It didn’t feel like a funeral to me, it felt like a public protest with some limo’s and two hearses driving by. ( Yes. Two. They have a second empy one in the motorcade in case the first one breaks down. )
I was at the corner of Massachusettes and Wisconsin. We were told to be on the Northwest corner. There is a small island there, a triangle. We show up, we start setting up the camera crane. I was there to assist the crane Op, not to operate a camera this time. There is a white van on the very spot where we are supposed to set up the crane. This van has …protuberances. It had a large protuberance up on the top. Stuff I had never seen in my life before. Evil lookin’ stuff. No markings. Our Producer who was apparently new to the industry as of Friday ( judging by his appalingly immature and inappropriate behavior throughout the day ) had his first of many hissy fits upon seeing this van. " Hey, Toons, go and tell those guys to move, we have to set up the crane there." Um, yeahright. I said, " They’re Military, I’m not knocking on that door". He went and knocked, and was greeted with a young extremely serious looking fellow who got out and explained- ONLY ONCE- that the van was not going to move, and not to be disturbed again. It was a Chemical Warfare Monitoring vehicle. :eek:
Said :wally of a Producer then huffed around for a while , and we found another place to be. On the Wisconsin side of this triangle, about 10 feet from a public-bus sized vehicle that was D.C.'s Emergency Mobile Command Center. All well and good, I checked with a cop who had exited it, he said yeah we could set up near him, and we went to work. Built the crane. Got a picture going. There was a lone couple on the park bench there in the triangle, watching us set up and talking to us. They’d left 5 hours before from North Carolina, to witness the funeral. Very nice people, we kept 'em nearby all day.
After we were set up, a police car pulls up, and we see that it’s filled with white shirts, gold stars and braid. A man quietly says to me, " You cannot be here, you have to move this thing right now". I said, Okey ! The :wally Producer was insistent that we had a permit from Capt. Whatevahwhatevah to be there, and he didn’t want to move. Meanwhile, my partner and I are talking about where to go, how to break apart the gear to move it quickly. The crane had 400 lbs of weights, and we had to remove those, remove the camera, and roll the crane diagonally across a very busy intersection to the catty-corner sidewalk and corner area. The Man In Stars And Braids said he’d bring in a pile of cops and traffic cops to help us. Good to his word, 6 or 7 traffic cops materialized a few moments later. They froze all traffic coming into the intersection, we rolled the freakin’ crane off the sidewalk and across the street, and re-situated ourselves.
It was drizzling on and off all day. The streets were empty and cleaned but the sidewalks were filled with people coming to pay respects by seeing the hearse and family drive by. There were also some very odd protesters. I am not sure what their agenda was, but their signs and behaviors sufficiently agitated the crowd on MY corner that all day it was a yelling battle back and forth. A line of cops stood before the protesters ( who were standing on the corner that is the far corner physically from the National Cathedral, but across the property from that building, they were right in front of the sign that reads National Cathedral. I was across Mass Avenue from them ). Two of the protestors had American flags with them, and were dragging them in the street or standing on parts of them as they held up their signs.
They surely acheived their goal. Few people if any within my earshot were talking about Reagan, everyone was involved in the situation with the protestors. There were a fair number of plainclothes cops in and around the crane area as well. I had to keep people from standing under where the crane would proscribe an arc, and so I would shoo them off in a polite way. At one point I said to a man who had walked right up to the curb, standing right under this crane, " Sir I need to ask you to step over behind this line, for your own safety. There is a crane just over your head, okay, so please move over here now". He turned and very quietlys aid, " I’ll move when I am finished seeing what I need to see". So, I let him stay… plainclothes cop. :rolleyes: Between the uniformed officers and the plainclothes officers, nothing much happened in terms of scuffles but there was an awful lot of angry shouting back and forth. Made for an interesting day. Ahhh, the 1st Amendment. ( How did I know with such surety who was undercover? I pegged one who had ID around his neck, and saw him talking to others, then when I headed to the van at one point, they were all hanging around their car, behind mine. They also never smiled till after the job was done. )
Even were I not working for a network at the moment, I wouldn’t have said anything when some people were talking in glowing terms about Reagan. I’m there, it’s his funeral. It’d never occur to me to share my ** highly negative ** personal feelings in that venue with mourners. ( My personal feelings weren’t appropriate ANYWAY since I was there in a professional capacity ).
We worked till midnight, by moving over to the new WWII Memorial on the Mall and offering shots for the funeral broadcast during Friday evening.
It was a long wet dreary day. I hope his wife and family can withdraw into some privacy and mourn as they see fit, now that The Show is over.
Cartooniverse
