The article "Delivering a President's Message to the World," about the 2009 inaugural sound system, brought back memories of a system I designed for the same purpose, but 40 years earlier, in 1969 for Richard Nixon's first inauguration. We estimated the crowd at about 50,000 people.
I was just 22 and recently graduated from college at my first job, when my boss, Lewis Goodfriend, asked me to work on the design with an experienced engineer. I took one look as the so-called "experienced" engineer's design and told my boss it was just an awful design. He challenged me to do it better.
I took the drawings home over the weekend and redesigned the system. To my amazement, he said my design was the one that would be used. This was the first inaugural sound system that would be fully solid state.
The system was built using all Altec Lansing equipment. Thirty two microphones were fed into the mixer from the podium (2 mics), the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Marine Band. A cross feed from the TV/Radio broadcast pool was also available on one of the inputs. A stack of 24 200-watt Altec amplifiers fed two stacks of Altec Lansing A500 Voice of the Theater speaker cabinets (12 on each side of the Capitol steps).
All of the equipment ran on 120 volt power as well as 24 volts DC. The DC power came from a large bank of car batteries that we bought at the local Sears Roebuck service center. Switching off the AC power hardly caused a click in the speakers.
As part of my job, I had to climb the speaker towers and check that the speaker wiring was in phase for each cabinet. Checking the top speaker, I was about 40 feet off the ground when a Secret Service guy spotted me up on the tower, climbed the ladder and tried to yank me off the ladder.
The two microphones for the podium were provided to the U.S. Army Signal Corps prior to the event to allow them to check them over carefully prior to their placement on the presidential podium. After attaching them, I covered each microphone with the largest prophylactic I could buy and then covered each mic with a normal foam windscreen – Washington DC is very windy in January.
The PA system was housed in the top floor of a temporary wooden building housing the three network studios used by the TV news people built about 100 feet in front of the inaugural podium. As I climbed down from the third floor (no steps, just a metal ladder) I stepped on NBC-TV news anchor Chet Huntley's head as he passed by the ladder, precipitating a screaming fit on his part.
Although my mother didn't sleep the entire night before the event, all worked as designed, and the "experienced engineer" never spoke to me again. Forty years later, I still do sound systems, but not quite like my first professionally designed system.
Mike Schatzberg
schatz5 [at] hicom.net
LSG&A (in 1969)
West Orange, N.J.
