LAST MONTH'S ELECTIONS, as usual, left some poll takers and pundits with egg on their faces.
Some races, which had been labeled too close to call, produced winners who easily glided to victory. In others, some underdogs pulled off upsets.
All of this brings to mind Baltimore's first TV election coverage team -- WMAR-TV's (Channel 2) Ernest "Ernie" Baugh, David "Dave" Stickle and Richard "Moco" Yardley and what they called their "100 prompt, predictable precincts."
When The Baltimore Sun began operating WMAR it naturally selected many of its first staff people from among the newspaper's employees. Stickle was a reporter who became Baltimore's first TV reporter; Baugh and Yardley worked for The Sun, too, as an editorial writer and political cartoonist, respectively.
WMAR's set and the system of the 1950s were primitive by today's standards: Baugh and Stickle sat at a table with a telephone, Yardley at a drawing board. The studio was on the fourth floor of the old Baltimore Sun building, at Baltimore and Charles streets.
On the night of Sept. 8, 1950, the team made history with its election night debut. On that night, it covered Maryland's gubernatorial primary. Gov. William Preston Lane was running against George P. Mahoney for the Democratic nomination. There was no Republican primary contest.
The team created its own system to cover the election, which proved to be very effective. Baugh's son, Ernest "Duke" Baugh III, who followed his dad's career closely and remembers it well, said, "They were right far more often than the exit polls used by the networks today are. Those guys were able to call the city's elections early and right!"
How did they do it?
"They studied the city's history," Duke Baugh recalled. "They picked 100 precincts that had historically voted for the winner in every election, and with a pattern of reporting in promptly. So promptly that at 7 p.m. [when the polls closed in those days] they were on the phone. Within minutes they had the results of those 100 precincts -- and called the election. Ten, maybe 15 minutes after 7! I never remember their ever being wrong. The system did not work well in Baltimore County because as late as 1950 the county was still using paper ballots that had to be counted by hand, and it took them forever to report in. The city was way ahead of the county on that one -- it had voting machines years before!"
And as Stickle and Baugh were calling the election by reviewing the 100 precincts, Yardley was drawing cartoons of the winners and losers -- the only illustrations available to the commentators.
Yardley left the team in the mid-1950s. Baugh was next, in the early 1960s. Stickle did the coverage all by himself until 1966.
Interestingly, Stickle, Baugh and Yardley did not have the blow-dried good looks of today's TV news people. That was the case with most newspapermen who made the leap to the then-new medium of television.
But Stickle, Baugh and Yardley, with their slightly rumpled looks, were pioneers whose record of accuracy is something still to be envied by today's TV election teams.