by Lisa Napoli
He was like a hyperactive kid, exploding into work in the morning—if he hadn’t slept on the pullout couch in his office the night before—spouting poetry, singing song lyrics off-key, roaming the halls to pump up the staff.
Indeed, despite or perhaps because of his unorthodox behavior, his very presence seemed to inspire his troops to commit to a higher cause—like, said one of them, military leaders who convince their young troops to walk into lines of fire. Even the people he routinely pissed off or berated somehow managed to get caught up in this infectious spirit.
Crew member Ron Kirk was waiting for a bus outside the station at the end of his shift when Ted pulled up in his everyman blue Toyota—a car he drove to show he was just a low-profile, regular guy—and offered him a ride.
“Ted,” the grateful employee said, “you strike me as someone who’s living life on his own terms. What’s the secret?”
“Attitude, man. Attitude.” That, he explained, was how he survived his assignment to clean the filth in the bilge during his Coast Guard duty.
Late one night, a hyper-conscientious new employee on the graveyard shift found an intoxicated fellow stumbling through the halls and threw him out the back door, figuring the drunk had wandered in from Harry’s. The next day, his supervisor called him at home on his day off.
“Did you throw someone out of the station last night?”
Yes, sir, the employee said, explaining the course of events.
“Well. That was the owner.”
Figuring he was sunk, the employee told his boss to just send his final paycheck in the mail.
“No, no, in fact, Ted wants you to come in and meet him.”
And he did.
“So, you’re the one,” Ted said with admiration. “I wish more people were like you. All I’ve got is these hippies around here.”
Though he had no compunction spending tens of thousands of dollars each year on sailing, he quibbled with a manager for deigning to ask for $212.50 to buy videotape, insisting he forage for used tape in the basement. (The same frugality ruled the Turner home. Janie opined to writer Christian Williams about Ted’s prohibition of air-conditioning and heat, and his proclivity for cutting his own hair—and balking when she took the kids for their own seven-dollar haircuts.) Emboldened by his success, Tush—who commanded the princely salary of $200 a week—screwed up the courage to request a clothing allowance. Ted looked at the man he’d started to refer to as his “low-budget Walter Cronkite” and said, “You’re about the same size as me. I’ll give you my hand-me-downs.”
Tush instead ditched the coat and tie, embraced the wide-collared, groovy, casual shirts of the day, and let loose.
From part-time announcer to on-camera host, new technology (and a sense of humor) catapulted Bill Tush to become the first star of cable television. (Rob Barnes)
The once-dreaded task of recording the news had become so much fun, it now served as the repository for the entire crew’s outlandish creativity. They all wanted in on the act: Troll, Captain Banana, Mr. Mike “Dy-nee-mite” Allen, Joe “The Fifty-Year-Old Hippie” Kelter. Tush stuck a paper bag over the head of one crew member—a guy hired to host a show Ted had commissioned and then canceled in a matter of days—and anointed him as his investigative reporter, “The Unknown Newsman.” The “news chicken” tackled pressing consumer affairs issues like traffic flow in the parking lot of a popular bar. Editorial analysis was provided by “Red Neckerson.”
Dressed in black robes, the stout promotions director, Jesse Waller, delivered impassioned “Reflections from Brother Gold” in a pitch-perfect impersonation of a preacher—a take-off of the sermonette that aired on many a station at sign-on or sign-off.
“This morning, the thoughts of Rod Stewart,” Waller intoned at a dramatically lit pulpit, somberly opening his “prayer book” and launching into a flamboyant recitation of the lyrics to “Da’ Ya’ Think I’m Sexy?” as if the words were heaven-sent.
When the nation was gripped with fear over the fate of Skylab, America’s first manned space station, the crew donned hard hats and frantically ran around the set, as newsman Tush delivered an emergency broadcasting alert that Skylab was falling. (It wasn’t, at least not then.)
Breaking news: “The Carter administration has legalized marijuana, and it will be cheaper than cigarettes,” Tush read; then, after a beat, “April Fool’s!”
Flipping through a book in the graphics department in search of new ideas, Tush spotted a picture of a dog clad in shirt and tie. Next thing you knew, a crew member’s German shepherd had arrived in the studio, similarly attired.3 Co-anchor Rex the Wonder Dog lumbered all over the anchor desk, helping to deliver the day’s headlines.
Even the installation of new linoleum in the studio proved fodder. During construction, Tush and his cardboard desk were relegated to the garage for a week. Each night, he’d cut away to a “live shot” from the scene of a workman in action. He even invited the laborer onto his temporary set for a proper sit-down interview. (The poor guy tripped on his way out.)
As soon as the work was complete, Tush celebrated by enlisting a local marching band, and the camera cut away for a close-up of the gleaming new surface, shot with a star filter like the kind used in Hollywood to imbue movie stars with a radiant glow. Tush exclaimed to viewers, “Look at our beautiful floor.” This was big news—at least to the staff. Did news always have to be something tragic?
Only one staff-person appeared to be displeased by this irreverence. Sid Pike, the station manager, older than the youngest of the employees by twenty years, and one of the few people on staff who’d had experience in “real” television, had reluctantly signed on to work for Ted—and now worried that a low-budget UHF station on his résumé would raise a red flag to future employers.4 Seated before this rogue employee, Pike scolded Tush, “We can’t do the news like that.”
“Why not?” Tush countered. “Where’s it written how you have to do the news?” Who said you needed a serious tone? The Federal Communications Commission hadn’t spelled it out. He was simply serving up news, WTCG style.
