I had just lost my TV news reporting job—Well, to be more precise, I had been fired from my TV reporting job. Publicly fired. Like in- the- newspaper-publicly. I hardly had any savings and my rent was coming up due. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and wondered just how did I get here? What had happened?
First of all, I’d moved from behind the camera to in front of it— sort of by accident —by necessity, really. I had studied in college to write for TV and Film and to work behind the camera and I did that during college. But later the only jobs I could find in the newsroom, where I wanted to work, were on-the-air. Since I had worked following a bunch of news reporters around, I figured with my Alfred E. Newman reasoning, that if some of the folks I’ve been working with could do News Reporting, so could I. How hard could it be? That’s the kind of girl I’ve always been —take a shot at it. So, I did.
Second of all, and, it’s happened to me once or twice before, things don’t always go as planned. Well in my case, there was this man at work. More precisely, a married man. Ugh. Just know, Yup, it got thick as mud. Even thicker. As thick as Chapapote.
Back to me losing it in front of my bedroom mirror after this brief linguistic aside. “Chapapote” is the word we Laredoans called tar or asphalt. It’s the Aztec word for Tar. The original “hot mess”. These digressions are the blue in the blue cheese. The mint in the mint julep. All the good stuff’s in the digressions. Bit of a cuentista in me. Storyteller. Maybe this tendency gives you a hint at why dry, factual TV news reporting was not working out for me.
Chapapote— Cool word, huh? Did you know you know some Nahuatl too? We can thank the Aztecs for Avocado, which comes from ahuacatl. Also thank the Aztec Nahuatl language for our tomato, guacamole, chili, cacao and best of all..chocolatl, which in Spanish is ’chocolate’, and in English is chopped to be chocolate.
Yay Nahuatl. Still spoken by millions in Mexico. So, not surprising the words had jumped across the river the way all kinds of our border culture jumps back and forth in the borderlands, the way its been since 10 thousand years ago when the Aztecs traded their goods with cultures all through the Great Lakes regions.
You may still want to know more about me and the married man— It was all just a hot, Chapapote mess —there won’t be much more about him. Only to say that once he and his wife became pregnant, I moved 150 miles away to San Antonio.
But let’s go back to Laredo first. I grew up there. In the 60’s, Reader’s Digest magazine, which was a big deal at the time, named Laredo the poorest city in the United States. That wasn’t any news to us. We knew how poor we were. Just look out the window onto our dirt streets. In Laredo, streets were an important topic. Besides the old western song “The Streets of Laredo”, the streets were rutted, caliche dust storms. Any vehicle no matter how slow going raised clouds of fine silt that drifted in doorways and windows and made it into every nook and cranny of our homes. We knew that things were not right. For sure not like the homes and neighborhoods we saw in movies and on TV.
Our mayor and the local political machine that ran the city were big time corrupt. Here’s an example: the mayor’s ranch outside Laredo had paved roads. For miles. Paid for by residents’ taxes. The streets in our neighborhood went unpaved and dusty for years until my mother and our neighbors arranged to pay for our own paving. Then there’s the heat. Our temperatures are so hot that the tar in the asphalt melts— and if you should find yourself walking around barefoot around for some reason, say poverty— the soles of your feet would get all sticky and stained with Chapapote.
As soon as I’d graduated from University, some of us returned to Laredo and worked for the local TV station. I got a job making signs to use in local commercials. My friend, Mark got a job as a cameraman and immediately went out and shot a news story about the sorry state of the streets of Laredo. He set his tripod in the back seat of a news car and filmed roller-coaster, dusty jarring footage of our unpaved streets of Laredo. His footage ran on the news at 6 that night. The mayor phoned the station raising a big fuss and the next day Mark was re-assigned from the news room to production where he got stuck shooting car lot commercials.
After stealing money from us for forty years, the mayor and his minions had become so corrupt that they got careless and got caught. Accounting irregularities in the millions—When the oligarchy finally crumbled, CBS Sixty Minutes came down to South Texas and they ran a segment showing our dummkopf mayor— who we dummkopf residents had kept electing — outright admitting what a crook he was. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Still don’t.
So, fast-forward past the married guy at the Laredo station, and now I’m working in the big city of San Antonio. This was the pre-cable, pre-Internet era, and TV was tops.
It was also the era of appointment television. If you wanted to watch a program, there was no DVR— you had to watch it when it was airing. It’s so different now in the age of streaming. In San Antonio, the station where I had worked had the highest ratings. If the TV was on, people were most likely watching us at 5, 6 and 10.
But now I was out the door and for me the glory was gone. I couldn't call up a city official and say, "Hello, this is Linda Cuellar, News Channel Five calling." All my clout was clouted over. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had to get used to it. At 27, I would soon be too old to get another TV job. No one would recognize me in the supermarket anymore. So, here I was fired. In public. In the paper. No picture with the article thankfully!
There were three of us that were fired —all of us women-- and two weeks later, two men took over our three jobs, sharing the extra salary between them. Three women out. Two men in. You do the math.
