearly four years at the station, I covered city and county government, sometimes interviewed state legislators for one of our programs, and had a role in both our radio and TV local coverage of the '64 Johnson-Goldwater election. I was also on the Syracuse University campus as a local reporter when President Lyndon Johnson made his fateful Gulf of Tonkin speech that drew the country deeper into Vietnam. The Civil Rights Movement was also in full swing with considerable turmoil in Syracuse giving city officials headaches. I was in the mayor's office one day as he complained about protests being stirred up by a couple of female community organizers from the university. I didn't have the nerve to tell him that I knew one of these social justice advocates very well - Bee.

My most rewarding experience at the station was during the blizzard of '66 that, as I remember, dumped 64 inches of snow on Syracuse, shutting the city down. We were all booked into a motel near the station after the storm began on a Sunday. I didn't get home again to see Bee and our son Kim until midweek, and then just to deliver diapers. With only three television stations in town, we had a captive audience since schools were closed, along with the university, big companies like GE - absolutely everybody. We went to full -time storm coverage on radio including my live helicopter reports. This was long before remote TV cameras, but I also did live shots outside the open studio door during the storm, plus countless film stories. WHEN even won editorial praise after the storm from the two daily Newhouse papers which also owned our main broadcast competitor.

When I started working at the station it seemed to me to be a cumbersome arrangement - all the news photographers worked, not for WHEN, but for a private company with an irascible owner. Nevertheless, he had some excellent cameramen, the most talented was Cos Santangelo, someone I did many stories with and who became a good friend. We visited Cos when we took a trip to New York several years ago. He passed away in 2023.

Without my experience at WHEN I would not have been hired at the WCCO in Minneapolis and certainly not CBS News where I would spend the next 25 years.

Jun 2024