OK folks, this is the final part of these early episodes of CBN, Pat Robertson, and my early years here. This weekend we celebrate FIFTY YEARS (our Jubilee) of broadcasting. That’s half a century!
I have been part of this work more than half of that time (1967-1971) with a break away period involved with my own work in upstate New York.
I returned here to CBN in the latter part of 1983. To date that’s a total of thirty three years with this work. But for me it’s more than just a job, or a worldwide broadcasting facility; it’s a relationship.
Thanks for all the comments and your own personal reminiscing.
Scott Ross
P.S. There is obviously more to the story I’ll save for another time.
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A New Adventure
It was a hot afternoon in July when I bumped into Pat in the hallway of CBN. In his hand he held a letter.
"Interesting, Scott," he said, handing me the letter as we passed. The letter was from a man named Andy Andersen and it described a chain of FM station in upstate New York. My eyes raced ahead. There were five stations, linked into a little network. An unusual network too, for they overlapped and today FCC regulations would prohibit this. You could drive a car all the way from Buffalo, New York to Albany, New York and never be out of range of these overlapping stations.
And these facilities were for sale. They were currently owned by a telephone company, but a recent court decision required it to sell. Andersen wrote that he thought they could be bought for half a million dollars. A good price, he said. A half-million-dollar bargain! I knew Pat and his associates had about zilch dollars in the bank.
I put the letter on Pat's desk. But I couldn't so easily get it out of my mind. I wondered if this was what it meant to have your spirit witness to a thing. I had often heard the phrase, to get a burden for something. That was exactly what it felt like. The sensation I felt in my heart for those five radio stations was like a weight. Heavy, but not unpleasant. The stations were my responsibility; I must pray for them.
Which is just what I did. Sometimes I prayed for a half a million dollars, other times I prayed they wouldn’t cost that much. Just, God, let there be some way we can bring those stations into the CBN network.
"Think of it, Nedra," I said one evening as we sat propped up on our mattress-bed with Nedra Kristina asleep between us. "Upstate New York. Dozens of colleges and universities. All those kids. And suddenly five radio stations are waiting to be bought. Just sitting behind a microphone we could talk to students at Cornell and Syracuse and Rochester and Rensselaer and Colgate. We could talk straight. We could let it all hang out. It would be something brand new."
"What does Pat say about it?" asked Nedra.
"What Pat said, of course, every time we talked, was, 'Where’s the money going to come from?'"
But then one day he had an idea: "Look, Scott," he said, "if the phone company is going to have to sell those stations for cash and then pay a tax on the transaction, why don’t they give them away to CBN and claim a charitable deduction?"
We stood staring at each other. "It might work," I said. "It just might work."
By the end of the week Nedra and I knew it was going to work. Friday night we got a baby-sitter and went out to a little coffee house. While we were sitting there a young man came over to our table.
"You're Scott Ross, aren't you?"
"That's right. Do we know each other?"
"No. I saw an article about you in the Virginia Pilot newspaper."
So we sat around making small talk.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Upstate New York."
Nedra and I exchanged glances. We told him about the network of FM stations we were praying for.
"Oh, those stations," the young man said. "Sure I know them. I used to listen to them while I studied. Most of the students do, because they play background music. You know, not a lot of talk. Listen, if you got those stations you’d have a built-in audience."
"I still can't get over it," I said to Nedra next morning at breakfast. "What are the changes of running into that guy and his bringing up the business about students and those stations? I tell you, love, God's in this thing!"
Check everything against the written word . . . The Bible beside the teapot. What if I were to open it, just anywhere, and see if it confirmed this idea.
Feeling embarrassed because I wasn't sure it was okay to use the Bible this way, I flipped it open somewhere in the middle and stuck my finger on the page. My finger landed on Isaiah 55:12:
“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
I read it again, scarcely believing it. "Oh, wow, Nedra. If this is God speaking to us, were going to be going up there, you and I, and there's going to be singing and the whole place celebrating because of what's going on."
Nedra took the Bible from me and read the verse herself. "Are there really lots of hills and trees in upstate New York, Scott?"
"Nothing but."
Monday I told Pat about the Isaiah verse. Pat was excited in his unflappable way. "I hear it, Scott," he said. "In fact, let's get on the morning show right now and tell people about this."
"We've made a definite proposal to the telephone company," Pat said into the microphone, and then laughed. "That is, we've asked them to give the stations to us. And now here comes this scripture which the Lord gives Scott. If we're hearing God correctly, the Rosses are to go forth and the very hills around Ithaca will sing. Will you pray with us right now for those stations?"
It was two days later that Pat was waiting outside the studio when I got to work.
"They've accepted, haven't they?" I said.
"They have!" For once Pat's cool was undone. "It's just a matter of the paperwork now. The stations are ours! When can you leave?" He ran on without a pause. "We can swing a twenty-five dollar raise for the higher cost of living up there."