Here’s how I much later figured out how it all happened. First, however another brief digression to media history—
Remember this is before the Internet and audiences for the few stations in town were enormous. There was short supply of content and great demand from audiences. In 1980, one of our local anchors made a million dollars a year. For an example of how much smaller audiences are today, consider in 1980 the TV show Dallas had a 34.5 rating. This week's top show NCIS got a 7.5 rating. With limited supply and lots of demand, TV and radio stations operated their extremely lucrative private businesses using something they still use today which belong to the American people, the public airwaves. Internet and Cable don’t use the public airwaves, so they essentially are private businesses. Stations are licensed by the government to use the airwaves through The Federal Communications Commission. The FCC at the time favored stations that complied with affirmative action laws —Those were good days for women and minorities and I was a two-for! I had a university of Texas degree in radio TV film. I was bilingual. But it’s not what helped get me jobs in media. Stations got to check off two columns every time I hired on because I am both a woman and a minority. With the arrival of The new republican president that advantage disappeared. Reagan’s administration pulled the cord on affirmative action in the government and its agencies. Licenses weren’t going to be weighed against who they hired anymore.
That’s how three women were replaced by two men getting the salaries we had been earning.
After I lost my job in tv news I immediately took a news reporter announcer position at a radio station for a lot less money—But, it paid the rent.
Now, I did not make a great deal of money at my old TV job, but I was making even less at this radio job. Plus, I had to work a split shift announcing the news from midnight to 5 a.m. and then I’d go out in the heat of the afternoon to do live radio reports on traffic. I’d drive to the airport and board a clear, plastic bubble about the size of the cab of a small pick up --un-air-conditioned. Inside this roaring heat bubble I sat, cradling a Diet Coke between my knees to keep my tummy from getting nauseous. I’d always had sitting-in-the-backseat- nausea, riding-in-boats-nausea, carnival-ride nausea. Add helicopter nausea to the top of my nausea list. The helicopter pilot was a taciturn guy who had been bumped from doing the traffic reports when I came along. He certainly wasn’t in my corner. He had the not-too-much-confidence-inspiring name of Captain K. He flew us very competently around the reflective, steamy air space hovering over traffic on the winding circular freeways of San Antonio,Texas, average August temperature at 4 p.m. 104.
From inside this baking-in-the-heat whirlybird that roared from take off to landing at noise levels that I can only compare to being front-row center at two side by side heavy metal concerts, I had to monitor three things:
Number one, my Diet Coke. Number two, whatever the DJ at the radio station was playing or saying because every 6 to 8 minutes he would throw it to me to report about rush hour traffic as we flew over all the usual cluster of humanity in cars inching for home below us. I'd do this live, with no script. Not easy for me, the camera-person-turned-news reader to speak off the top of my head. My News Director, who had hired me, liked and encouraged me, but her programming counterpart, the Program Director not so much. I wasn't blonde and bouncy like he liked his women. But I have to admit, sometimes his criticism was justified. Sometimes I stumbled and stammered My rough edges were really showing some days. My Alfred E. Newman, "how hard could it be?" logic was not really working for me. Number three thing I had to monitor: the police radio channel. I had to listen carefully because that's how I learned about car accidents on streets all over town that I needed to warn drivers about avoiding. There were the usual street names like you'd find in any city. Names like Main, Broadway or the numbered ones. We also have streets with all sorts of names going back in the city's 300 year history. Names like Nacadoches, Flores, Alamo, Houston, San Pedro, Culebra, Bandera, Losoya, Durango, Blanco as well as street names that led to ranches like Jones Maltsberger, Callaghan, or Babcock.
The hot days passed one by one and the rent was being paid. My time with Captain K up in the whirlybird doing traffic reporting was getting easier and the program director at the station had stopped yelling at me every single afternoon. So things were looking up.
Then suddenly things took a turn for the worse. A huge truck on the freeway flipped over and dumped a load of asphalt across three lanes causing a massive traffic delay.
Well, I got so excited that day, something newsworthy had finally happened, that I referred to the contents of the truck not by the English terms “asphalt” or “tar” or even the Spanish term “brea” --as in the La Brea Tarpits in California--but by the Aztec term “chapopote" ——I said it just a few times on the air, but when I finished my report my program director went bananas — he screamed at me "Why are you always speaking Spanish on the air?" I answered, "What do you mean? "Chapopote" ? That isn't even Spanish! Do you mean each time I sign off with my name LINDA CUELLAR? Is that what you think I'm doing, speaking Spanish ? It’s my name, dude!!
It would take me a few days to finally catch on, but what the guy at the station yelling at me was saying-- in an indirect manner— because even he knew it was wrong-- was that he wanted to hear me pronounce Spanish street names with an English pronunciation instead of Spanish-- Blank-oh, Floor-es, Dure-ang-oh instead of Blahn-ko, Flo-ress and Du-rahn-goh. Too bad. I was pronouncing all words as well as I was able.
Between flying around like a sun-scorched Peter Pan in the heat above traffic and juggling way more than my upside down tummy could handle, both my time in-the-air and on-the-air was coming to an end. T’his time in a happy landing kind of way. In my usual how hard could it be approach, I applied for a new job, not coincidentally also located at the airport— working as a public relations manager for the airport.
When I got the phone call at home letting me know I’d been selected, I found out I'd beat out a ton of candidates because of my on-air experience and my in-the-air experience flying around in the heat trying to keep it together with Captain K. I rushed back to the mirror in the bedroom and jumped up and down like Mary Tyler Moore in the snow.
And my salary? Twice what it had been in my TV job —plus the newspaper wrote up a nice story about my being hired. And this time with the story about me there was a nice big photograph.
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