While watching "Good Night, and Good Luck," the excellent movie directed by George Clooney about Edward R. Murrow's and CBS News' confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R. Wis.) and the House of Un-American Activities hearings in the mid-1950s, a single moment in the film brought back some childhood memories of growing up in Encino.
The sight of the black and white CBS Eye, the network's logo which would precede most of its programming, made me think of life on Magnolia Boulevard and our neighbors, the Franklins and the Grahams.
Chuck Franklin was a cameraman and a technical director for CBS. He worked on a lot of specials and also "The Red Skelton Show." He also shot sports including football and the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. Brooks Graham was a technical director and later an executive producer. I used to run into him at the Coliseum press box at UCLA football games.
It didn't matter what the time of day was, when you walked into either the Franklin's house or the Graham's house, the TV sets would be on and tuned-in to a CBS program. There in black and white was the CBS Eye. Joy Graham, who was the daughter of Al Brick, a renowned cameraman for Movietone News, would never miss CBS' "The Early Show," a staple of the KNXT-TV's, CBS' affiliate in L.A., crop of daytime programming back then.
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add Al Brick: He shot the majority of news film of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 for Movietone, being at the right place at the right time on a dock across the bay from where the USS Arizona was moored. He was both lucky and good that morning. As his newsreel camera rolled, a bomb dropped by a Japanese plane landed a few feet away from him and bounced down the dock. It was a dud.
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