The Presidential vacation in Texas

Crawford,  Texas      August 2001

Here is the pacsat truck in Crawford Texas.  After a few days of getting things together we put up a tent and were ready for the business of news.  We are parked in front of the Crawford elementary school and the work space is behind the brick wall in the old gym.  Tom came in from from seattle to help out in the 100 degree plus weather.  Tom and I set up 3 live locations outside, podium camera, tape feed deck, and could transmit any 2 sources at the same time.  Here I am rolling up some cable.  The bottom 2 photos show the workspace.  On the left is the podium for the presidential press secretary.  Bush will not speak here but if there is any other news from The White House they announce it here.  The tables will be filled with print reporters.  The TV camera was hooked into our truck so the press conferences could be live on TV and recorded in Washington DC and where ever else news people record things like this.  The right side photo is the television work space.  Each row of tables is for 1 network.  The front table is for the press pool the next tables are ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NBC.  Most of the time each of these networks would feed a tape through our truck for the nightly evening news.  Sitting at the table in front is Amy the pool producer.  All the networks got together to pay for 1 truck to sit in crawfor for the entire month.  Amy's job is to organize all the requests for the truck.  Who get to feed tape first, who gets the 7am live shot and who will settel for 7:15.  Then she would tell us in the truck which camera to punch out and when.  I helped set this up, then drove out to Houston for the Yates trial, and then back here for some more Texas fun.