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(On the recent passing of Temple University professor John Roberts)
I was an 18-year-old communications major at Temple University in 1956 when I first met professor John Roberts. If my memory is correct, the course he taught in freshman year was Radio 43. Upon meeting him, I was impressed, even if he probably wasn’t. After all, Roberts wasn’t any fuzzy-headed academic. He was a real television newscaster at Channel 6. Those of us who dreamed of going into the business didn’t often get to interact with someone who was actually on the air. Roberts with his good looks and mellifluous voice was as impressed with himself as we were. Who knew that I was looking at the forerunner of Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Roberts was ready for the challenge. He would mold us, his pupils with our nasal Philadelphia accents, our bursting little egos, and our wildly optimistic dreams, into broadcasters. In his classes, the good professor would regale us with his insider tales of the world of television. Roberts was the TV weekend news anchor on Channel 6, which boasted Gunnar Back as its main guy. Back had the unhappy fortune of having to compete with John Facenda on Channel 10. Back played it straight. His big shtick was to sign off by saying “Back with the news tomorrow.” Roberts told us that Back was a real journalist while Facenda was just good at reading scripts someone else wrote for him. We secretly watched Facenda and ignored Back just like most of the other TV viewers in the Delaware Valley.
I remember Roberts also telling us that then-President Eisenhower had such poor syntax that the TV news networks had to edit his speeches just so folks could understand him in the news clips. What would be a frightening prospect today — editing a president’s speeches for public consumption — didn’t make the slightest dent on our cotton-candy brains.
Roberts liked to fancy himself an expert on speech dialects. He boasted that just by listening to us read a few lines of a commercial he could tell what area of the country we hailed from. In those days, the overwhelming number of Temple students came from Philadelphia or its surrounding suburbs, so that didn’t seem to be that difficult a feat. However, Roberts gathered us together to prove his point. Each of us dutifully read a few lines of script while the good professor shouted out our hometown. When it came to my turn, I dug deep for what I thought was my best impersonation of Vin Scully (baseball voice of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers). Roberts stopped me after a couple of lines and told me that he perceived a trace of Southern dialect in my speech.
“What part of the South are you from originally?” he asked me confidently.
“South Philadelphia,” I answered and the class cracked up.
Our professor was undaunted and moved right on to the next student.
In our senior year, Roberts taught a class on using a television news film camera. We were teamed in pairs and assigned one of the buildings on the university’s then-concrete campus and told to film it, write a script, and, for all intents and purposes, make a mini-documentary. All through the semester, we toiled at filming the various assigned buildings, trying to figure out how in the world we could make our project interesting. Finally as the semester was nearing its end, we gathered with Roberts to view just what it was we filmed. That was when he blithely told us that the film in the cameras had been overexposed, but we received passing grades, and after all, that was basically what we were worried about anyway. Had we been misled? Was it just a colossal blunder? The mystery still echoes through the ages.
Our collegiate years passed quickly. The fun and games were over. It was time to leave the sanctuary of make-believe radio and television for the real world. We were confident. The world was waiting breathlessly for our talent. We soon found that none of the local outlets were interested in us at all. The want ads in Broadcasting Magazine directed us to far-flung places such as Lafayette, La. and Hastings, Neb. But even those stations returned our audition tapes with form letter rejections. The Temple job placement service was not geared for its communications graduates. I was referred to Korvettes, the Best Buy of that era. The “broadcast” job turned out to be shouting over the loudspeaker, “Today’s sale is stemware.”
I went to see Roberts. He said, “I’ve got just the job for you at a station in York, Pennsylvania.” I dutifully sent an audition tape to York and expectantly awaited a reply. I received a phone call from a very confused program director at the station. He told me that he didn’t understand why he was receiving all these tapes from Temple students when the job had been filled six years ago.
I went back to see Roberts. Somehow he explained away the York fiasco with a smile on his face. He was ready with another suggestion. In ’60, we were still subject to the military draft. “Join the service,” he told me.
And I did.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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