What a thrill....
What a thrill to see something you've worked on for two months come to life and run so well! The West Texas Troop Salute was truly amazing and a great experience. The show came off virtually without a glitch, some small ones yes, but putting that into persective, two months is a short, short time to assemble all the acts, speakers, volunteers, equipment, media and to have communications connections in place and having it all work...it's a testiment to all those who spent so much time and effort in making it work. Amazing because of the venue and scope we had not had time to have even one reheasal. Gail Essex ran the program segment and she had it down prefectly.
I have to say that I almost....no I actually did, get misty eyed when the troops of the 1/7th Cav in Camp Taji Iraq came up on the Jumbotron. I had worked through a number of contacts in the military to arrange that, and relied on the expertise of Chuck Cooper at NewsWest 9 to set up the technical stuff. We had high hopes, but shooting satelitte beams to Odessa then to Rockhound stadium just seemed like one of those things destined to have some small snafu rendering it inoperable. No such thing; it worked flawlessly. So well that I almost blew making the most of it.
I had seen video of the troops on the Jumbotron being fed periodically into the program but had not heard any audio. Somewhere in my mind, I suppose, I was just happy with the great video. More than half way through the program I was on the baseball field when I got a call from Nick Carlton in the press box. Nick was our committee genius who ran the Jumbotron and feeds in and out. As the program was moving on, Nick called to say that he had a direct phone line to Camp Taji and the troops there wanted to know when they could talk to the crowd, they'd been seeing it all on the Internet feed we had going out.
Idiot I thought, of myself, you almost wasted what you worked so hard on. But that didn't happen, I immediately asked Gen. Sanchez who was standing with me, if he would go out and talk to the guys and gals in Iraq....and so he did and if you there you know how emotional it was as about 20 troops told us who they were, where they were from and some gave a small message such as "hi Mom". Two of the troops were from Midland and there is a good chance that the Moms were in the crowd to hear it. This made every bit of work worthwhile.
And I found out this morning from my contact in Iraq, Major "B", that the troops had the Internet feed fed thru a digital projector onto a large screen, they could see and hear us all very well. Double worthwhile.......! Thanks is not enough for all who helped, volunteered and of course attended.
Despite all my running around I did manage to take some photos. Here are some... As did the Midland Reporter-Telegram
What a thrill to see something you've worked on for two months come to life and run so well! The West Texas Troop Salute was truly amazing and a great experience. The show came off virtually without a glitch, some small ones yes, but putting that into persective, two months is a short, short time to assemble all the acts, speakers, volunteers, equipment, media and to have communications connections in place and having it all work...it's a testiment to all those who spent so much time and effort in making it work. Amazing because of the venue and scope we had not had time to have even one reheasal. Gail Essex ran the program segment and she had it down prefectly.
I have to say that I almost....no I actually did, get misty eyed when the troops of the 1/7th Cav in Camp Taji Iraq came up on the Jumbotron. I had worked through a number of contacts in the military to arrange that, and relied on the expertise of Chuck Cooper at NewsWest 9 to set up the technical stuff. We had high hopes, but shooting satelitte beams to Odessa then to Rockhound stadium just seemed like one of those things destined to have some small snafu rendering it inoperable. No such thing; it worked flawlessly. So well that I almost blew making the most of it.
I had seen video of the troops on the Jumbotron being fed periodically into the program but had not heard any audio. Somewhere in my mind, I suppose, I was just happy with the great video. More than half way through the program I was on the baseball field when I got a call from Nick Carlton in the press box. Nick was our committee genius who ran the Jumbotron and feeds in and out. As the program was moving on, Nick called to say that he had a direct phone line to Camp Taji and the troops there wanted to know when they could talk to the crowd, they'd been seeing it all on the Internet feed we had going out.
Idiot I thought, of myself, you almost wasted what you worked so hard on. But that didn't happen, I immediately asked Gen. Sanchez who was standing with me, if he would go out and talk to the guys and gals in Iraq....and so he did and if you there you know how emotional it was as about 20 troops told us who they were, where they were from and some gave a small message such as "hi Mom". Two of the troops were from Midland and there is a good chance that the Moms were in the crowd to hear it. This made every bit of work worthwhile.
And I found out this morning from my contact in Iraq, Major "B", that the troops had the Internet feed fed thru a digital projector onto a large screen, they could see and hear us all very well. Double worthwhile.......! Thanks is not enough for all who helped, volunteered and of course attended.
Despite all my running around I did manage to take some photos. Here are some... As did the Midland Reporter-Telegram
