Now Hear This! It's Show Time for East Oahu Council

Weekly Television Broadcast Directs Spotlight on Life in the Sea Services

By MARGARET ROTH
Special Correspondent

Sea Cadets at boot camp. Penguins in Antarctica. A bagpiper's victory over cancer.

It's a rich life that the sea services offer, and while every day may not be material for a major motion picture, there's more than enough drama for Bill Bigelow's Hawaii-based TV show.

Airing for a half-hour every Wednesday, with four or five different stories per show included, "Now Hear This!" is how Bigelow, a former Sailor and veteran radio and television broadcaster, provides an up-close-and-personal look at what people do in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. His motivation is the same that spurred him to found and run the East Oahu Council of the Navy League two years ago: to foster a sense of community that goes beyond men and women in uniform.

"All of these people are dedicated to what they do," he says. "It's good for civilians to see."

Not just see, but also help create. Without the help of civilian volunteers, Bigelow wouldn't be able to produce the show for Olelo Community Television, Channel 52, in Honolulu. (Olelo means community, or family.) Each of the half-hour segments, which air at 6:00 p.m. every Wednesday (and include a new feature each month), takes about five or six hours to shoot and 30 hours or so to edit.

The idea for the show came from a dyed-in-the-wool Sailor, retired Navy Chief Boatswain's Mate Harold B. Estes of Honolulu. It was Estes--a charter member of the council, a Navy League life member, and a past national vice president who is now a national director emeritus--who urged Bigelow, as president of the East Oahu Council, to go on TV with his stories about the sea services.

"It's a labor of love," Bigelow says.

For Bigelow, that means love both for the sea services and for broadcasting. For his civilian camera operators, editors, directors, and producers, it's a love of the show--combined with at least some curiosity about the sea services. But for at least eight hours of free television training and the promise of an exciting challenge, enough volunteers have stepped forward to get "Now Hear This!" started.

"We've had good luck in people who have volunteered to help with photo shoots and especially asking questions, being reporters," Bigelow says. "Some of them are former television people themselves."

So far, Bigelow and his "Now Hear This!" team have completed nine shows, the first of which aired in December 2002, following several months of planning. The team is now preparing to take the show national. But first things first: Each volunteer is trained in the basics of public television: what it is, how it works, why it's worthwhile. After that, anyone who is interested can take additional courses in camera work, editing, directing, producing, and running the mobile van that allows the show to go directly to the scene of a new episode being produced.

The cost is considerable in terms of time; minimal in terms of cash.

"We have everything we need to shoot anything throughout the United States"--for less than $500 per show, Bigelow says proudly.

That seems improbable, but one of Bigelow's principal focuses in launching "Now Hear This!" was to assemble donations of state-of-the-art camera equipment from the Sony Corporation, a major vendor to base exchanges and now an official underwriter of the show. A local personnel firm, Omega Checking, another underwriter, has donated money, and a small number of Navy League members also have chipped in, to the tune of $1,000 each, Bigelow says.

The rest of the equipment (microphones, camera cases, stands--all of it new) came from eBay auctions and was purchased "for about 30 cents on the dollar," he says.

Bigelow saves time and money, and broadens the show, by using segments produced elsewhere, for about 20 percent of each of the "Now Hear This!" episodes. He said he hopes that Navy League councils will take similar advantage of all the work that goes into "Now Hear This!" and use it for their own purposes.

"We spend an inordinate amount of time getting videos from people to support what we're reporting," he says. "The key to our show is B-roll," or background material. "If you're interviewing someone talking about health care, you better be showing doctors and patients and people."

That effort has paid off in numerous ways--in a feature on Sea Cadets at summer boot camp, for example; in an episode about an award-winning galley in Hawaii; in episodes about Operation Deep Freeze (the Coast Guard's series of operational exercises in Antarctica); on the successful battle of a Marine captain, a bagpiper in his off-duty hours, to survive cancer; and on a number of more run-of-the-mill shows--e.g., various changes of command, and the keel-laying of a new Virginia-class submarine.

There's no need to duplicate the effort, Bigelow says. He is offering "Now Hear This!" for a modest price, "at least $100," to other Navy League councils with the idea that they can insert five minutes of their own locally produced news and features into the 30-minute show. In television parlance, this "blending" concept is called a "doughnut."

"We've had a council in Portland [Ore.] that wants to do it, one in San Diego, and one on the East Coast," Bigelow says.

He said he hopes that broader distribution of "Now Hear This!" ultimately will pay off in greater public understanding of the defense role played by the sea services, and in attracting more Navy League volunteers.

"They're patriots, is what they are," Bigelow says of his fellow Navy Leaguers. And not because they have served in the military, he emphasizes: "Because most of them haven't." *