In 1982, I didn’t know the word for it. I only knew the feeling. But it was time to pick a college major, and that feeling stuck foremost in my mind.
I’d long watched The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson first with my parents when I was finally old enough to stay up that late, and then on my own. Hearing my folks laugh along with the live studio audience always infused my enjoyment of the show.
It was the opening that always caught me most: the camera taking you into the video control room. You see panels of monitors glowing in rows, a large control board scattered with flickering lights, knobs, levers, and switches. The room is dim, almost blue in its lighting. Hands move quickly across the console. Someone is calling camera shots. Cameras switch in rhythm, almost like music being played in real time, live, precise, alive with timing.
Somewhere in that blur was a board covered in buttons. And I wanted to sit there.
Not to be on camera. Not to be the voice. Just to be the one deciding what the audience saw next.
Years later I would learn the proper terms. The console is a video production switcher, and the person operating it is the technical director. What I had glimpsed was only one part of a larger system that included master control, the quieter final checkpoint where signals are monitored, routed, and prepared for transmission before they reach the world.
But back then it was just “that board on TV.” And I decided that was what I wanted to do for a living.
My father was a buyer for a Gulf Coast department store chain, and through his media contacts, he arranged a visit to KLFY-TV in Lafayette. I remember the smell of warm equipment, the dim control room light, and the sense of a world operating just behind what people saw at home. It felt real in a way television never had before.
The Image That Snapped It All Into Focus
While working on this memory, something remarkable happened thanks to the internet: I found the very image I had been trying to recall for decades, an image of the show’s title card from the Carson era. A production control room. Monitors glowing. A dense console of buttons and switches. A hand resting on the board while someone called the shots for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
It’s at the top of this article. I was especially happy it was still at that old 1980s video resolution. There’s a warmth to it, the soft glow of the CRT monitors, the slightly grainy quality, that feels so much more authentic than today’s high-definition sharpness. That lower-resolution image brought the memories flooding back exactly as I had carried them all these years.
Suddenly everything snapped into focus. That was it. That was the thing I had seen without knowing I had seen it. Not a vague impression anymore, but a real place. Real equipment. Real people doing real work in real time while millions saw something seamless on the other side of the screen.
LSU and the Noise of Everything Else
College was a series of pivots: a year at LSU of general studies and “Free Speech Alley,” followed by a transfer to NLU (now the University of Louisiana at Monroe) because they had something I finally recognized as a destination: a Mass Communications program. That name mattered. It gave shape to what had once just been fascination.
There, I learned the history behind the medium I had been watching since childhood. I learned about broadcasting not as magic, but as infrastructure. I learned about policy, networks, production, and the long argument over what television was for.
The Vast Wasteland
At NLU, we studied FCC chairman Newton Minow and his famous 1961 address to the National Association of Broadcasters, known as the “vast wasteland” speech. Even now, the language still carries weight:
“When television is good, nothing, not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers, nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”
Minow challenged broadcasters to sit down in front of their own station for an entire day, without books, magazines, or distractions, and really watch what was being offered to the public. What he described was not just criticism. It was a blunt call for honesty about how much of the airwaves was filled with formulaic shows, violence, and endless commercials when no one demanded better.
I didn’t know it then, but Minow was describing the very friction I would spend my life trying to resolve—the space between what is fed to an audience and what an audience actually needs. At the time, it felt like distant history. Decades later, it still feels uncomfortably current.
The Part Where Life Redirects
College did not unfold in a straight line. I stayed at LSU long enough to learn how easy it is to drift. I moved through NLU long enough to finally name what I was interested in. And then I went home, at my father’s suggestion, finished at McNeese State University, and began to narrow the path in a more practical direction.
By my senior year, I had met someone I would marry before graduation. But that’s a story for another day.
Broadcasting still lingered at the edges. I called stations across the region. I learned quickly that “entry level” often meant something closer to unpaid labor. I interviewed with a news editor at WAFB in Baton Rouge, carrying recommendations from an instructor who had once worked in network news out West. There was another opportunity on the Gulf Coast. It would have required skipping finals. I remember declining it, thinking I was being responsible. Now I recognize it as something simpler: I didn’t yet understand how the door actually worked.
Close, But Not Quite
The closest I ever came to that original vision was a small AM/FM station in my hometown. The control room was mostly automated by then, but I learned enough to cut a few commercials and keep things running. It paid the bills for a time.
From there I moved into newspaper production. That’s where I finally learned something that stayed useful for the rest of my working life: communication is never just content. It is process, timing, coordination, and constraint.
Eventually I stepped away from media altogether and entered public assistance work, where I would stay for more than three decades. It became a different kind of system to understand, less visible, more structured, still built on the movement of information between people who needed it and systems that had rules.
What Remains
Looking back, I didn’t become a technical director. But I never really left the control room either.
I learned how images are chosen, how sequences are built, how stories are assembled in real time. I learned it first with a switcher I could not yet name, then with VHS editing systems in school production rooms, and later in quieter forms of production work that didn’t resemble television at all.
I’ll always love the magic of TV in the 1980s, a time before we were constantly fed an endless stream of “reality.” Escapism. Back then, they played the game on Carson well, entertaining us and making us feel like we were seeing something real. It was a grand illusion, but one played so skillfully that it earned him a permanent place in television history and American hearts, along with Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart, and others.
I’ve been writing for decades, mostly self-taught, learning as I went, sometimes clumsy, sometimes surprisingly clear. Journalism never quite fit. What draws me is the space between things, between fact and memory, between observation and story, where nonfiction leans slightly toward fiction without letting go of what actually happened. In writing, I still find myself doing the two things I first saw at that board: choosing what the audience sees next, and managing the invisible process, timing, and coordination. Struggling to make it all feel seamless.
Even now, when I see a video production switcher, I feel that old feeling. Not nostalgia exactly, something closer to recognition. A sense that I once stood near a version of my life that could have unfolded differently, but not necessarily better.
I never got to sit at the board I saw in that 1982 opening montage of The Tonight Show. But I did spend a lifetime learning the craft of guiding what others experience.