WHEN I LIBERATED MY lumpy carry-on bag from the overhead compartment, it wrestled itself free from my grasp and fell heavily on the arm of an unoccupied seat. Working hard not to bruise anyone, I eventually deplaned into a long hallway and skirted the usual metal detection station.
Glancing back I noticed a no-nonsense gray sign: NO MACE, NO GUNS, NO WEAPONS, NO JOKES. Another comparable rectangle alerted outgoing passengers about which (foreign) airports the Secretary of Transportation determined were not maintaining effective aviation security measures.
Along a relatively empty stretch a sign depicting Paul McCartney's smiling face welcomed me to, "...Norfolk, World Headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." A red hexagonal sign that said, "Stop eating animals," was positioned about where fans might have expected a guitar. Further along another picture of an elderly woman in need of a wheelchair scowled at me in black and white. To her right a hand filled out a United Way pledge card beneath the copy, "Fill in the blank...Generously."
Apparently some ill-advised fool had chosen an exceptionally humane city in which to commit murder. Lucky thing I hadn't bopped anyone with my carry-on.
The lobby was clean, more or less round, and dotted with strips of comfortable, dark red chairs. At opposite edges the Check-in and Ticketing sign faced the Baggage Claim/Ground Transportation escalators.
Downstairs I collected my larger bag and stepped out into the chill. A miniature brown building labeled "Airport Shuttle" resided between the two driveways. Yes, a driver could take me to the Virginia Beach General Hospital. A limousine, really a white car wearing a rainbow-colored swath that read "Groome Transportation," would leave within ten minutes.
Perhaps out of respect for my destination, the driver decided against small talk and entertained himself by drumming his fingers to the tune playing in his head.
At least initially Norfolk seemed to be a many-laned highway lined with low, boxy businesses, so I shut my eyes and daydreamed about our Thanksgiving Day tour of NFL Films. Garry had viewed the place with such wide-eyed thrall that I began to wonder whether immortalizing football games might eventually become his profession. Exactly what, I reflected rocking back and forth in the dusty-smelling cab, had so captivated my son?
For starters, probably Ronnie himself. Broad shoulders flexing as he steered his comfortable van, my cousin possessed the body type of someone who had played the game he recorded.
“No,” he responded when Garry asked, “but a couple of other cinematographers did. It is very physical work," he added as we arrived at our destination. I noted that the white "National Football League NFL FILMS" sign included the NFL logo, since the company was actually owned and operated by the league.
We were already headed for the door before Garry gave voice to his confusion. "What's so physical about it?" he asked, causing Ronnie to pause and turn back.
He rubbed his cold hands together then spread them wide. "I guess you've seen me rushing back and forth on the sideline with a camera on my shoulder?"
Garry nodded.
"Well, that camera weighs about thirty-five pounds," Ronnie told him. "But for every game I also have to move six metal cases of equipment in and out of vans, airports, hotels and stadiums. The cases weigh forty to seventy-five pounds apiece. I've got a cart, but the cart weighs twenty-five pounds all by itself."
Doug contributed his own thought. "Then when you get back here you spend, what? ten, twelve hours a day putting it all together?" Clearly he admired his brother-in-law's dedication to his craft.
Ronnie nodded modestly. "Right. So I can use all the stamina I can muster. Usually I lift weights. Tomorrow I'll probably run–especially if I eat what I think I'm going to eat tonight."
I remembered that Fridays were his only days off in the fall. Fridays and Thanksgiving.
"I'm really sorry to bring you back here today," I apologized, finally realizing the magnitude of what I had asked.
"I can stand it if you can." He winked at me then headed toward the larger of the two low, pale brick buildings belonging to the company.
"Do you really have to go to all that trouble?" my son inquired. He hated carrying so much as a book bag.
"We think so," Ronnie answered, casting me a conspirator's smile.
"Why?" Garry asked for the first, but certainly not last time that day.
"Because we're the historians of professional football," my cousin patiently explained. "Twenty, thirty years from now people will be able to pull out a tape and watch the Miracle in the Meadowlands, or the Immaculate Reception, maybe some Joe Namath, or Brett Favre. Pretty wonderful stuff."
