| This is the equipment set-up at the Marriott Hotel in Rochester Minnesota.
(right) On the roof is the dish pointing at GE-5. The blue tarp behind
it covers the HPAs. It is sitting on big pieces of wood because the
roof is made of rubber, just under the rocks on top. (below) this
is our studio. Well it is a hotel room in the hotel with everything
taken out. From the chair in the middle Billy Graham can talk, via
satellite to the Amsterdam 2000 conference in Holland. (below right)
this is the Master Control Room (MCR) this is where I worked for a week.
In this room I have control over the receivers and what is being transmitted.
My main responsibility for the week I was here is to record 4 hours of
the conference, so Mr. Graham can watch them. We also had a big TV
set up in his room so he could watch the feeds live if he wished.
I transmitted him to the conference only twice for the opening ceremony
and the closing ceremony. |
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| Here are some pictures with people in them. Here I am in the
master control. Yes that is a bit of breakfast on the chair.
Below This is the crew when we went live. Top row is Charlie the
Make-Up man and Steve V. He ran camera and lights. Bottom row Kristi
on the prompter, Billy Graham, and me. Below right is Billy and his
2 assistants. In the blue shirt is Maury he is the person I dealt
with the most, on the right is David Both of these guys are
the nicest people I have ever met and their job is to do any thing Mr.
G wants. I finally pried them away for a nice dinner on the last
night of our job. |
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| While I was in town I had a chance to get out a little bit and went
to the Olmstead County Fail. I thought it would be really fun
to go to a smaller county fair but it turns out it is like any other state
or county fair just on a different scale. Some of the fun things
I found were (up right) the local power company doing their demonstration
on how dangerous electric wires can be. (right) This is a water tower
near the fair grounds. It is actually used for some sort of manufacturing
plant but I thought the corn look was really neat. In my tours around
the state I saw many many corn fields growing. |
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Being this close to Minneapolis I had to visit the Mall of America.
It was a very big mall. (above left) this picture has the flume ride,
roller coaster, and a couple of spinning rides. The coaster has no
loops in it there for not worth riding. There was also a Lego Land(above)
I liked this a lot. I have always like Lego but I never had this
many, or this much time to play with them. The whole Lego display
was all 4 stories tall. The rest of the mall was filled with all
the usual mall stores, including 3 stores devoted to NASCAR. I thought
that was a lot. For the TV types, I found the KSTP Broadcast Center.(left)
Although no broadcasting actually happens here they do sell station logo
stuff and lots of the ABC merchandise. The local PBS store was also
in the mall. I was impressed. |
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I also found the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. (left)
I had to try out the Phrenology Machine. This machine "reads" the
bumps on my head and tell me all about 32 different mental faculties including
individuality, hope, friendship, faith, and inhabitiveness. The machine
is old and it was just my luck that it broke down during my reading so
I cannot tell you just how much hope I hold. (below left) Stephen
was the museum guy that hooked me in to the phrenology machine then he
showed me a Hamilton Beach(HB) Vibrator. He said this sex toy uses
the exact same motor that HB used on the blender it manufactured that same
year. (below) these are vacuum pumps. The pink one is for the
girls and the white one for the boys. The girls were to use them
to enlarge their breasts. The men used the same technology on their
heads to stimulate hair follicles to grow back or keep growing. There
were also 40-50 more gadgets mostly from the 30s-50s with lots of dials
and knobs on them to cure all types of ills. I could look into many
of these boxes and the dials and knobs were not even hooked up, never been.
I recommend this museum to anyone visiting the area. |
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