FROM THE ARCHIVES: The year the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley didn't see the Super Bowl

FROM THE ARCHIVES: This story originally appeared in the Tribune on Jan. 26, 2003. This year's Super Bowl -- which will hopefully be shown on televisions all over the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley -- is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Sunday.

In this age of cell phones and satellites, DVDs and CD-ROMs, it seems like a preposterous notion. There once was a party that merrily welcomed every couch potato on Earth, beckoning them to the toasty glow of the television. But one small community was left out -- suddenly marooned in the 19th century.

Twenty-four years ago this past week, the Super Bowl, the Moby-Dick of sports events, somehow slipped by the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley, unseen.

Think about that for a moment. It was a January without the Super Bowl. Considering the thou-shalt-not-channel-surf reverence the game has gained, that's almost like a December without Christmas.

On Jan. 21, 1979, Pittsburgh outlasted Dallas 35-31 in Super Bowl XIII in Miami, widely thought to be one of the NFL's finest championship games ever. Around the world, millions watched on television. But because of troublemaking weather and series of technical malfunctions almost too intricate to be a coincidence, TVs across the valley showed nothing but snow that day.

"You can just imagine the trauma," said William J. Raschka, who, in 1979, was the chief engineer at Teleprompter, the valley's cable provider. "We would hear all kinds of stories in the days after the game. I would have people come into the office and say, 'We know that was a communist plot. They did it.' "

Over the years, the lore of the valley's un-Super Sunday has bloomed. For conspiracy buffs, the uncanny timing of the TV outage is probably what sets off alarm bells. Televisions around town went fuzzy at 1:05 p.m., moments before kickoff, and the signal was restored at 5:13 p.m., about 30 minutes after the game concluded.

Maybe it couldn't match the excitement of the Steelers-Cowboys showdown, but here, in the valley, there was another drama unfolding. A group of men were trying to save the Super Bowl.

First quarter

The initial sign of the coming calamity arrived at noon, approximately one hour before the game. Flipping around the dial, Raschka noticed a glitch in the picture -- an error undetectable to the untrained eye, but very telling for him.

The Teleprompter relay site on the Lewiston Hill was running on generator power. That meant the main electricity had been knocked out.

But this didn't send Raschka into a panic. Just a month earlier, the generator's propane tanks had been refilled, and the equipment was checked on a regular basis. And Clearwater Power Co., which supplied electricity to the Lewiston Hill, was usually quick at resolving such problems.

Besides, Raschka had plans to go four-wheeling at Waha that day. The generator could supply the relay site with power for eight hours, which seemed more than enough time for Clearwater Power to patch up its lines.

A little after 1 o'clock, Raschka and a co-worker were about to leave his house and head to Waha.

"And I said, 'Well, let's just check and make sure the Super Bowl channel stays on,' " Raschka said. "The referees were standing around and they flipped the coin -- and it went to snow. And I went, 'Oh no.'

"Then I flipped through the channels and realized what had happened," he added. "We looked at each other and were totally baffled. It was running perfectly and it was in good shape, so how could this happen?"

Somehow, Teleprompter had gone off the air -- and not just the NBC affiliate from Spokane that was carrying the Super Bowl. Every single channel was out.

In fact, there weren't any televisions working in the valley. When Clearwater Power had gone out an hour earlier, the UHF translators -- not to mention the local KLEW relay station -- went silent. And none of them had backup generators.

But what about Teleprompter's generator? Why had it failed? Raschka jumped in his car and raced to the office, looking for answers.

Second quarter

Stan Vannoy was one of many valleyites who planned their day around the Super Bowl. And he watched the picture suddenly blink out, too.

Moments later, the phone rang. Vannoy, a lineman for Clearwater Power, was called into work.

A large crew was sent up the Lewiston Hill to investigate the outage, but Vannoy was dispatched to Juliaetta, where service had also gone down. Still hoping to get home for the end of the game, Vannoy went about his assignment.

Meanwhile, viewers were growing more upset by the minute. When Raschka arrived at the Teleprompter office, worried-looking people were already pulling into the parking lot. They were hoping that someone could explain what happened -- and quickly.

A number of Raschka's co-workers had automatically assembled at the office after the outage. Raschka decided that he and one other engineer would scramble up the hill to investigate.

