post 100: Remember Flavor-aid?

Thirty years ago this month Jim Jones was merrily drinking himself to death along with scores of his followers, thus introducing the phrase "drank the Kool-Aid" into the national lexicon. This is ironic, because it wasn't Kool-Aid that was laced with cyanide and lovingly fed to 900+ lemmings; it was Flavor-Aid, a low-cost knock-off product that managed to avoid the fate of death-by-mass-market-association, and is still sold today, unlike a familiar diet product of the time...


November 78 brings back many memories for me. Talk about a previous life.. at the time I was a mass communications student in Eugene, working for the NPR radio station on campus. First marriage, my daughter was 6 months old, and I had three jobs (radio in the afternoon, Jiffy Market evenings, and KVAL-TV weekends schlepping cameras and lighting around for the 11pm local news; now there's a glamour job).

I was working the news desk at KLCC that afternoon. Back then we got our news feeds via two teletype machines, the ones that made the "chgchgchcchgchgchgchg" sound you used to hear in the background of news broadcasts -- one AP, one UPI. When news reports would come in we'd hear bells.. one or two or three, depending on the severity.

At about 2:10 pm I was editing some copy for the 3pm news update when the bells went off. TEN bells. I'd never heard more than three before. First AP, then UPI (UPI always seemed to be a step behind; maybe that's why they're now owned by the Moonies and have little relevance today). The updates came in little spurts of concise text.. ten bells, "ATTN REPORTS OF ASSASSINATION OF REP LEO RYAN D-CALI IN GUYANA".. ten bells, "EYEWITNESSES REPORT MASS SUICIDE OF RELIGIOUS GROUP IN GUYANA".. etc.

This was back before NPR had its own national news feeds, so any news before All Things Considered aired was locally produced. I put together a readable text based on what I had at the time and dashed upstairs to where the board op / hourly news update guy, a very cool dude, was cleaning jazz LPs. He read the copy. "This is a joke, right?" Nope. "Great, but you know as soon as I read this everyone will turn off the jazz and turn on the TV, right?" He was only half joking. He hated TV. "Yeah, bummer, dude." He decided to air it right then, not waiting for the hour, although he did do Freddie Hubbard the courtesy of finishing his track.

I went back downstairs, where the reports were still coming in, not as rapid, not as many bells, but more detail. Gunshots at the airport, a cameraman playing dead while others are having their heads blown off, mothers killing their children.. absolutely horrifying. I obsessed over it for weeks. The covers of Newsweek and Time, with Time screaming "Cult of Death" while Newsweek opted for the more explicit "The Cult of Death".

Later that night I heard the word "shit" for the first time on the national news. The NBC sound guy, Steve Sung, was describing how he played dead while the Jonestown boys massacred the congressional party: "I was watching the Congressman, he said 'Ow', or 'shit' or something, and then the guy blew his head off.."

It really shook me up. At the time I was really excited about being a videographer (there wasn't a lot of ENG going on in '78, but everyone knew it was coming). This was the first time I realized there might be a downside to a field journalism career.

A month later, I was working at the post office. But that's another story.