•_—. I .... ..
Story and Photos
hy Michelle Paulman
Cformer University of Ncbraska
L.incoln employee has lived
news broadcasting history. He
even helped create some of it.
Filming Fidel Castro before he w as
a dictator, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
before he was assassinated, Jackie
Kennedy before she was Onassis, and
every president from Harry Truman
to Jimmy Carter also has given the
cinematographer hours of story-tell
ing material.
Wendell Hoffman, 78, often re
gales people w'ith tales from his days
as a Columbia Broadcasting System
cameraman in the 1950s and ’60s,
during the dawn of television news
coverage.
A soldier in World War II, Hoffman
began working at UNL in 1945 after
the war ended as the Head of the
Photographic Laboratory. He began
working part-time for CBS in 1952
and, a couple of years later, he left
UNL to work for CBS full-time.
In 1958, CBS learned that Castro
was camped out in the mountains ol
eastern Cuba. At the time, a dictator
ruled Cuba, and Castro promised to
restore a democratic government.
Hoffman and other CBS newsmen
spent three weeks with Castro in the
mountains, filming him for televi
sion.
When three young civil rights
workers were killed in Mississippi by
a town sheriff and his deputies,
Hoff man was there to cover the story
for CBS. The event was later made
into the movie “Mississippi Burn
ing.”
Hoffman also worked with Dan
Rather before he was a famous net
work anchorman and covered John F.
Kennedy’s assassination with him in
1963. OlhcrCBS greats Hoffman has *
worked with include Waller Kronkile,
Harry Rcasoner and Charles Kuralt.
These days, Hoffman, of 19(X)
King’s Highway, is renovating a house
at 5019 Walker Avc. into apartments,
l ie bought the house in 1937, and it is
now over 100 years old.
Hoffman worked when television
and filmed news coverage were just
beginning. Now, after 25 years of
filming history, he has plenty of sto
ries to tell to his old news buddies or
young, budding journalists.
“When a bunch of old newsmen
get together, it’s like telling war sto
ries,” he said. “They’re the stories of
their lives.”
Clockwise from top left:
•Hoffman fiddles with a torpedo camera used during
World War II to determine if bombs dropped during air raids
hit the target.
•Hoffman holds some panelling while University of Ne
braska-Lincoln junior Jack Jenkins nails it in place.
•Hoffman relaxes in his living room after a day of renovat
ing his other house at 5019 Walker St.
•Fifty-year-old bottles from the days when developing so
lutions were mixed from scratch are ready for the trash.