A Pioneer Of Public-Access TV Books Passage To The Print World

Old TV shows never die; they just go into reruns.

But what about old-TV-show producers?

Virginia Brookbush, the matron saint, the grande dame of Seattle public-access TV, is going into print.

``It was a terrible psychological shock to have to turn my back on television,'' says Brookbush, who left the medium almost two years ago because of failing health. Now the 74-year-old busies herself researching two autobiographies.

Two? Actually, they're two volumes. Like a miniseries. Remember, hers is a big life. Part One starts in 1915 - when her parents married; Part Two picks up in 1935 - when she married - and continues through the present.

In Brookbush's tiny University District apartment, a row of filing cabinets that once held notes from her various television projects now holds documents for her books. Videotapes cram an adjacent closet.

Perhaps you remember some of the shows she produced. Perhaps not.

Shows such as ``You Have the Right to Know,'' ``Visiting Over the Backyard Fence,'' ``Choir Practice,'' ``This Town's Talent'' and ``Vicinos'' - ``people'' in Spanish - weren't exactly blockbuster hits. But then, nothing on the public-access channel (Channel 29 on TCI and Viacom) is. In volume alone, though, she was the Quinn Martin of public access - during her most productive peak, Brookbush produced seven half-hour shows a week.

They were chatty shows. Shows that stressed content, not style.

``It was OK if they tilted the camera wrong,'' said Lani Edenholm, director of local origination programming at TCI Cablevision of Washington. ``She offered a vehicle for the man on the street. It was the message she cared about, not the medium.''

In a video production ``grass-roots handbook'' that Brookbush published in 1987, she summed up her philosophy: ``To watch television and not use it as a means of communication is like being allowed to read books and never being allowed to have a pencil and tablet.''

Perhaps the Brookbush oeuvre is typified best by ``Community Bulletin Board.'' Representatives of local nonprofit organizations would bring their own charts and posters and each receive up to five minutes on-camera to talk about any activity or service.

``The content, sharing information, was the purpose,'' Brookbush says, maneuvering her wheelchair past the file cabinets. ``That's what makes better citizens. Better voters.''

Maybe she's naive. We seem to live in a teledemocracy where people stay home to watch ``The Wonder Years'' and avoid the polls.

And lately, religious shows - Buddhism, Judaism, Hare Krishna, Islam, Catholicism - dominate Channel 29.

``It kinda looks like public access is going to the bow-wows,'' Brookbush says, mourning the lack of community-affairs programming. ``I'm disgusted there aren't enough people interested in the variety of subjects. Nobody's carrying on for me.''

Meanwhile, Seattle and several other local cities are preparing to renegotiate agreements with local cable companies, with policy for public access one of the topics to be covered.

``If people want to improve access policy . . . those people have to come forward,'' said B. Parker Lindner, who chairs the Citizen Cable Communications Advisory Board. ``That's what Virginia did.''

Born in Iowa and raised on a horse ranch in Wyoming, Brookbush held jobs leading trail-horse tours, running a kindergarten and selling promotional ads for radio and TV. Her visits to TV stations were enough to convince her that she wanted to try TV directing. So Brookbush became a 50-year-old college student and graduated with a degree in speech and drama from Idaho State University, an institution that helped pioneer TV studies.

In 1970, she wound up in Seattle and found a job at a vocational school making training tapes that taught such skills as carpentry and welding.

Public-access TV was only a promising infant. By 1976, Brookbush had started the Community Television Agency, to teach amateurs how to harness the medium's potential.

``I could see better than the young people what would happen down the road,'' says Brookbush, who reckons she has trained upward of 500 people in the rudiments of production.

To pay the rent, she signed on as a Panasonic sales rep. She persuaded a company that leased bulldozers and posthole diggers to buy a TV camera, then leased it for herself with the money she earned as a commission. Later, she would spend most of her Social Security checks on new equipment and videotapes.

Bound like a mummy in sandwich wrap, Brookbush's first camera is nestled on a high shelf in her apartment. It looks primitive, all chrome and burnished metal; it feels heavy.

Lugging a camera like this and a Porta-Pak onto a bus caused Brookbush to fracture her hip.

``I broke two prosthetic devices carrying TVs,'' she says. ``I dedicated my time, my money, my body to public access.''

She puts the camera to her eye. ``I've done all I can do.''