Sport: Best Seat in the House

The best seat in the house was not in Yankee Stadium or in Milwaukee's County Stadium, but in front of any TV set in the land. NBC whisked the home spectator all over the field almost as intimately as the ball itself, perched him right behind the umpire at home plate, let him look over the pitcher's shoulder, or into the dust cloud at third. It was a job that took teamwork as smooth as any on the ballfield. Alertly swung and aimed cameras sent a confusing pell-mell of images from all angles into a control room where split-second decisions distilled the chaos into the crisp, orderly telecasts that brought the World Series to baseball's biggest audience—some 40 million all over the U.S., Canada and, for the first time, "over the horizon" to beisbol-slappy Cuba.

NBC's decision to cover Yankee Stadium with four color cameras made a tough job even tougher. Using six black-and-white cameras in Milwaukee, the same crew achieved more fluent coverage from a greater variety of angles. Though the vast majority of viewers saw even the colorcasts in the black-and-white version, color demanded cameras three times as bulky (and balky), and the engineers had to "paint" constantly with their control knobs to cope with changes in lighting and color temperature. Their pains reproduced some vivid ballpark atmosphere. The grass sometimes turned Kentucky blue and the shaded areas filled with indigo murk, but improved equipment averted the blind shadows that plagued the first (and only previous) color Series in 1955.

Battle Stations. At Yankee Stadium a mile and a half of cable linked the cameras with NBC's color mobile unit in the street outside. Within the curbstone control room, nine shirtsleeved men were wedged into a maze of apparatus like submariners at battle stations, lit by little more than the flicker of eight TV monitoring screens. Director Harry Coyle, 35, an ex-bomber pilot who, like most of the others in the mobile unit, is a veteran of TV's infancy, chain-smoked from his perch on a high stool, his eyes darting back and forth. Crammed in front of him and to his left stood screens flashing four different views of the game, plus a fifth monitor linked to another camera focused on cards bearing players' names. Above this cluster of screens hung two more: one showed the picture that Coyle had just decided to put on home sets; the second, like the batter's on-deck circle, carried whatever shot he could foresee as the next.

Producer Perry Smith, standing behind Coyle, wore two headsets—one connecting him to the Radio City studio where most of the Gillette commercials were fed into home screens, the other into the stadium to a man alongside Announcer Mel Allen, whose voice blatted through the control room above the hum of air conditioners. Smith kept a score card, called out what action possibilities lay in the next play. With two men out in the second inning, Joe Adcock was on second, and Milwaukee Catcher Crandall came up to bat. Smith sang out: "Next man up is the pitcher. They might walk Crandall."

"Take Three," called Coyle. "On Three," echoed Technical Director Walter Serafin into his private line to the cameramen, and he punched a button that put Camera Three on the air. It showed a side view of Crandall in the batter's box, with catcher and umpire behind him.