I had just started working at WMBD-TV in Peoria as a part-time Floor Director in early 1965. I was scheduled Sunday night, but I couldn’t stay away from the station weekdays as well. Television production had got into my blood. I was hanging out at the station and skipping Dr. Smyth’s English 102 class in the afternoons at Bradley University. Thus, I still don’t know ‘to’ from t o o. After graduating from high school, I labored for a year at Caterpillar Tractor Company before enrolling at Bradley University in Peoria, because factory life was not for me. I was learning television production.
One Friday as I skipped class again, I discovered a lot of activity in the TV studio, and I was asked to help out. It seems the sales department of the TV station had sold a contest package to a local supermarket Ben Schwartz Food Mart. Founded by Asher Schwartz in the downtown area of Peoria in 1933, and it had grown with several locations in the Peoria market. The stores had been turned over to his son Ben and that is where the name came from.
The marketing package the sales department had sold Ben was a package to get more people to come into their locations and they could register to win a brand-new motorcycle. The winner was going to be announced ‘live’ on the TV station at 10:30 this Friday evening.
The promotion had been a great success. Thousands of names were registered, and all of the entry blanks were delivered to the studio on Friday morning and dumped into a child’s blowup swimming pool that was staged in front of the motorcycle that was to be given away.
As I said, I was asked to help out. It seems the sales department had just received a frantic phone call from Ben Schwartz just a little after the noon news had gone off the air.
Ben Schwartz had discovered that his devious teenage son, Kerry Schwartz had taken several of the entry pads to write his name and stuffed them into the entry boxes at various store. However, employees and family members of Ben Schwartz Food Mart were not eligible to win in this contest.
We at the station were looking at a sea of names in the swimming pool that practically filled to the brim. So, I along with several other staff members were engaged to go through the sea of names trying to get to the bottom to see if we could find any of the entry blanks that Kerry had inappropriately placed into entry boxes at different stores.
Now how do you eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time and that was what we were doing. There were seven of us around the edge of the plastic kiddie pool on our knees looking at as many entries we could see to verify that Kerry’s name was not one of them.
As I said, this panic started a little after the noon news had gone off the air. Ben Schwartz was aware of what it would have looked like if his son’s name was going to be drawn on a ‘live’ TV drawing. The sales department was hovering about because their client was not happy. We actually got to see the station manager come up to the studio.
The station manager with his Florsheim Wing Tip shoes squeaked when he was walked down the highly polished hall on the first floor by the sales off