Anyone looking over the Athletic Complex during the week preceding the presidential debate would not have recognized it -- especially the Field House.
Outside, dozens of workers from Sachs Electric Co., Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., Paric Construction Co. and other St. Louis businesses were bustling about the grounds transforming a sports complex into the site of the first 1992 presidential debate. Sachs Electric workers hauled in some 20 miles of electrical wire, according to Mike Eaton, Washington University's superintendent of electrical utilities. Two transformers from Union Electric were brought in to handle the additional power requirements. Southwestern Bell's personnel installed 3,500 access lines, 20 times more than the normal 150 lines that service the complex.
Inside, Paric Construction's 20 workers used approximately 200 sheets of plywood and an estimated 700 boards of various widths and lengths to construct platforms for the network broadcasts, the stage foundation, and holding rooms for the presidential candidates.
Southwestern Bell workers installed one mile of fiber cable, two-and-a-half miles of copper cable, four switching terminals and 50 distribution terminals. They set up fiber-optic video circuits for network back-up transmissions, as well as high-speed data circuits for radio broadcast transmission.
"The 3,500 lines are equivalent to what there is in a typical St. Louis suburb," said Pat Stinnett of Southwestern Bell. Stinnett added that 70 people from Southwestern Bell worked around the clock at the Athletic Complex preparing for the debate.
While the Field House gymnasium floor was beginning to take on the unaccustomed veneer of a theatre setting, deep below it, the showers in the men's and women's locker rooms gradually were converted into darkrooms for photographers from the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and Agency France Presse. The showers were draped in black plastic, and washing tubs were brought in to wash photograph negatives.
The visiting photographers needed the darkrooms immediately to develop negatives. They then used electronic scanners to digitize the images from the negatives and did their cropping and toning on a computer screen. Their negatives were dispatched from the computer terminals via modem to their media headquarters.
The Field House, its one-week transformation complete, was ready for the 6 p.m. debate on Oct. 11. As the debate began, students, faculty and staff unable to be at the Athletic Complex watched the debate at a dozen sites on both the Hilltop and Medical School. The simulcasts were made possible through the work of Martin Dubetz, director of the office of the network coordinator, and his colleagues.
Meanwhile, a group of people gathered in Room 516 Bryan Hall to watch the debate on the Washington University fast-packet network. The high-speed, fiber-optic communications network transmits voice, data, video and high-resolution images in one package.
From Bryan Hall, the debate also was seen on the fast-packet network at the Southwestern Bell offices in downtown St. Louis nearly six miles away and at Southwestern Bell Technology Resources Inc , some 12 miles away. The fast-packet broadcast represented the first time a presidential debate was carried on a digital broadband network, considered the communications vehicle of the future.