Doug shook his head to disagree. "It's a little more than that," he chided his brother-in-law. "You make us look great, man. Larger than life. It's an art form. Admit it."
Ronnie pretended that the building's security system required all his concentration.
Doug ignored Ronnie's discomfort and finished lecturing me. "To football, they're Ernest Hemingway and Vincent van Gogh all rolled up. They only do highlight films, not TV coverage or print or anything else, and they're the best. You can see ten seconds of an NFL Films' product and know it's their work. Hell, you can hear ten seconds..."
I smiled my undivided attention, although my cousin-in-law wasn't telling me anything new. Even when Ronnie first landed the job, I understood that he would be turning admiration into art, creating the polar opposite of the commercial hype I hated.
"The president should be so lucky," I remarked.
Ronnie's grateful glance included surprise, but no sympathy for our elected official's chronic public relations problems.
"Yes," Doug agreed.
Ronnie ushered us into a short narrow hallway. "Here's where we drop off our cans of film when we first come back." He gestured toward a shoulder high section of gray cubbyholes, each marked with the upcoming Sunday's games written on strips of masking tape.
"Cans of film?" Garry asked. "Don't you use videotape?"
"Nope," Ronnie replied. "Videotape looks too harsh, too realistic."
"So?" Garry pressed.
"We're after a softer, more polished effect. True, film is more expensive, more perishable, and less convenient, but we think it's worth it."
Garry's expression was dubious, pure Iowa, and Ronnie laughed as he led us toward the film processing lab, a darkroom with little to see, but apparently the largest of its kind. Here a working print would be made from the negatives, which would then be checked for scratches, dirt, edge fogging and so on. The whole area smelled strongly of chemicals.
"Nasty stuff,” Ronnie admitted. “Every time film is handled, it has to be cleaned," he explained.
Further along he took us into another office with a pink sweater hung on the back of a chair. Signed pinup posters of male athletes adorned the corkboard on the wall. Ronnie impatiently poked at a keypad at the end of the room. "This door stands open all day," he said, "so I don't usually have to deal with the daily password."
"Turkey?" Doug teased.
"Got it." Ronnie reached around to turn on the light then stood back to let us enter a tall, long room not quite big enough for basketball.
"Wow!" Garry exclaimed.
Left and right, floor to ceiling it contained blue metal shelving nearly full of fifteen-inch red, silver and blue cans of film. Miniaturized, it would have looked like poker chips on scaffolding built from an erector set.
"These are all negatives, everything we shot of every game," he said. "All carefully labeled and pretty easy to find. Only the older stuff, the silver nitrate film, is stored in an old church somewhere."
"Why?" asked my son, the nudge.
"Flammable."
Garry mouthed an O.
"We have the first football game ever filmed, too," Ronnie boasted. "Rutgers versus Princeton. Filmed in 1895 by Thomas Edison himself."
"Who won?" Doug wondered.
"No idea," Ronnie admitted. Cutting through a side door, he led us into another lengthy hall illuminated by safety lights. Most of the walls were white, but in the middle, horizontal strips of decorative wood sparkled with rows and rows of gold statuettes, their graceful arms holding an open globe aloft.
Garry's eyes bulged. "How many?"
"Emmys? A hundred and seven the last time I checked."
"And counting," Doug added.
"Any of them yours?"
"Garry!" I scolded.
"Two," Ronnie replied. "Want to see which ones?"
The two new soul-mates shambled off around a corner, leaving me alone with Doug. I took the opportunity to ask how Michelle was doing with her pregnancy.
"Pretty good," her husband answered, "all things considered. She hasn't had it easy."
As a quarterback, Doug was permitted to buck the trend and have a neck and an ordinary hairstyle. Aside from his size, the most intimidating thing about him was the intelligence in his eyes. Yet just the mention of his wife had reduced the man to putty.
"When's she due?"
"Seven weeks, give or take a couple weeks." His worry lines told me he feared she wouldn't last that long.
Not sure what else to say, I stood there in silence until Doug threw me a lifeline.
"Hard to get into that school Rip runs?"
"Not for relatives," I answered with a grateful laugh. Maybe I would include an application in with our baby present, a little joke Michelle and Doug could smile over then throw away.
