Clyde was dedicated to serving the public through his work as a broadcast engineer. He held high standards for the work we did in engineering and expected perfection from us. The work was hard and small details were critical to the operation. Clyde was also fair and respected his engineers very much.
Clyde developed an interesting collaboration with Chuck Hughes, our lead director. Chuck had many ideas about special programming and needed Clyde’s help in fine tuning the engineering details to make it work. One of the major accomplishments they worked together on was doing a live broadcast in 1982 from the Epcot Center in Florida. We had no way to do a direct satellite feed so Clyde developed a leap frog of the signal up the east coast by contacting many stations. Other special programming included our yearly live coverage of the Section V basketball games at the War Memorial. We also began a series of live broadcasts in cooperation with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. All of these programs required unique engineering techniques and Clyde was instrumental in how successful we were.
Clyde enjoyed amateur radio and spent his free time on the radio talking to friends around town or the world. One friend was Fred Ambrose who had worked as chief engineer for WROC for many years. Fred “retired” to take the position of chief engineer at SUNY Geneseo. I was working at WGSU-FM as a student supervisor. Fred had to spend time at the station working on the transmitter and checking official logs. I enjoyed spending time with Fred learning about electronics and maintaining the transmitter in our studio control room. Fred and Rose invited me for dinner often and I would sit downstairs while Fred chatted on his ham gear. Clyde was one of those friends. Fred contacted me about a job at Channel 13 and that led Clyde to hire me. In the following years I was able to obtain my amateur radio license as well.