I must have looked hesitant because he started telling me all over again what a great opportunity the stations were. "I know the money's not great, but if you got along on a hundred dollars a week here, you should be able to make it on a hundred and twenty-five up there."
But it wasn't the money. Just, somehow, I'd never really pictured what it would be like to pick up and move, baby and all, to some place we'd never laid eyes on, and now that the time was actually here I was scared.
But Pat had been right when he’d said that God's signposts, when they come, never come singly. Everything but everything suddenly pointed us away from Portsmouth. Even the townhouse where we'd been so comfortable, all at once wasn't comfortable any more.
It happened when some of Nedra's family came down for two weeks in August. Funny how no one had ever noticed their skin color before. Now we began to get comments from the neighbors.
"You know, Mr. Ross, it's not that we have any objection to these people, but I'm going to be selling my house soon, and you know what happens to real estate values when . . ."
Yeah. Anyhow, I believe the Lord let this happen as an added direction signal. Nedra and I had an easy time packing, since most of our furniture belonged to CBN anyhow. We'd sold Nedra's car to pay our daughter Nedra Kristina’s hospital bills. We rented the smallest U-Haul truck available and took the highway north.
The needle of the Empire State Building rose out of the industrial fog of New Jersey as we approached New York City. I remembered the first time I'd seen that spire, a lonesome kid of sixteen, riding up to the observation tower to dream dreams of glory. Here I was, twelve years later, my worldly possessions not filling the back of a small U-Haul . . .
Ithaca is 250 miles northwest of New York City. On September 1, 1968, Nedra and I pulled the truck to the crest of a hill overlooking the town. A fabulous world lay below us. Geologically, the land was glacier country. Huge ice fingers had gouged out the area, leaving long slender valleys which filled with water. Ithaca sat between two parallel ranges of hills, at the southern end of one of these deep-water lakes. Here and there already a scarlet tree announced the oncoming fall.
Our only contact in Ithaca was Andy Andersen, the man who had been running the station and acting as intermediary between the telephone company and Pat Robertson. We located Andy’s house and got a big welcome. He and his wife Robin couldn’t wait to drive us up to the transmitter.
What a site for a radio station! Chipmunks, woodchucks, a porcupine and a deer ran to cover as Andy's car crunched up the gravel road. Years ago some farmer had built himself a house way out here. The network had purchased the property and erected a transmitting tower in the back yard. The farmhouse was now studio and office, and to run both there was only a skeleton crew headed by Andy.
The Andersen’s insisted we stay with them until we could work out living arrangements of our own. And so began our search for a home, the search which though we didn’t suspect it at the time was to lead to so much more.
Each day we poured over the real estate columns in the local paper. There were very few rentals, and what did exist was out of our range. Using the textbook rule of one-weeks-pay-for-the-rent, we could spend $125 a month for housing. There was never anything near this price. Then one day Nedra said:
"Scott, look at this. Under MOBILE HOMES: Trailer for rent. $90.00 And its furnished!"
Andy looked at the address and nodded; the trailer was on the very road that led to the transmitter. That same afternoon we all drove out to take a look at it. The trailer sat catty-cornered on a lot next to an isolated farmhouse. It was small and tinny and I wondered how it would stand up to the deep freeze of Ithaca’s sub-zero winter. But inside it was cozy and homelike. Twenty minutes later we signed a month-to-month rental agreement.
That night I phoned Pat to report progress. The plan was for me to stay at the transmitter until the beginning of 1969 when the Christian programming could begin.
"That's over three months off," Pat said. "You won't have anything to do except play records. Know what I suggest you do with your time, Scott? Read the Bible. What an opportunity! Wish I had it myself."
And that's exactly what I did. For three months, for twelve hours a day, from six in the morning until six in the evening, I played background music, breaking in occasionally to read the news. But basically, I knew, I'd been given this time to find out what God said in His Word.
During this time too I settled on the kind of program I wanted once CBN officially took over the stations. I got out a map of New York state and drew circles around the five outlets Ithaca, Syracuse, Schenectady, Rochester, Buffalo each circle representing the FM range. It was true that you could drive across the whole state and never lose the voice of CBN Northwest.
My dream was to reach my kind of people with a contemporary sound. Instead of the usual back-to-back preaching of most Christian radio stations, ours would have varied programming. Mine would be the evening show, and I'd call it Tell It Like It Is. In between good records people could call in to talk about their problems; I knew from my experience in Portsmouth that there was no better setting for a natural lead-in to Jesus. The show would be reaching into bars and automobiles and dorms and drug-scene parties: the market place where my kind of people hung out, hungry and thirsty for something they couldn’t define.
And afterwards, when they found the answer what then? The ones Jesus would call, the ones He would heal: where would they go? To some red brick church-on-the-corner, dressed, like the man said, in appropriate attire?
I didn't have any answers to that one. I wasn't sure anybody did.