Blue White Illustrated

The changes keep coming, but it���s strictly business A recent comment by coach Bill O���Brien about the sudden and surprising dismissal of Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli as the football team���s doctor and orthopedic surgeon after 20 years had a very familiar ring, and I couldn���t help nodding in agreement about what he said. Sebastianelli had been informed of the decision in the fourth week of January in a telephone call from an official at Penn State���s Hershey Medical Center, and O���Brien had never talked to him. When it was announced on Feb. 27, many Penn State football fans were upset and some outraged. Sebastianelli was a familiar figure on the sideline of every game home and away. After what he did on the field at Ohio State in 2000, when his quick action was cited as instrumental in sparing Adam Taliaferro from permanent paralysis, Sebastianelli was almost raised to sainthood by the Nittany Nation. O���Brien admitted it was his decision, saying ���Wayne is a good man and a fantastic doctor and has done so much for Penn State. This is more about the reorganization of the medical team. Wayne is still the head of Penn State sports medicine. We just reorganized the team.��� That may be completely true, but it really doesn���t matter. It���s what O���Brien also said about Sebastianelli���s departure during his meeting with reporters before the Maxwell Club Awards Banquet on March 1 that is the significant point and one I can relate to personally: ���You know, any time a new general manager of a TV station is hired or a new editor of a newspaper is hired, I don���t think they���re expected to come in and keep things the same way just because that���s the way it���s been done for many years.��� Amen, brother, and I should know because I spent 15 years in television and radio station newsrooms and another 12 years in Washington, D.C., running an independent news bureau that was affiliated with Northwestern University and had dozens of television and radio clients throughout the country. I saw a lot of general manager changes in that time and the transition in and out of many more news directors, the people who oversee the station news departments for the general managers. I���ve been hired by a couple of general managers and then fired later after they were replaced. I have also fired people myself, some of them not long after I was placed in charge of the department. The most unforgettable firing I ever made occurred a couple of weeks into my tenure at a Dayton television station in December 1978. I inherited a 50-year-old assignment editor who, like Bill O���Brien, was a native of Boston and loved hockey. He also loved smoking and chain smoked all day. Those were the days before smoking became a curse, and I even smoked cigars in the newsroom back then ��� yes, cigars. Anyway, the job of a television assignment editor is stressful and hectic, sort of like being an offensive coordinator or maybe similar to that of an air traffic controller. One day I learned my assignment editor had recently undergone a heart bypass operation and was playing ice hockey before or after work several times a week. I had visions of this editor dropping dead in front of me in the newsroom or on an ice rink at 5 a.m. I quickly discovered the editor had not mentioned any of this when he had been hired by the general manager about a month before me. Be- cause he lied on his application, we fired him. Less than a year later, the editor died of a heart attack playing hockey. True story. Often, there is no legitimate or fair reason for the various management firings in radio and television other than a new boss���s desire to change things. Period. But there also are dismissals because of the news or program ratings or poor sales figures. It���s not a pleasant experience being fired or having to fire someone else, but I did meet several managers along the way who appeared to get a lot of joy out of other people���s misery. In Detroit, Chicago and Dayton, I even hired three news directors who had just been fired themselves, and I didn���t know the one in Detroit beforehand. His dismissal is one of the cruelest ones I know. Rob Mahr was a well-respected news director who ran a first-class news and talk operation at a major radio station in Minneapolis in 1971. He left for a week���s vacation on a Friday, and when he returned to his office 10 days later, he thought he had stepped into the wrong room. Everything had been changed and there was someone he described as a ���young, long-haired, bearded hippie��� sitting in his chair. That���s how he learned the station���s management had changed its format that weekend and he was history. I hired Rob as an anchor-reporter for the news and talk radio side of my television-radio newsroom in 1973, and later, in addition to his work at the station, he helped cover the auto industry for the CBS Radio Network for decades. Another bizarre firing occurred at the NBC-owned television station in Chicago a few weeks after I was fired from the NBC radio station and went to work in Dayton. NBC���s corporate

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