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Muleshoe TV
carol_rust@hotmail.com
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Crammed into a tiny attic studio in the Rennels' home,
the station is the eyes and ears of this blustery
West Texas town of 4,800, covering in tedious detail
everything from school pep rallies to bake sales
to honor roll students, from wrecks to write-in
candidates to walk-a-thons.
• • •
MULESHOE TV
Up in Muleshoe, three generations of homespun
broadcasters are celebrating 10 years
of operating Channel 6 from their house
By Carol Rust
S
HE PADS UP THE STAIRS in her bare feet and bathrobe. She hasn't
been awake more than five minutes.
Taking a seat in a tired swivel chair behind a table piled high with
videotapes and aging broadcast equipment, she locates an unruly stack
of papers and shuffles through it to make sure the announcements and
advertisements for that morning are in order.
At 7:30 a.m., Maggie Rennels stifles a yawn, clears her throat and
leans into a microphone on the table.
"It's time now to start another broadcast day," she says.
Welcome to Channel 6 in Muleshoe, Texas.
The 24-hour cable television station, owned and operated by three
generations of homespun broadcasters, will celebrate its 10th
anniversary Saturday. It is one of the smallest TV stations in the
country, - if not the smallest. As a closed cable station, it does not
even have call letters.
But size has nothing to do with appeal, not in Muleshoe. Seventy
percent of Muleshoe's residents tune in to Channel 6's live morning
broadcasts, a figure that is just a distant dream to major television
networks.
Crammed into a tiny attic studio in the Rennels' home, the station
is the eyes and ears of this blustery West Texas town of 4,800,
covering in tedious detail everything from school pep rallies to bake
sales to honor roll students, from wrecks to write-in candidates to
walk-a-thons.
Just as she's done every Monday through Saturday for 10 years,
Maggie starts the day's broadcast by asking her viewers to pause for a
moment of silent meditation.
She immediately switches off the microphone and punches an intercom
button to be heard downstairs.
"Payton," she beckons her 10-year-old son. "Come upstairs and
bring your comb and water. Did you hear me? It's 7:30 - you need to get
up here 'real fast.' " She switches the intercom off and the
microphone on. "Good morning. And now it's time for the weather,
direct from the National Weather Service in Lubbock, brought to you by
Harvey and Marie Bass of Harvey Bass Appliance, located on the big
corner of ... " Payton strides reluctantly into the room, dressed
in school clothes but still looking sleepy. He carries a glass of water
with a comb poking out of it.
He scowls as his mother wets the comb and rakes through his curly
hair while she continues announcing: "In a moment, Gilrobert will give
you the school lunch menu, followed by `Bargain Basement,' brought to
you by ... " She kisses Payton and her 8-year-old son, Greyson,
goodbye, and they race downstairs and out the door to play soccer
before school starts. Maggie's 14-year-old son, Gilrobert, enters the
studio from his bedroom nearby and sits behind a desk adjacent to where
Maggie sits.
"Pull down the window shade behind you," Maggie hisses urgently,
not wanting the two unevenly opened windows to show behind Gilrobert
while he is on the air. Stationing herself behind a video camera, she
points it at her son, turning the lens slowly to focus it. Maggie won't
come on camera herself until later, after she's gotten dressed and put
on makeup.
His face appears on the television monitor, just as it has every
school morning for the past three years, and he announces what the
school cafeteria will serve for lunch. Today, it is skillet dinner,
green beans, new potatoes, rolls, milk and peanut butter confection.
"Bargain Basement" follows the school lunch menu, and Gilrobert
reads want ads: a trailer space for rent, a lost rabbit with gray ears
and gray nose, an upcoming garage sale.
"F.B. Ruthardt found a tire and wheel on Highway 214. If it's
yours, call him at ... ' When Gilrobert finishes the segment and
hurries off to school, the picture on the TV screen switches back to a
slow parade of pictures, mostly Polaroids, and hand-printed
advertisements, which are taped inside a carousel. A small video camera
rotates in the center to show the advertisements over and over again,
along with meters showing temperature, barometric pressure and wind
velocity.