The weather was rather mild in the valley that day, overcast but largely dry. But as Raschka and his assistant ascended the grade, the conditions turned nasty. By the time they got to the farm that was adjacent to the relay site, snow drifts were as deep as 4 feet.

"At the time, we had no concept of the danger in getting to the site," he said. "We got to the top of the hill and found out there was a blizzard going on."

Once they arrived at the relay, Raschka was expecting to find some piece of technology on the fritz -- a frazzled wire or cracked cog. But the problem was much simpler than that.

"When I finally got into the site, I heard this light hisssss," he said. "And it dawned on me why we were off the air."

For a month, the propane tanks had been slowly leaking. (A faulty switch-over valve between the two tanks was the culprit.) Since the tanks sat outside the relay shed, none of the engineers paid much attention to them, so no one noticed the leak.

Third quarter

Actually, it isn't accurate to say that none of the Super Bowl was seen. For a tantalizing moment, the picture flashed back on, showing a replay of Terry Bradshaw hitting Rocky Bleier for a 7-yard Pittsburgh touchdown. Then snow. Later, a shot of Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach warming up on the sidelines materialized. Then snow.

For Clearwater Power linemen, simply finding the problem was, well, a problem. Wet, heavy snow had accumulated on the power lines in a number of places, then snapped them in two.

Twice, the workers were able to jury-rig a solution. And for a precious few moments, viewers got those quick glimpses of the game. But both times, the power shut down again.

After he had finished with his work in Juliaetta, Vannoy joined the rest of the linemen on the Lewiston Hill. He soon discovered that there was no quick-fix to this outage. Because of the weather, just inspecting all the lines was a struggle.

"There was so much wind and snow that it plugged all the roads, and it was really hard to get around," Vannoy said. "... At the time, our company didn't own any snowmobiles, so we just borrowed a couple from a farmer."

At the Teleprompter relay, Raschka knew exactly what he needed -- a tank of propane. From that isolated shed, he had to find some way to get that message to his co-workers in the Lewiston office.

So he turned off every piece of electrical equipment in the building -- except for the radio. There was just enough propane left in those leaky tanks to power the radio for a few moments, allowing him to make contact with the office.

With a fresh tank of propane and their own snowmobiles loaded on pickups, the engineers headed up the hill. At this point, they were battling both technology and time -- the Super Bowl was coming down to the wire.

Fourth quarter

What does Raschka remember most about that day? There's the "seriousness," he called it, of losing service, and the danger of sliding around the Lewiston Hill.

And there's also the camaraderie. Facing a hairy problem, the Teleprompter team performed with savvy and skill.

But it turned out to be a hollow victory. By the time the engineers arrived at the relay site with the new propane tank, the game was over.

"After finishing it up," Raschka said, "we realized, 'Oh my God, we lost the Super Bowl.' "

Postgame

In the days following the game, Raschka heard a ream of salty complaints and bizarre stories. He was told that the Super Bowl blackout prompted one man to chuck his dog out of a window and another man to strike his wife. And, of course, many were sure that commies had a secret base on the Lewiston Hill.

No doubt, the irony of the outage is what infuriated the town. The valley's electricity was supplied by Washington Water Power, and it was on-line all day. And the valley's weather gave no indication of the tempest brewing atop the hill. So most fans were looking for a boogie man to blame for the blackout.

Knowing this might be the case, Raschka placed a call to the Lewiston Morning Tribune after his crew had finished installing the new tank. He explained to reporter Sylvia Harrell what had happened, and the story appeared in the paper the following day, Jan. 22.

But the public found a scapegoat anyway. In the Tribune's story, Clearwater Power manager Clement W. Eaton said this: "God is responsible, not me."

Raschka cringed.

"I felt very sorry for that comment, because (Eaton) took a lot of heat for that," he said. "Clearwater Power took a lot of ridicule that they didn't deserve. ... You came blame God for a lot of things, but never blame God for the Super Bowl. People just won't take that."

Twenty-four years hence

In time, just about everyone recovered from the shock of missing the Super Bowl. It even became a joke. Almost every January following '79, Raschka would get a handful of smirking "Are we going to have the game this year?" comments.

Raschka, now 57, lives in Oklahoma City and hasn't worked in cable TV since the early '90s. But every once in a while, he thinks back to that day.

"Every January," he said, "I kind of giggle a little bit."

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Baney may be contacted at mbaney@lmtribune.com