Garry and Ronnie returned, and we walked through the Tele-Cine #1 room, a curved bank of monitors with a computer keyboard and a big batch of slide switches. Here the film's colors would be enhanced and the edited work print transferred to video tape.
"Hey, Gin," Ronnie had whispered as he showed us out the opposite door. "Didn't you sort of solve a murder a month or two ago?"
How on earth would he know that? Then it hit me. He was a relative, therefore Cynthia had access to him. My mother, The Mouth, had been bragging about me again.
In an attempt to keep a certain portion of my sleuthing activities to myself, I said, "Not exactly."
"But..." Ronnie sputtered. "That dog bite thing. I thought..."
"No," I lied with conviction. "That wasn't me."
Ronnie scratched behind his ear, leaving a clump of medium-brown hair poking out like a hook.
We had arrived outside the room where Ronnie told us the 'lower thirds' were added. "That's the graphics showing the name of a speaker, or the score..."
"Next to the picture of the helmets?" Garry was indeed tuned in, absorbing like a high-priced paper towel.
"You didn't...?" my cousin quizzed me out of the side of his mouth.
"No." I had solved the crime, of course, but denial seemed to be the only way of undoing my mother's damage. If it were up to Cynthia, I'd be up on a shelf holding the world in my hands like one of those Emmys.
Ronnie gave an exasperated little sigh and adjusted his volume back to tour-guide level. "We use several different tracks of sound–dialogue, ambient sound, music, narration, sound effects, and so on; and we fade each one in and out however we want." This time we were viewing a room with several banks of NASA-like switches and a large television monitor high up on the wall.
"You tape the sound separately?" Doug inquired.
"Yes. The camera only has film in it. The soundman carries a DAT–digital audio tape–machine, and I'm sure you've noticed the boom mikes–the fuzzy ones on long poles. Also, we occasionally wire coaches and certain players. That's how we get the calls on the field, the sound of the hits," he turned toward Doug, "things you guys say to each other on the sidelines. Neat stuff."
We came to the end of a hall. "Here's one of the places we mix the sound...using machines from the CMR," Ronnie told us, opening yet another door.
CMR stood for Central Machine Room, which was a long rectangle, its side walls filled with boxes with buttons and monitors and wires. "This is where the final edits really bring the shows together." Technicians also worked there with outside customers who were getting ads done.
"What about the Philadelphia Flower Show?" Ronnie quizzed me while Garry ran his finger along a chest high table. "I suppose you had nothing to do with that?"
He alluded to the murder of my mother's friend, Iffy Bigelow, but the way he phrased the question allowed me to say, "Nope. Not me."
Ronnie scrunched up his nose and squinted his eyes. "You're bullshitting me," he whispered, after checking that Garry wasn't near enough to hear.
"Moi?" I gave him a dainty blink.
My cousin responded with a have-it-your-way glance. Then he knocked his knuckles against a door marked, "Engineering."
"We repair our own video equipment," lectured Ronnie the Guide. "In fact we have shops to fix anything we use. Even a wood shop to build sets for our studio."
We also passed a few rooms containing AVIDs, machines that allowed film editors to cut and paste by way of computer commands. "Word processing for film," Ronnie called it. "Greatest thing since football."
Upstairs, we found a door marked "MIDI Room," named after the computer program the in-house composers used to write music.
"Garry," Ronnie shepherded my son into a modest-sized theater. "This part is pretty amazing." He explained about hired TV watchers Ronnie referred to as "kids" who sat across the front row viewing all the Sunday NFL games by satellite. Each with their own TV, they logged the highlights as they happened. "Their selections are edited into one-minute highlight packages that get transmitted back to the stadiums and shown to the crowd."
"Wow!" Garry exclaimed, his eyes wide with awe.
At other times the theater would be used to screen the finished products, such as the latest Super Bowl film headed for the Football Hall of Fame.
Ronnie joined me back in the doorway. "Seriously, Gin," he whispered. "You can tell me."
I tilted my chin toward my son. "Not now I can't."
"Oh. Gotcha. Little pitchers have big ears."
"What if the electricity goes out?" the little pitcher piped up.
"We have an uninterrupted power supply, a UPS," Ronnie answered patiently.
"What about if it rains or snows real bad on game day?"
"We live for bad weather."