These pictures are all the viewer sees for most of the station's
actual broadcast time. Channel 6 airs scheduled, live programs until
noon only. During the afternoon, evening and early morning hours, the
station runs the carousel and plays music and news programs from one of
two nearby FM radio stations, sort of like radio with a continuous
picture. But Maggie also interrupts the parade of ads with footage from
civic organization meetings, music programs or school sports that
either she, her husband, Jack, or one of her sons has taken. In the
afternoons and evenings, members of the Rennels family scramble around
town, anywhere there's something going on, capturing it on video.
"And stay tuned, folks," Maggie says. "The Muleshoe one-act
play is going to break a leg today in district competition.' Very
little escapes publicity on Channel 6.
M
AGGIE READS ENTIRE rosters of junior high school track team members,
of Cub Scouts, of students serving as actors, actresses and stagehands
in the school play - including alternates.
"The more names that we have in our program, the more listeners are
pleased," she says. "Like the one-act play. The kids know they're in
it, their parents know they're in it, but through us, the whole town
knows they're in it."
In this small town 90 miles northwest of Lubbock, the news is just
about anything that happens.
Katie Roubinek slipped on her front porch and broke her hip two
months ago, and granddaughter Kim Roubinek, a college student at the
University of North Texas in Denton, canceled a ski trip and spent her
spring break visiting her grandmother instead.
That's news.
A former schoolteacher in Muleshoe showed slides from her recent
trip to Africa to the Muleshoe chapter of the American Association of
Retired Persons.
That's news.
Maggie takes a call from a woman in the nearby town of Earth. A
longtime farmer there died this morning in a Lubbock hospital. Maggie
interrupts the music to bring the Channel 6 audience the bulletin.
Maggie reads each day's birthdays from a worn calendar in which
she's scrawled names in every square.
And anniversaries? You bet.
"Speaking of important events, John and Billie Joan Smith are
celebrating their 50th anniversary today," Maggie says. "Can you
believe it? And they're just spring chickens."
Then she plays "You'll Never Grow Old," by the Mills Brothers, one of the easy
listening groups that is a regular on Channel 6.
During the weekday morning routine, she seems more like a
ringmaster than a television announcer. She answers questions from her
sons such as, "Do you know where any money is?" and "Do we have
scouts this afternoon?" She carries on telephone conversations while
simultaneously snapping audio tapes in and out of a tape recorder to
locate specific recorded ads. She accepts news releases as people drop
them by her house and, of course, she announces.
"There will be a walk-a-thon, `Miles for Muleshoe,' tomorrow
morning starting at the bank to raise money for the Fourth of July
fireworks," Maggie says. "Every year the cost of these fireworks goes
up and up, so get out and help. It will be good for your heart - and
your town."
The telephone and doorbell ring incessantly throughout
the day.
Three correspondents in the outlying towns of Sudan, Amherst and
Earth call in regularly with news from their areas. Channel 6 recently
expanded its broadcasting to take them in.
When the telephone rings while Maggie is on the air, she picks up the
receiver and drapes it over her shoulder until she can complete her
announcements. If she is on the air when the doorbell rings, she either
recruits a family member downstairs via the intercom to answer the door
or waits until she can head downstairs and answer it herself.
And she's just one person in the Channel 6 clan.
By Muleshoe standards, 83-year-old Gil Lamb is a legend.
A
LITTLE AFTER 9 a.m. and a bowl of bran flakes, Maggie's father
makes a slow trip up the stairs to begin announcing the two television
programs he does each morning.
The trip is always slow because of Lamb's declining health. He
sometimes stops to catch his breath midway.
"I'm legally blind, I have a 60 percent hearing loss, I had my
gallbladder and my kidney removed, I've got three hernias, emphysema,
leukemia and an ingrown toenail," Lamb says. "Outside of that, I'm in
pretty good shape."
