Gerald Ford and the Airport Ambush

 By Mike Tully

 John Paul looked like a man who had just been given a week to live.  The film from Gerald Ford’s news conference in 1967 had just come back from Arnie’s lab and it was entirely blank.  There was sound on the optical sound track of the 16 millimeter film, but no picture at all.  John, who was the weekend anchor at KGUN-TV, Channel Nine, had diligently prepared to interview the Minority Leader of the U. S. House of Representatives.  He had read articles, written down questions, picked out his best suit and asked a couple of salient questions.  All the while the lens cap remained securely fastened on the camera.

“Mac is going to kill me,” said John to nobody in particular.  “Mac” was Mac Marshall, the hard-drinking silvery dean of Tucson newscasters.  The 1960s gave us a remarkably interesting gallery of television news anchors, like Mac Marshall, George Borozan, Hank Hubbard, Dick Mayers and John Cardis.  All of them were characters and a couple of them – Mac and George come to mind – had a temper like a javelina.

They were strong-willed men who read news from written scripts and the occasional flip card before the days of Teleprompters.  The sets were ridiculously dingy.  The KGUN news set consisted of an orange burlap cloth that hung from a drab grey frame.  Mac and John would deliver the news standing at a podium and staring directly into the camera.  They were pros and pulled it off.  When a new anchor arrived, the newscast resembled a hostage tape until he (always he in the 1960s) got used to the surroundings.  There were two cameras in the studio, both black and white.  The color cameras were more than a year away.

Channel Nine’s studio was located in a large red brick building that still sits on the west side of Sixth Avenue, just north of Grant Road.  The studio was huge by Tucson standards and had a lift in the center.  Visitors were impressed that a small TV station in a small town had a lift.  The reason was not exactly inspiring.  Since the first owners of the station were not sure that Tucson could support a third television outlet, they constructed a building that would serve as a warehouse in case the station went broke.

The newsroom was framed by two-by-fours and plywood and housed several desks and two noisy wire service machines from AP and UPI.  On Saturday evening, John and Greg Cooper (his TV name—his real name was Gary Cooper) would crank out copy for the ten o’clock newscast.  One of the odd traditions of television news in the 1960s was the habit of finishing the script as late as possible.  The first time I saw Mac Marshall running from the newsroom to the studio at full speed during the format open, then stop at the podium and take a deep breath, I thought it was the most unusual thing I had ever seen.  I soon got used to it.  Local television news was shabby, reckless, on the edge, and sometimes crazy things happened, like leaving the lens cap on the camera during an important news conference.

I was a teenaged cameraman, working at my first media job.  I was living a dream.  I took a seventeen-unit load as a University of Arizona freshman and worked seven evenings a week running a camera during the evening newscasts.  I also helped with graphics, which meant I taped black-and-white photographs to a free-standing shower door.  Some of the photographs were slightly tilted because, as I said, everything was rushed at the last minute.

So there I was with John and Greg in the dingy KGUN newsroom, pondering the future eruption of Mount St. Mac, when somebody came up with a possible solution.  If, by some miracle, Gerald Ford had booked a late flight back to Washington, then it might be possible to interview him before he left.  Not only would that replace the botched film from the news conference, it would also be an exclusive.  An exclusive was the holy grail of local news.

Somehow, John knew that Ford was staying at a motel near the airport and called him.  He identified himself and asked to be put through to Congressman Ford’s room.  It was nearly eleven o’clock at night.  A sleepy voice, probably that of an aide, answered the phone.  John asked if he could speak with Congressman Ford.  “This is Congressman Ford,” said the sleepy voice.  There was no aide, no entourage of any kind, just a bleary Congressman who was desperately trying to get in a couple of hours of sleep before his red-eye back to Washington.  John, who was dumbstruck by inadvertently waking up the Congressman, asked if he could conduct an interview at the airport.  Ford, not really awake, said yes and hung up.  John, Greg, and I grabbed the camera and headed for the airport.

Tucson International Airport was still new and quite different from the sprawling, glistening center one flies out of these days.  Nearly every part of the terminal was freely accessible.  The concourses were shorter and there was an outdoor sidewalk on the runway side, as well as corridors with blank white walls that led to the gates.  The corridor that led to the concourse had a right angle turn on the way to the gates from the ticket counters.  We decided to set up the camera and interview location just beyond the right-angle turn.  It was a blind corner, the perfect location for an ambush.

Each of us had a task.  John, of course, would conduct the interview.  Greg would operate the 16 millimeter camera and make sure the lens cap was off.  (We all checked to make sure.)  My job was to hold a cup of black coffee, which I would give to Congressman Ford as a sign of our civility.  Everything was set.

Then Gerald R. Ford, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, came around the blind corner, walking alone, toting a large suitcase in each hand.  He saw us and froze.  The suitcases hit the floor like bags of cement.  “Oh, fellas,” he said.  “Please!”  He had been in meetings and interviews all day, barely had time for an interrupted nap, and the last thing he wanted to do was submit to yet another interview by a team of goobers from a local TV station, even well-dressed goobers with a cup of hot coffee.

Needless to say, we felt like idiots.  We wanted to slink away, but there was no place to hide.  I held out the cup of coffee and Ford looked at me as if I were offering poison.  John stammered out an apology and told Ford about the lens cap and the potentially homicidal news director.  Greg tried his best to conceal himself behind the camera, and I drank the coffee.

Then, Gerry Ford, bless him, took pity on us.  We were, in fact, pitiable.  “All right,” he told John.  “Five minutes.”  He gave us ten.  Then it was over, John thanked him a hundred times, Greg thanked him, I stepped aside and Gerald Ford picked up his bags and disappeared into the concourse on his way to the red-eye flight home.

We had done it.  We got the interview with Ford and saved John’s job, if not his life.  John loosened his tie, Greg began to pack away the camera, and I crushed the coffee cup in my hand.  “Shit,” John said.  “We did it.”  Then we returned the camera to the station and had a few beers before the bars closed.

The next time I saw Gerald Ford was when he was President and I was Assistant News Director at KOPO radio.  He had met with Mexican President Luis Echeverria and the two of them conducted a news conference at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base before Ford returned to Washington.  I sat at a dais some distance from the podium with Don Jackson, our engineer, and anchored the coverage of the summit and news conference for about an hour.  Oddly enough, the only thing I can recall from the news conference was a moment during Ford’s remarks when Echeverria, slightly off-mike, asked an aide, “Que es un ‘Michigander?’”

After all these years, I have an answer:  one hell of a gentleman.

© December 28, 2006 by Mike Tully