26 DEC 05: DEAD HOGS AND OTHER DISASTERS

(BLOGGER'S NOTE: On this legal holiday, we defer to a guest blogger - TV news anchor Wayne Bennett. Our regular entries should resume Tuesday, including our continuing review of events in 2005.)

In 1975, I covered a story that nearly soured me on sausage forever.

I was working as a reporter for WESH Television in Orlando, Florida when a call came in from a distraught farmer whose hogs were mysteriously dying. My photographer, Buddy Pittman, and I loaded up a news vehicle and headed out. The hog farm was located in a rural community called Bithlo. For those unfamiliar with the Orlando area, Bithlo is made up of numerous junkyards and trailer parks, a couple of liquor stores and, of course, one hog farm.

It was mid-August. The mercury was hovering somewhere in the upper 90s, so when we arrived at the farm, the air conditioner was blowing full blast. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened next. We opened the doors to get out and the smell assaulted us. If you've never smelled a pig farm, consider yourself lucky. It has a pungently overpowering scent that would gag a maggot. It certainly triggered the gag reflex in us. We jumped back in the car and slammed the doors, but it was too late. The smell had permeated everything. It was days before it completely went away.

After getting over the initial shock and pulling ourselves together, we once again ventured from the car to check out the farmer's story. He wasn't exaggerating. There were dead and dying hogs everywhere. Some of them were in rigor mortis. Others were barely clinging to life. It was not a pretty sight. We interviewed the farmer, filmed the carnage, and got the h**l out of there as quickly as we could.

In those days, we were still shooting our stories on 16 millimeter film. The editing process took place through a viewer that was about three inches square. When the story aired that night, what we could not see through the viewer was perfectly obvious on the television screen. As the farmer droned on about his pig problem, an Irish setter walked in over his left shoulder, squatted, left a steaming token of disdain, and walked away. My fellow reporters were in stitches. My News Director was not amused. Unfortunately, it didn't end there. As the story came to an end with a slow pan of dead and dying hogs by the dozen, we did not go back to the anchors. We did not go to a wide shot of the set. For some reason I still haven't discovered, we cut directly to a Jimmy Dean Sausage commercial. The sales department was upstairs at the far end of the building, and we could still hear their anguished screams echoing down the hallway. It was, needless to say, not my finest hour.

We later learned the hogs were being killed by contaminated feed. The source of the contamination, as far as I know, was never determined. Buddy Pittman later went into sports and is still working for WESH. I eventually wore out my welcome in Orlando and am now anchoring the news for WTVM....

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© 2005 Wayne Bennett.