But no matter how he feels, Lamb always wears a
suit coat and tie, and has his hair parted and slicked neatly to the
side for the camera.
"He's tougher than John Wayne," Maggie says.
Like his daughter, Lamb shuffles through a stack of papers,
throwing some away, rearranging others, adding new ones.
When he starts his first daily program, "Prayer Line," viewers
will be hearing the third of three generations on the air that day.
During that show, Lamb reads the names of Muleshoe residents who
are in hospitals and urges viewers to pray for them and for area
families who have suffered recent tragedies.
"Grandma Joella, you're in our prayers today," Lamb says. "Just
remember we're thinking of you."
Part-time Channel 6 employee Cheryl Puckett hears sirens around the corner from the Rennels home and
sprints in their direction. She returns and breathlessly reports to
Lamb that a neighbor in pajamas was lying in his yard by the porch
before paramedics arrived to load him in an ambulance.
"We just received word that an ambulance is at the home of ... ,"
announces Lamb. "We hope it's nothing serious, but let's keep him
in our prayers."
And he never forgets to urge viewers to remember the
hostages in Lebanon. "They need our prayers, bless their hearts," he
says each day. "Let's pray for a miracle for the hostages."
He always ends the show the same way: "I know there are some of you out there
who are lonely or sad or feel like you've just reached the end of your
rope. I know exactly how you feel. When you get to feeling like you've
reached the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. 'Cause I love
you."
After "Prayer Line," comes Lamb's favorite: "Muletrain," a
chatty, small-town news show that Lamb has broadcast over either TV or
radio for 36 years.
Heralded by a scratchy record playing the song, "Mule Train," by
Frankie Lane, Lamb recites the program's introduction in singsong
fashion, telling everything good about Muleshoe and stretching the
truth only a little.
"We grow white and yellow corn, milo, cotton, soybeans, pumpkins,
potatoes ... and in Muleshoe you can get 10 hours of sleep in just
six hours," he says. "How many people do you know of who can say they
live 18 miles from Earth? If you lived in Muleshoe, you could say
that."
He never tires of praising the town he calls home, especially
on the air. "Somebody might be passing through and hear it, get
interested in Muleshoe and start a business here," Lamb says.
He calls himself the mule skinner, and the advertisers "are what
make the mules go." He says that before reading the advertisements.
But his favorite part is the last line of the program's
introduction: "So get a deep seat and a tight rein, we'll catch you on
the "muuuule" train."
Then he claps his hands together and calls
his imaginary mules, "Get up there, Little Red, come on, Lady Legs,
Corrina, Arbutus. Pull it on out of here, now."
He writes his own notes for announcements with a black marker in 2-inch-high letters,
usually just one announcement to a legal-size sheet of paper. Even
then, he must hold the paper close to his face to see it because of his
deteriorating eyesight.
He announces the Sweetheart of the Week, Evelyn Johnson, who
celebrates her 80th birthday today. Johnson's family located a picture
of her when she was a child, and it is one of the pictures in the
carousel this week, right between the John Deere "Riding on Air"
tractor advertisement and the meter showing the wind velocity. Viewers
nominate each week's sweetheart.
Every now and then, Lamb will remind his viewers how "Muletrain" got its start 36 years ago, reciting the story fondly with a smile
tugging at the corners of his mouth. He was selling ads in the Muleshoe
area for AM radio station KICA out of Clovis, N.M., after playing
trumpet in a traveling tent show on an entertainment circuit in the
Southwest.
One day he was at Harvey Bass Appliance, where 35 women were
taking sewing lessons on a new line of sewing machines.
"Why don't you call in to the radio station and tell people what a
good time everybody is having here?" Bass suggested. Lamb's
on-the-scene report was a hit, and he started doing it regularly. A
radio program was born.
"As long as I've been working, Gil Lamb's voice has woke me up in
the morning - we'd set the alarm to his station," says regular Channel
6 viewer and Bailey County district clerk, Nelda Meriott. "My two
children grew up waking up to his program, too. I think of them more as
family than a business. We all do."
