The Early Years of Arizona PBS
When a live rattlesnake gets loose in your TV studio, you know something hasn’t quite gone according to plan.
That’s not a metaphor. In the 1960s, one of the ASU courses broadcast by the fledgling Arizona PBS was Dr. Herbert Stahnke’s biology course. At the end of the semester, he filled the last few lectures with information about poisonous animals his area of expertise, as one of his great achievements was developing a scorpion antivenom. During one demonstration, a rattlesnake did get loose on the studio floor.
“We had two cameras on the set, and you could tell something was wrong because the cameras were pointing at the floor,” Bob Ellis (pictured at right), then the station’s general manager, remembered years later. “The student cameramen locked the cameras in position and left the studio. Dr. Stahnke’s assistant caught the snake, put it back in its cage and the course went on when the cameramen returned.”