He saw history through a television lens
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July 21 2005
Tony Cucurullo's stride is slower now. His hair has gone white. But let him talk for a while, and he takes you back to when he was young, hustling to make his way in an industry that gave him some of the greatest moments of his life.
The 77-year-old worked as a CBS cameraman in the network's New York studio and on the road from 1955 to 1992. His mind is a storehouse of indelible images that, to hear him tell, happened just yesterday.
And complementing his words are proud possessions - not big or showy but surely the makings of a grown-up show-and-tell.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represents many broadcast industry employees, and on Cucu- rullo's white satin IBEW jacket is an array of pins from events that he's viewed through his lens.
"These are some of the places I've been to," he says, fingering a pin from a Belmont Stakes race won by Secretariat.
"Nineteen seventy-three," he recalls. "He won by 31 lengths."
Cucurullo opens a worn brown clasp envelope at his kitchen table in York County. Out tumble press passes from NASA, NBA and Super Bowl games, the United Nations, the U.S. Capitol and late President Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
"That was the coldest inauguration I ever been in," he muses.
A bad back forced his retirement in 1992. In 1999, he and his wife, Pauline, settled on the Peninsula, near his brother, Joe, who lives in Williamsburg.
"I just faded into the woodwork," he said. "Nobody's ever ready to leave. (But) you have to go. It's your time to pack it in."
Even in high school, Cucurullo wanted to be around celebrities. He got a job with CBS Radio's "Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour," later hosted by Ted Mack. It didn't matter that he was only an office boy. "That was a glorious time for me," he said.
In the radio studio in the 1940s, he watched Jimmy Durante, Gary Moore and Kate Smith rehearse their shows.
After a stint in the Navy, followed by college and some per-diem camera work that included NBC, he was back at CBS.
In the 1950s, he was one of Arthur Godfrey's CBS cameramen.
Remember television's Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams? Cucurullo does.
"Oh," he said, "was she lovely!"
"That Old Black Magic," a tune from the 1940s, is playing as Cucurullo reminisces. "It's just fun talking about it," he says. "It brings back my memories."
There are no careers these days like the one that he spent with the "Tiffany network," he says. If you were sick, CBS developer and honcho William Paley paid the bills and sent flowers.
"William Paley was a father to all of us," Cucurullo says. "I was known as a 'Bill Paley boy' because I worshipped him."
His prime time put him in contact with a who's who of history makers.
"You meet the headlines," he says over a cup of coffee in his breakfast room. "I was there for Nixon's Watergate."
When Pope John Paul II celebrated a papal Mass at New York's Yankee Stadium on Oct. 2, 1979, Cucurullo arranged the camera work. "So," he reminisces, "everyone in the world saw that pope through my eyes."
He traveled the world, a camera on his shoulder, capturing history through a lens.
Vietnam. Russia. Israel.
He covered the Olympics; a space launch at Cape Kennedy, Fla., with CBS News' Dan Rather; and the Andrews Air Force Base homecoming of the U.S. hostages held for 444 days in Iran.
Spending 12 weeks on stories for the "Captain Kangaroo" show around the late 1970s, Cucurullo was assigned to a piece about how New York's World Trade Center twin towers' windows were washed. Although he was the technical director on the project, he volunteered to go up in the bucket to do the camera work.
"For a half-hour," he says of his 110-story perch, "I went up and down the Twin Towers, shooting this machine. No other cameraman ever did that - and no other cameraman will ever do it. I had a high for two days."
"He was an excellent cameraman - a crackerjack cameraman," says retired Lt. Col. Arthur Korff of Newport News, who worked in CBS' engineering department years ago and was a director of the IBEW's cable television department.
"A good cameraman knows ahead of time what will work," Cucurullo explains. "See the shot in your mind's eye, and do it."
These days, Cucurullo is "practicing" painting. Pencil sketches of Big Band greats such as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller dot his walls.
He's also learning to play the trumpet.
He reads.
He stays in touch with former colleagues via the CBS retirees' Web site that he was instrumental in starting, www.cbsretirees.com.
"And I have my memories," he says.
"I daydream. That's my hobby. I have wonderful friends. I've met wonderful people all over the country."
Those people remember Cucurullo and his connection to his career. "He loved every bit of it, by golly," says Korff, now Langley Air Force Base's retiree activities office director.
"It was great, it was great," Cucurullo marvels, "every minute of every day."
Copyright © 2005, Daily Press
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