Armed with information he picked up at Colgate's career services office, Pendell spent the summer after graduation in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., living with his father (Thomas Pendell Sr. '56) and participating in a film workshop at Vassar College. The New York Stage and Film Company was on campus making a film written and directed by actor Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure), and members of the workshop rounded out the crew. So, Pendell said, in addition to making 16mm films for the course, he was able to work with professionals on a larger project.
After the workshop ended, Pendell, convinced that his future lay in journalism, pursued jobs at small newspapers, hoping to train there and move up in the business. In the meantime, though, his Colgate girlfriend, Susan Jensen '91, was living in New York City and -- unbeknownst to him -- sending his résumé to likely employers there. When he got a call from the National Video Center he thought at first that they were dunning him for an overdue rental. "When I finally realized that the guy on the phone was talking about a job interview, I had to ask him to repeat everything he'd said, because I was trying so hard to remember which movie I hadn't returned," he said.
He went to work in a "video editing training program," which turned out to involve laboring in the shipping department and, in his spare time, watching the editors work. But the job was in the same building as MTV, which meant lots of exposure to high-profile video production, not to mention daily sightings of famous musicians.
Stints at ESPN, behind the camera for CNBC and CourtTV and as a Continental Football League and college football videographer followed. Then Pendell landed a position at Interface Video Systems, in Washington, D.C., which specialized in postproduction services for public television, for the Discovery Channel and for political campaign ads. The company was simultaneously producing ads for the Dole and Clinton campaigns in 1996, which, Pendell says, gave him some insight into both politics and government. Having to keep information from one campaign private from the other probably prepared him well for his next job -- video producer for the United States Department of State.
There, Pendell helped produce a variety of promotional pieces. He went to South and Central America to shoot a video about the mission of embassies; he made a film on diplomatic immunity that was sent to every law enforcement agency and attorney general's office in the country; and he followed dogs and handlers through a course in the use of canine bomb-detectors. For that film, he went to Cairo for a week to get shots of the dogs and handlers in action. "Fortunately," he noted dryly, "while I was following them they didn't find anything."
"It was a chore to make that interesting. It's easy to make dogs look good, but this was dogs doing the same thing over and over." What the dogs did, he said, was sniff around for explosives. When they found something suspicious, they were trained to sit and look up at their owner. "Not visually engaging," Pendell said, "but we got a lot of shots of it."
After two years, Pendell left the State Department for the Baseball Hall of Fame in December 1999. A friend of a friend saw the ad on the hall's website. "I knew thousands of people would apply, but I sent in a demo reel and an application," Pendell said. He soon got a form letter saying his application was received. "I figured that was the last I'd hear. But I was so thrilled just to have correspondence on the Hall of Fame letterhead that I said, `That's all I need.'" When he was called for an interview, he considered that a lark, too -- if nothing else, it would be a chance to tour the hall and maybe to visit some areas the public doesn't get to see.
He got the job, of course, and within a month of arriving in Cooperstown he was sent to San Diego to tape an interview with Ted Williams, that year's spokesman for the hall. Since then, despite plenty of hard and occasionally routine work, Pendell has had more than his share of thrills. At the "Baseball as America" opening, he operated the camera as, one after the other, legendary Hall of Famers were interviewed. When he goes to a ball game, he often sees one of his promotional videos on the JumboTron screen. "I love standing in a ball park with 50 thousand people and seeing a trivia quiz I produced come up on the screen," he said. "Everybody's yelling `I think it's A!' `I think it's C!' It's great."
Every chance they get, Pendell and the other members of the hall's video crew tape interviews with and about Hall of Fame members. They go to spring training each year, for instance, to ask current players what they think of the new crop of inductees; that footage can be used in the biographical video each hall member receives upon induction. And whenever a Hall of Famer visits Cooperstown, they try to capture him on tape. Pendell says those who do his job in the future will appreciate the efforts being made now to stock the hall's video library. And besides, he has no objections to spending time with the likes of Williams, Willie Mays and Stan Musial.
"One of the things I was afraid of with this job was discovering that baseball heroes really aren't all they're cracked up to be when you actually meet them in person," he said. "And very fortunately, I've found that that is not true. By and large, they are good people. They are heroes." SB