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No. 21 Vol. 8
My Life Publications • 973-809-4784 September 2025
Livingston Television’s Steve Milano Retires
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By Steve Sears teve Milano was with Livingston Television (LTV), a shared channel of public access for the Livingston school system and the township, for 33 years. But when he officially retired in June, he asked the township and Board of Education if he could occasionally return and volunteer. Milano said, “I’d like to be approved to be around the students again and to keep doing what I did. I just found it so motivating, liberating. You end up living through their excitement. You get excited about getting everybody else excited. It’s just such a thing - it’s positive.” “I was the second staff member brought on in 1992,” Milano said regarding his early days at LTV. “I kind of represented what the high school students were doing on the channel, and helped to get the volunteers working on what they were doing with the channel. So that has always been my role, and that role grew over time because I created more for us to do.” Milano takes the reader back to where it all started. He said, “My dad had an eight millimeter silent film camera that he used. In middle school, he taught me how to use it to do stop motion animation. So in middle school, every toy I owned became an animated video: Matchbox cars driving, GI Joes walking, little story lines that made no sense, but I was creatively making films. And when I got to high school, I looked for a film club, and it didn’t exist, but there was a TV studio. So I joined the TV studio, thinking this would be similar, and just fell in love with a crappy
little black and white, three camera studio that did a news show that aired on local access on Sunday afternoons.” After his Indian Hills High School of Oakland graduation, he attended then-William Paterson College. “I always thought that I would be an NBC camera operator; it seemed like in the back of my mind that’s where I was going,” Milano said. But during his time at William Paterson, he did a work study program one on one with a chief technician named John Kiernan. Instead of just working cameras, his education expanded to the overall workings of the station, in his words “how the studio was fired up and how you build it. It became more of a technical job for me.” Kiernan would often be asked by adjunct professors teaching an evening TV class and high school teachers who attended the college to further their education if he would visit their studios to fix equipment. When he made those trips, he asked Milano to assist him. Eventually, when Kiernan was seeking to pass the baton, he said to Milano, “You seem to be catching on. Do you want to do it?” “And I said, ‘Yes!’ and I took it over,” Milano recalls. Those early efforts became the company that he still owns, Video Plus TV, and Ridgewood High School maintenance led to his first job teaching TV. For Milano, it has been a rewarding 38 years total in the industry, and perhaps the top reward are the successes of the people he has mentored. “Most of the Livingston graduates who went through
Steve Milano in the control room (courtesy of Steve Milano)
the TV program and decided they wanted to have a TV career went to very good places and really were successful,” he said. “Some on camera, some on the air, and some behind the scenes. I’m proud of that, because what we created gave them opportunities, and then they made the most of their opportunities.”