Greg Bowler was a broadcast / film professor at the University of Maine at Orono.
The Mission Orono Maine’s Beverage Warehouse For Hydration. My black and white film partner Andy Kosinski and I loved his classes. Especially when animation was the project Mr. Bowler taught the class. Handing out one hundred feet of black and white 16 mm film and telling us to have fun.
Most of the animation projects our classmates created were the here’s an orange. Watch the knife saw through the fruit simple.
I worked at WABI radio and television in Bangor Maine at the time during college so had access to lots of editing gear. Plenty of extra film footage bonus ingredients to add some razzle dazzle to the production.
Andy’s dad direct from Poland had always had more than a mild fascination with film. And that expertise with 8 mm filming from experimentation over the years helped our productions as a partner with his son Andy too.
So instead of the orange, we got Andy’s roomate Ron Rojas to put on a Mr Goodwrench mechanic’s jump suit.
We splurged from the limited film budget and purchased a lunar patrol helmet from Kmart. Fashioned a dorm size refrigerator box in to a cylinder shape that we covered with tinfoil. Placed hooks on the back and ran forty pound fishing line outback in the yard in Brewer where Andy’s parents lived. With the “space ship” hoisted high and the sixteen mm camera set up on a tripod, I would click, expose one frame. Andy would move the alien craft down the fish line a few feet, stop and I would repeat the process. Until it “landed”.
Then Ron the captain of the ship would roll out from behind it in sequence captured one frame at a time. Move, stop, move more, stop and so on. Then standing up, we had Ron jump high. In the air the black and white camera would only capture Ron off the ground. His hands up, elbows pointing where we had him “levitate”. And the direction he would move as he headed to the Beverage Warehouse in downtown Orono Maine.
The best animation trick was having Captain Ron who sported an eerie smile for the first installment of “Space Critter” fly through glass.
Facing, up against the front door to the store frequented by mostly college kids. Then Ron jumping, the camera catching him off the ground. And then stopping the filming, having Ron go inside, backing up to the glass door and jumping while we filmed him off the ground. Neat effect when the film was edited, in the can and replayed for the class.
Another film exercise started out to be the life of a lonely Bangor Maine cab driver. Story boarded with some night scenes as he waits. Smoking, listening to the jazz, blues radio. Killing time before his next fare. But a fire engine’s sirens, lights came on the scene. As we pulled off the Orono campus of the University of Maine. Causing Andy and I to make a quick executive field decision for a change of film locations.
The fire on the street north of the Stillwater River near the University of Maine at Orono mother campus was excellent real world news footage.
But the school bus pullling up to the curb and letting off the kids who lived there was very emotional, sad to watch unfold. As the kids looked at the burning, smoking house and Andy, I both thought what that scene would feel like. If the Maine house a blaze, smoldering was our own family home. Maine, learn more about her. Watch our Maine community videos…shaped a little by my partnership with Andy in college a view years back.
Four Seasons Beauty, The Major Ingredient Of What We Sell.
The blogs we write about Maine properties, the local community flavor, videos we shoot, edit, post in marketing real estate now started with radio.
Broadcasting in a small market like a Houlton, Maine was a great job for a fourteen year old farm boy. The station WHOU, and two others in Calais and Millinocket Maine, were owned by early television pioneer Howdy Doody (Buffalo Bob) who had a summer place in Princeton ME.
My job as a one-man show was do everything from spin tunes, find lost dogs and cats, take out the trash, make sure the transmitter was turned to low power during lightning, and rip/read the news, sports, weather.
The Associated Press machine chattered and spit out the news. I always thought it odd that 99% of the news we broadcast was for starters, just read and not in the news makers own words. And two, mainly copy on events in the Maine cities and around the world. But not local. We had a station bunker bomb shelter constructed back in the cold war days. I thought if there was ever a nuclear attack at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, no one locally would know until it came over the wire. News locally went unreported unless called in to the AP and re-routed back to the announcer. If they took the time to check the wire.
When I entered college at the University of Maine at Orono, I landed a job at WLBZ radio 620 on outer Broadway in Bangor, Maine. Station manager Eddie Owen specifically sought employees from “The County”.
He figured my growing up on the farm meant I knew how to work, and I liked it. He was right.
WLBZ radio was just coming off an all-news format that had not scored well in the Bangor market Arbitron ratings. As we struggled to find a niche, a following on the return to the music dial, our news roots carried over in being more than a rip and read AP robot. Sound bites from the news makers themselves were aired. We would rewrite and edit three or four paragraphs down to two. Adding a local angle for home grown flavor and appeal, sparkle.
We had lots of local news aired around the clock in Bangor involving all the satellite towns, making us different. We were worth listening to. Besides our setup, only newspapers and television outlets were covering the local beat. I worked throughout the year, racking up many radio hours. I also attended UMO where I earned a broadcasting degree with heavy concentration in speech, film and advertising/marketing journalism courses.