After two years at KICA, Lamb and two others started the radio station KMUL in Muleshoe, and Lamb took
the "Muletrain" program with him.
One of the partners later died, and Lamb sold his share to the
remaining investor when doctors diagnosed his retina deterioration, the
cause of his failing eyesight.
Four months later, Lamb was fired, which he generously chooses to
call "a parting of ways."
Within the month, he and Maggie had started Channel 6 in the corner of their living room. They later added
a second floor onto their home to accommodate the studio, confident the
venture would stay afloat in a town with fierce competition for the
advertising dollar, including two newspapers that publish twice weekly
and a radio station.
They were right. With the help of two part-time employees and the
Rennels family doing the rest, Channel 6 survived and prospers today.
M
AGGIE AND LAMB may know which buttons to push and when, but Maggie's
husband, Jack, is the reason they can push the buttons and expect
things to work. An electrical technician with the Bailey County
Electrical Cooperative and a self-taught radio electronics specialist,
he's never seen on the air, but he's as much a part of the station as
any other family member.
At 6:55 a.m. each day, he hooks the station up to the National
Weather Service broadcast out of Lubbock, which runs until 7. Then he
switches the station to pick up world and national news from the
college radio station at Eastern New Mexico University in Pertalis,
N.M.
The news runs until Maggie climbs the stairs and starts her
program, "Maggie's Morning."
Jack is responsible for all the electrical wiring. When lightning struck the station a year ago, he
stayed up all night rigging together a makeshift electrical board so
they could go on the air the next morning.
He also does his share of grocery shopping, cooking and playing
referee in sibling disputes.
It's late morning on a Saturday, and he's making spaghetti sauce
for lunch while Greyson shoots rubber bands at a poinsettia plant on
the kitchen counter. Jack stands over an electric skillet, stirring the
meat as it browns. He seems oblivious to the cacophony of cartoons
blaring from a TV in a bedroom where Payton is glued to the set, their
two dogs barking outside, the doorbell ringing and the Lawrence Welk
Orchestra's rendition of "How Great Thou Art" coming from a TV tuned
to Channel 6 in the living room.
On his way to answer the door, the phone rings.
"It gets a little crazy around here sometimes," he says quietly,
shrugging his shoulders at his obvious understatement. "But everybody
kind of pitches in, and it all gets done somehow."
Right now, the thing that needs doing most is for Jack to herd Payton and Greyson
upstairs for their Saturday performance of "Happy Birthday."
They take their seats in the studio, and fidget and poke each other until
it's time to sing. Maggie plays a recording of them singing the song
during the week.
The tradition is as old as the station itself, Maggie says.
"We'd just started, and halfway through reading the people who had
birthdays that day, I realized we didn't have a recording of 'Happy
Birthday.' " Gilrobert, then 4, was playing in the living room, and
Maggie grabbed her son and held him up to the microphone.
"I told him to sing "Happy Birthday," and he did," she said.
That spontaneous, homey touch delighted viewers, and her sons have
been singing "Happy Birthday" ever since.
Most of the station's news is as country as grits and gravy for
breakfast.
In a town where everybody knows everyone, the happy birthday wishes,
track team scores, covered dish suppers and school plays are something
to talk about.
But with birth comes death. With the happy events come sad ones.
In a steady announcer's voice, Maggie reads the obituary of a
17-year-old who died of a single gunshot wound to the head. That's
Maggie the newswoman. But ask her how it happened, and tears will fill
her eyes as she says he committed suicide.
"He was in Gilrobert's Sunday school class," she adds, as if to
apologize for her tears.
His grandparents were the Rennels' first friends when they moved to
Muleshoe 35 years ago, and Maggie baby-sat for the youth's mother.
"He was so young," she says, dabbing the corners of her eyes.
This is Maggie the mother, the neighbor, the friend.
E
VERYONE WHOM SHE, her father and sons talk about or sing to on the
air is somebody's neighbor, someone's son's piano teacher, someone's
cousin.
