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Retired broadcast journalist watched a century unfold
By CARY L. WILLIAMS FOREST HILLS -- To hear his wife tell it, Bob Sullivan is not easily impressed. He sports a been-there, done-that attitude that, in his case, is well deserved. Now retired, he's a veteran of the early days of television journalism whose souvenirs include snapshots of himself with Fidel Castro, Barbara Walters and Richard Nixon. He has witnessed the world and the way the medium covers it since the black-and-white days of the 1950s. His impression of Castro, whom he met in the 1970s? "Well, he was a politician," Sullivan says dismissively. He had a similar assessment of Richard Nixon, whose presidential campaign he covered in 1968. A native of Tampa, Sullivan landed a job in 1958 in Miami as a field crew sound engineer for CBS, and later, ABC News. He remembers a technology radically different from today's. Everything was captured on film -- no videotape mini-cameras, no instant live pictures, no 24-hour cable news channels, and no giant corporate mergers. But news was news, and some stories almost cost Sullivan his life. On August 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille had Sullivan and his fellow ABC crewmembers scrambling for shelter near Gulfport, Mississippi. "We had a flat tire on the way," Sullivan said. With conditions worsening, they made their way to a Holiday Inn on the Gulf of Mexico. "We got a room on the second floor," said Sullivan. In the middle of the night they heard "things going thump...thump on the floor." Under the floor, to be precise. The entire ground floor had flooded and furniture had floated up to the ceiling. "When we went downstairs the next morning, there was nothin' in the lobby," he said. "Nothin'." Not far from the hotel's swimming pool was a grounded ocean freighter. They rescued the camera and film the night before, but the sound equipment was still in the car, drenched in saltwater. When the footage finally ran on television, "it was silent video," he said. He recalls another close call in 1965, when he and ABC cameraman Steve Stanford found themselves at the outer fringe of a demonstration in the Dominican Republic. Sullivan heard gunshots, and a still photographer captured the moment. In the lower left corner, Sullivan is seen holding a large microphone. Next to him: cameraman Stanford. In the center of the photograph, dozens of frantic people are running in all directions. Some died in the gunfire, he said, although Stanford did not get a "cutaway" shot that would have shown the shooters. "I'm glad he didn't get it, 'cause we'd be dead," Sullivan said. Sullivan covered most of the early launches from Cape Canaveral, beginning with the Vanguard rockets. "They wouldn't let us near those," he said. "I remember one of them got off the ground just a little, then it settled back and blew up." With the beginning of the manned space missions, NASA finally opened its doors to the media, and Sullivan was at the Cape to record the voyages of Allan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and eventually, the Apollo moon rockets. He also traveled to Cuba with ABC News correspondent Barbara Walters to interview Fidel Castro. It was the late 1970s, and Sullivan recalls a night when Castro entertained them at a mountain retreat. "The next day, a Russian helicopter, with a Russian pilot, flew us (Castro, Walters, and Sullivan) to Havana," he said. After leaving ABC in 1978, Sullivan worked at the Tampa Theatre and the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center as a stage hand. An on-the-job injury put him into permanent retirement five years ago. Since then, he has lived a quiet life with Ada Sullivan, his wife of 54 years. His reputation endures, long after his retirement from television. When he wasn't feeling so well a few years back, flowers arrived at his home along with a personally signed photo from ABC News anchorman Ted Koppel that bore the message: "To Sully -- get well -- or else." He occasionally watches news shows. His favorite stations are CNN and MSNBC, although he has mixed feelings about modern day programming. "I think it's fantastic," he said. "But they have so much air time to fill that they wind up covering every little thing. And when something remotely big happens, that's all you hear about for hours and hours."
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