WABI radio program director George Hale offered me more pay at a higher-rated station with the chance to get in to commercial production. I remember being the TV voice of the horse used in a series of Jack and Jean outlets around Bangor. Because channel 5 and sister country station WBGW were at the same facility, the option to learn more was all around me. The film animation courses I took at UMO came out so much more professional due to the access to editing and other enhancements at “Studio City” at 35 Hildredth Avenue near Pilot’s Grill. I was able to do every air shift. I even had to spend the night a few times. One morning, I had to open up the station for George Hale due to a major snowstorm that caused state police to order traffic off the road.
Eventually “Humble But None The Less Mighty John Marshall” called me while I was on the air at WABI. He offered me a job to come back to a new Z-62– A rock station with many of the former employees of WGUY that had come across town to breath new life in to the old WLBZ, Then WACZ and now WZON. I spun records as Andy Powers, and news as Andrew Powers. The new last “air” name– thought up by Mighty John–was meant to impress the president of Maine Broadcasting with that also shared my new last name.
I remember rolling in before 5 AM to get the station news ready for Mike Ohara, Tim Comer and eventually Mighty John. When news of a fire at the Greyhound bus stop and The Phoenix in downtown Bangor Maine hit the scanner after one newscast, I fired up my Pinto.
I raced downtown with a portable cassette recorder and microphone to capture the event’s fire engine sirens, the clanging of busy fire fighters and to interview the chief.
Later, I would learn it was an electrical fire, and two fire fighters developed smoke inhalation. A cat and a dog in an apartment had died.
Next, it was a race back to the station–Edit the sound bite–Write the wrap around copy. You did not hear me say “Bangor Fire Chief Daigle says this or that.” I would lead in with “Bangor Fire Chief Leo Daigle” and he would say the fire started on the second floor, “When we got to the blaze, the second floor was pretty much smoke filled, and the cold temperatures hampered our efforts to get water where we wanted it.” The sound bite was blended with natural event audio that put the listener at the scene with live captured sounds. Sirens in the background, windows being cleared, broken glass sound, fire fighters shouting and the fire venting process under way.
Barry Hobart, another Houlton boy that was the station’s sales manager, said he was stuck on the new third Bangor Brewer bridge in traffic, wondering what all the smoke was. Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” ended and the lead in story on his radio was the Z’s Bangor Fire Chief explaining what the hub bub was… and where all that smoke was coming from that Barry was wondering about. The best compliment was when he asked how did I get down to capture it, back to edit and air in in the less than 30 minutes between newscasts? I smiled and said “I’m from the County and hustle is something you and I learned growing up”. He grinned.
People tuned in listen to our news, even when they did not necessarily like our rock music. Our quarter hour ratings were off the scale because of this loyal “news” audience following. Our morning man Mike Ohara was from Houlton, Maine, too, just like Dale Duff, Pete Chambers, John Elliot and Mike Dow who worked the Bangor market. I also ran TV 2 camera for Eddie Driscoll and did the 6 o’clock news with Bill Green, Don Carrigan et al.
Suddenly, I realized I loved broadcasting, but to move up the ladder meant relocating every two years to places like WPRO in Providence, Rhode Island, and WRKO in Boston. I interviewed and was to be hired for a job at a Brunswick Maine station WIGY. But I had married a Bangor lady and decided I did not want our kids to grow up in the move to eventually outside of Maine. So, I took my real estate courses in Bangor, and for the last thirty years have listed, marketed, and sold real estate in Houlton ME. The broadcasting background and education from UMO served me well as video is taking over real estate promotion.
In 1980, the market was local. Your property buyers home grown, in the same town the property was parked. Now, the real estate playing field is worldwide. Instead of selling just the sticks and bricks, the area needs to be promoted to someone that has never been to Maine before. Local videos of sports, canoe races, local churches, the area banks, the hospital, soap box derby races all needed to be shot, edited, uploaded. I have close to 400 youtube videos and populate other sites along with posts on over 80 social media platforms we populated along with the blogs, podcasts, vidcasts. Here is a 9000 view example of the local Northern Maine Soap Box Derby Race, the largest for five years in a row in the entire nation. And here is a local hockey game video between two rival hockey teams, the Houlton Hodgdon Blackhawks and Presque Isle Wildcats. And one video showing how we sell Houlton Maine real estate.
The best program director that I learned the most from in Radio was Mighty John Marshall. It is not cocky if you can do it with his handle “Humble But None The Less Mighty John”. He handed us a dozen-page broadcasting “bible” much of which was from WJBQ, WLOB stints, gigs he had earlier in his Maine broadcasting career. It had advice for on air…don’t complain. Never tell customers to stay off the road on their way in a snowstorm to shop with the guy who pays your salary with his ad sales campaign that is underway during your shift. Never, never have dead air. Keep the levels hot. Talk less. Know what you are going to say, and when on the hour. And play the tunes, entertain, inform.