In a small town, the news touches everyone, reaches every home.
There also have been times in the past decade when investigating news
tips and covering the news didn't make some people happy, and even
caused the Rennels to be worried about their safety.
Take the California-based hospital corporation that operated the
31-bed hospital in Muleshoe until three years ago. The Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal published a story that the corporation was being
investigated amid complaints that it was overcharging patients for
goods and services, such as hundreds of dollars for a single aspirin.
The administrator for the hospital in Muleshoe asked Maggie if he
could reply to the article on Channel 6, not knowing that Maggie had
been doing some investigating of her own.
During the live broadcast, Maggie presented the administrator with a
copy of an article from the Los Angeles Times that charged the company
was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy because of mismanagement at
its hospitals nationwide.
The sputtering, red-faced administrator didn't leave happy, and the
Rennels' phone started ringing. Anonymous callers, some identifying
themselves as hospital employees, warned Maggie of possible violence.
"They said they (whistle-blowers at the California company)
received bomb threats after the (Los Angeles Times) story came
out," Maggie recalls. Jack was leaving town the day after the
interview, "and we made copies of the tape and had them stashed all
over town," Maggie says. "We didn't like the uneasiness, but we
didn't have a choice. People had to know."
The company eventually filed for bankruptcy, and the threats against the Rennels were never
carried out.
But enough of the unpleasant things, Maggie says, waving her hand in
the air as if shooing away a fly. "Let's talk about the happy stuff."
There was the time they did the story about a 15-year-old youth who
was injured in an accident and whose family was too poor to buy him a
wheelchair. He'd missed the first month of school because he had no way
to get around.
"We did the story on a Saturday, and he had a brand-new wheelchair
the next Monday," Maggie says. "Two people who were watching Channel
6 bought him one. That's the kind of stories I like."
T
HE STATION'S GREATEST success story came in 1986 on a day of chaotic crowds,
complete bedlam and so much mud that the Rennels had to get the carpet
replaced in their den and living room. It started out with a benign
enough idea to raise money for a good cause - relocating and renovating
the historic, 18-room Janes Ranch house that was built around the turn
of the century and was near ruin.
Countless transients had stayed inside over the years, leaving their
trash and wine bottles behind. Bodies of dead animals had decomposed
there. The roof, rotted from weather and years of neglect, had fallen
through in places.
The Muleshoe Heritage Foundation and Channel 6 wanted to save it.
Merchants donated goods, from tires to baking racks to dolls, to be
auctioned live on Channel 6. Foundation members solicited promotional
pictures from stars such as Bob Hope, who autographed them and sent
them to be auctioned. Actor Lee Horsley, at the time starring in the TV
show, "Matt Houston," and now in "Paradise," donated a pair of his
cowboy boots to be auctioned in his hometown.
Jack put additional phone jacks in the living room and kitchen to
accept bids on items once the auction started.
And "everyone" volunteered to help with the entertainment, which
was shown live on Channel 6.
One country and western band after the other performed on the
Rennels' front porch throughout the day. The Muleshoe High School
marching band performed in the front yard. An entire Jazzercise class
performed in the street in front of the Rennels home.
Curious people drove in from the country to witness the event
firsthand rather than watch it on TV.
Everything was fine until it started raining. The crowds of people
coming and going from the Rennels home tracked in enough mud that Jack
and Maggie opted to rip up the carpet and replace it rather than try to
clean it.
Nevertheless, the auction raised $10,000, surprising even the most
optimistic fund raisers. The Janes Ranch house, elegantly refurbished,
is now a meeting place for civic organizations and a senior citizens
center.
An out-of-towner passing by the Rennels home that day might have
wondered out loud what was going on, with the muddy musicians, dripping
dancers and a street crammed with cars and soaked spectators.
Anybody from Muleshoe would have told him that's just Channel 6 in
action.
Then they would have told Maggie there was an out-of-towner in
their midst. They'd know that she would want to interview him.