"Why?"
"Because that's when we get our best stuff, like icicles on the goalposts, steam coming off a bald head, or maybe rain pouring down the stadium steps like a waterfall." Visual stories, the pictures that were worth a thousand words.
"You ever get sued for filming somebody who didn't want to be filmed?" I wondered aloud.
Ronnie nodded for the professional player to answer that one.
"Our contracts state that every move we make on the field is fair game."
We passed by another video library, bar-coded and carefully guarded by a librarian who helped producers find whatever they needed for whatever piece they were putting together.
The master vault was especially memorable to me. Several wide white metal shelves were crowded tight together with only one adjustable gap large enough for a man to walk through.
Ronnie gestured toward a shiny black handle protruding from a ten-inch white wheel at the end of the nearest shelf. "Try turning that," he challenged Garry.
My skinny eleven-year-old prepared himself to set to, but to his astonishment the twenty-foot long shelf loaded with tapes moved with ease.
"One pound of pressure can move nine hundred pounds of weight," we were told.
Yet another room stored and duplicated the audio tapes for each game.
Back downstairs we saw the "Green Room," the lounge for the visiting "talent"–the host and guests from NFL Films' three regular weekly shows, or celebrities there for the industrial or rock videos that were the mainstay of the company during the off season.
Ronnie named a few of the current hit bands he had worked with personally, and Garry's eyes took over his whole face. "Wait till I tell Chelsea. She'll go bonkers."
"What's with Elvis?" I finally asked. Collages of Elvis Presley photos seemed to be everywhere.
"Steve Sabol," my cousin answered. "His father was founder of the company, and he runs it now. Steve's the big Elvis fan."
"Why?" Garry again.
Ronnie shrugged. "Elvis's favorite sport was football."
Garry left it at that, but my own imagination connected the dots.
Elvis had possessed an astonishing charisma. He was, and continued to be, a larger than life phenomenon. There would never be another icon of popular culture like him. But, I realized, the same could be said of Jim Brown or Dick Butkus. Looking closely at one of the oval, decoupage tributes to Elvis, I realized that it illustrated the wonderfully personal connection between pro football and NFL Films perhaps better than anything else I had seen.
Further along the hallway an in-house fifties style diner featuring plenty of chrome over black and white tile furthered the theme.
"Breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Sundays. Breakfast and lunch Mondays, of course. Dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays. We've got beds and lockers available here, too."
Plus their own travel agency and a shipping department that handled five hundred packages a day.
"Overwhelming," I decided.
"Want to see my building?" Ronnie asked.
"There's more?"
We toured Ronnie's video domain politely, but I was on technical overload. Only Garry remained jazzed and wide-eyed.
When Doug's stomach growled audibly, he asked whether Ronnie had caught the noise on tape.
Soon afterward we piled back into Ronnie's Audi and returned to Aunt Harriet's, all of us weary from hunger.
Before we went inside Garry pulled me aside. "I'm going to try it, Mom," he announced.
"What?" I asked.
"I'm going to film the ultimate frisbee game they play Sunday mornings at Bryn Derwyn. What do you think?"
"Go for it," I said. The puzzle of what my son would grow up to be would remain unanswered for another decade or more, but this made for a most interesting start.
Aunt Harriet's house finally passed the sniff test. Turkey and jokes and old family stories would soon circulate around the table.
And later, over coffee in the kitchen, I would tell Ronnie whatever he wanted to know.
"Everybody out," the limousine driver joked, for I was the only passenger he had. Glancing out the window I noticed a bas-relief blue cross next to the words "Virginia Beach General Hospital" on the portico of the building's main entrance. Reading signs usually centered and reassured me, but this trip was too sudden and unexpected. For a second I couldn't believe what I read.
My driver helped me to the curb with my luggage and accepted his fee and a tip with a grunt. I let out a plume of cold breath as the building's doors slid aside for me to enter.
Like all hospitals, the lobby ambience projected a cool sterility. And as usual, I felt as if I were defiling a private sanctuary that welcomed only health-care professionals and their patients.
I hefted my travel gear over to the information desk and asked the receptionist the easy question: Where would I find my cousin, Michelle?
The answer to the difficult one–what I was really doing there–I would have to work out for myself.