Isle newscaster recalls day Earth crashed

In the early 1950s, KGMB-TV’s "Pan American World News" was the only TV newscast in Hawaii. Wayne Collins was the first news anchor.

Collins now lives in Arizona and has shared many of his great stories with me.

"Most of the 15-minute show was my talking head on camera," Collins recalls. "Our lead local story usually featured a live interview, with the guest behind the news desk with me."

Commercials typically consisted of silent film clips or still photos.

The news sponsor had a model Pan American airliner suspended in midair by black threads in front of a rotating world globe. The globe was about the size of a soccer ball, mounted atop a waist-high pillar. To give the shot a sense of movement, the floor camera would zoom in slowly to a close-up of the airplane and globe.

One evening as that particular shot began, the zoom lens had not been "pulled back" and could not zoom in. "But the director in the control room wanted the customary inward movement and instructed the cameraman to ‘dolly in, dolly in tighter!’ He did so, not noticing how close he was to the suspended model and the rotating globe."

Sure enough, the camera crashed into the pedestal. "The Earth quivered, touched the model and then toppled," Collins remembers. "To the viewer, the world fell out of sight with a crash and a bang."

The globe’s electric motor shorted out and exploded when it hit the concrete floor. A rising spiral of smoke engulfed the jittery Pan American airliner.

"The airliner jiggled in the smoke, shouts were heard in the background and the control room was chaos. The voice-over droned on about ‘the world’s most experienced airline,’ and somebody finally cut to me, a bemused newscaster trying hard not to grin. I doubt I was successful."

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Bob Sigall, author of the "Companies We Keep" books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.