---

MEMORIES OF ED HOTALING
by Jerry Levin
former WCBS producer

Ed Hotaling's name may not be the first one that comes to mind when remembering the many journalistic luminaries who worked a shift at Black Rock in the early days; but for those who really knew him it sure does.

He landed on my producing shift at about the same time that Ted Fuery, Jim Cusick and Dick Williams did. Ed's entry point was Tape Ops. All those guys were irrepressible, energetic, clever, hard to hold down (but who wanted to) experienced journalists, full of fun and great senses of humor, the sliest of which was probably Ed's. (Not to slight Dick Wiiliams who drew down the wrath of Ed Joyce one day when he wrote an intro to a Myra Waldo piece, "Now here is Myra Waldo with observations on Broccoli.")

But Ed had a way of goofing people about their foibles (or worse) that was so excruciatingly accurate that even the butt of his gibes would inevitably die laughing. (So I died many many times and wish he was around to put me down that way again.)

It was only by happenchance that I learned what a truly great and incisive reporter and writer we had working anonymously in Tape Ops. Glancing at a Village Voice on a newsstand one day at a time when the escalating Viet Nam fighting had become increasingly deadly over there and divisive over here, I discovered Ed's by line. Curious, I discovered a long free lance piece about the history and the roots of the enmity between Ho Chi Minh and the west, and in particular the U. S. -- the result of his enterprising curiosity about truth and his exhaustive dogged research.

It was set forth in what became his singular disingenuous of course this is something you really do want to know about, don't you, if you really want to know what's going on, and why wouldn't you narrative style. And reading it I discovered everything I should have known about that significant past, but did not. His book, written about forty years later, Islam Without Illusions, and other enterprising works, such as the one that set forth the undeniable use of slave labor in building the Capitol in DC. were written using that same compelling tone.

Back to the Village Voice: he never mentioned the piece to anyone in the newsroom, and he wouldn't have talked with me about it, if I hadn't brought it up. He was a genuinely modest man.

We had a long but too intermittent friendship in NYC and years later in the 1980s when we both worked in DC, where he earned several TV emmys for his enterprising work as a producer at the local NBC affiliate.

My most enduring and fondest memory of him is from the morning after I arrived at the Air Force hospital in Germany, where doctors were examining me for aches, pains and whatever following my getting away from the place in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley where I had been an unwilling guest of the Hezbollah for almost year. The doctor was not allowing any calls from the press. Private, personal calls, yes, but not the press.

That evening, I was asked if I wanted to talk to a person who said he was an old friend, a Mr. Hotaling. Naturally I said, yes, gleefully understanding immediately that in typical old time Tape Ops aggressive enterprising style he had found a way to talk his way past the switchboard guards to get "the" story, an interview for WRC-TV. It was a great reunion; and, of course, I was damned if I was going to deny him. In the course of our excited chatter, I asked him, "How did you get through, they've been catching imposters all day long." Recalling, in that sly tone of his from those long ago Tape Ops days when he would put on and put down his demanding producer, he said, "Well, I just had to. I knew if I didn't get through, you would kill me."

Rest in peace, Ed. You sure as hell earned it.

__________________

DON SWAIM adds this rather lame postcript to the Ed Hotaling story, but take it for what it's worth:
Ed Hotaling is responsible for my breaking my cigarette habit once and for all. I had given up smoking a few years earlier, but the urge to smoke never left me. One afternoon after work, Ed and I were sitting in the Channel Seven bar, just off Sixth Avenue, sipping martinis. Ed was a chain smoker, and when he pulled out his pack I bummed a cigarette, despite his protests. I hadn't eaten that day, and the combination of the cigarette and the martini sent me reeling to the street, where I hailed a cab, vomiting all the way up Central Park West. I was so sick that I've never wanted a cigarette since. Thank you, Ed, you cured me of the habit once and for all.

---