Before Huseby, Inc., worked on the O.J. Simpson and James Jordan trials, there was the PTL civil trial with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in 1989.

Huseby, Inc., CEO Scott Huseby remembers being awed at seeing the Bakkers, who were cultural and media icons at the time, along with church secretary Jessica Hahn.

There were dozens of TV trucks parked outside the courtroom, Huseby recalled, and entrepreneurs selling T-shirts that said, “I ran into Tammy Faye at the mall,” with the lettering on top of what look like blobs of mascara, traces of lipstick and smudges of beige makeup.

Stuart Huseby works the PTL trial in 1989 on a Cimarron computer-aided transcription system.

Scott Huseby became involved in the trial when a court reporter in the U.S. district court in Charlotte contacted him to do daily transcripts of the trial. Huseby brought his father, Stuart S. Huseby, and his brother, Steve, to help do the work.

“I knew that if I called my dad, we could do it,” Huseby said recently. “He brought in one of his best reporters. It was a very wonderful time in my career. There was a lot of excitement about the case and the fact we were involved.”

The amount of testimony taken in that trial was astronomical, Huseby said. The file transcript was more than 10,000 pages long. Their days would start at around 6:45 a.m. and would end around 8 p.m.. As they adapted to the schedule, Huseby would deliver morning session transcripts at lunchtime and evening session transcripts as early as 6 p.m., using what was then the newest computer-aided transcription hardware and software.

U.S. District Judge Robert Potter sentenced Jim Bakker to 45 years in prison, saying, ”Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests.” Scott Huseby later became Judge Potter’s court reporter.

Sketch from the PTL trial, with U.S. District Judge Robert Potter presiding. Henry Young is the court reporter

While this early work wasn’t real-time reporting, it led to Huseby’s involvement in real-time, which is now one of the many services Huseby offers all of its clients. To schedule real-time transcripts or any Huseby service in any location, go to Huseby.com or call: 1-800-333-2082.