Pike shrugged. “I guess you’re right.” He was too busy wading through the ever-expanding film library. They currently owned the rights to enough films, if played back to back, to fill a year and a half of airtime. Ted never met a movie package he didn’t buy, said Pike, who was consumed by his boss’s erratic schedule and capricious decision-making. After he’d pitched in to help with the beg-a-thon at WRET, Ted had rewarded Pike with a gift of company stock—which he later rescinded, deciding a onetime $300 cash bonus was more fitting compensation. Like everyone else at channel 17, Pike was doing the equivalent of four different jobs, so he didn’t have much time to worry about the particulars of the news, anyway.
But he wasn’t so busy that he didn’t notice Tush’s growing popularity. Everyone else in town did, too. Now that he’d infused the news with comedy, people on the streets no longer shouted “Hey, channel 17!” They began to yell, “Hey, Bill!”
And then, something else started to happen—something that didn’t make any sense. The fan mail that streamed into the station, along with the orders for merchandise, started to arrive bearing postmarks from far out of the Atlanta viewing area.
* * *
As the crew of Super 17 caroused and laughed and made TV, a quiet revolution was brewing in “television land” that would change the medium forever. A utility known as “Community Antenna Television,” increasingly referred to by the shorthand “cable television,” found itself at the cusp of explosive growth.
At the dawn of commercial TV, appliance salesmen struggled to sell this pricey magic box in remote areas, “television deserts” where reception was poor or nonexistent.
Three different enterprising men in three different cities—Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania; Tuckerman, Arkansas; and Astoria, Oregon—had independently arrived at the same solution to the problem. Each had erected an antenna at the highest possible point in their communities, allow
ing them to capture the nearest signal and then, thanks to the magic of coaxial wires, run it into homes. Voilà! Reception! For anyone who couldn’t otherwise receive a clear picture, forking over the onetime installation charge of $100 or more, plus a monthly service fee, was a worthy investment in order to participate in this communications revolution.
Dazzled by the larger possibilities beyond the mere utilitarian, these pioneers who believed in the technology’s wider promise brazenly imagined the day the entire country would be wired—and entire channels would be created that could be seen only by cable customers.
Traditional broadcasters, meanwhile, fearful of their turf, reactivated their earlier venom against pay television. This time, it was cable in the crosshairs. Viewers didn’t want to pay for TV service, they argued. Who would ever want or need more than several television stations? No one wanted to watch that much TV!
For its part, the government struggled with how or whether to regulate the burgeoning industry, while the monopoly phone company schemed how to get its mitts on this new, powerful wire that had entered the home and rivaled the one they’d controlled for decades.
For the time being, they’d managed to succeed in blocking cable from entering most of the nation’s major cities.
A dizzying matrix of ever-changing rules—or what writer Christian Williams eloquently described as “an opaque cloud of regulatory gobbledegook”—overwhelmed even those whose fortunes were dictated by them.
It was in the muck of the ever-changing gobbledegook that Ted Turner’s destiny was to be found.
In 1972, while cable television was still a runt—available in just six million homes—the FCC handed down an industry-altering edict. Cable operators, they decreed, could import the nearest independent station as a bonus offering to their customers.
Here channel 17 possessed a decided geographical advantage. The southeast had few other independent stations. None carried the variety of local sports programming that Ted’s station did, much less the vast collection of old movies he offered, and none broadcast all night.
Till now, Ted been hungering and toiling to bring his “underground” station into the light. Now, a way to expand the market itself—to burst beyond the borders of Atlanta—had been handed to him on a silver platter.
While other broadcasters feared the cable incursion, Ted set about wooing and glad-handing cable operators all over the southeast, evangelizing with the fervor of a tent-revival preacher the benefits of adding his station to their systems. From Tuscaloosa to Knoxville to Tallahassee, his frank enthusiasm electrified the industry. Channel 17 was a southern-fried alternative to what those networks in New York had to offer!
In practically no time, seventy-three cable systems across five states were carrying channel 17 into 312,000 cable homes—as many homes as the station reached on its own turf. Within a year, its viewership would triple.
No longer was channel 17 some piddling also-ran on the lunatic fringe. Now it was a full-on powerhouse, a southern network.
There was no way to know for sure how many people were tuning in. Ratings didn’t measure cable yet. But there was a more powerful indicator, and it arrived in the form of an avalanche of hundreds of pieces of mail a day—fan mail for Tush, fan mail for the wrestlers, orders for products. More than half of that mail arrived from outside the Atlanta metro area, demonstrating channel 17’s expanding footprint and the zeal with which the audience consumed it.
There was an added bonus to the excitement. As Ted gleefully sifted through the life-saving bounty delivered each day by the postal service, he’d keep his eyes peeled for stamps the post office had forgotten to cancel and carefully remove them to use again. Every penny helped.
* * *
It was about this time that Reese Schonfeld and Sid Topol had walked in the door to Ted’s den-like office, buzzing about commercial satellites and this service called HBO and the transformation of the business of television. Ted was positively giddy about how cable had turned around channel 17, and his growing audience around the region.
While it made sense that people in the southeast were devouring his programming, especially since they loved Atlanta’s sports teams, it seemed preposterous, at first blush, to think that anyone outside the area might be interested in what channel 17 had to offer.
Or was it? Why wouldn’t other viewers in markets around the nation want to see channel 17? Sixty-five percent of the country had never laid eyes on an indie station. And unlike HBO, which cost an additional fee and aired for limited hours each day, his service was free—and on the air day and night.
Airing over cable had stripped away the innate liabilities of the station and had allowed him to compete, side by side, with network affiliates. The potent cocktail of cable and satellite would allow him to compete with the networks themselves.
Yes, it was new and untested and the rules were changing quickly. Yes, some people thought it crazy. But the fact that others saw something as crazy had never stopped Ted before. The riskier the proposition, the more likely he was to take it. As a kid, as he devoured the stories of kings and conquests from the history books, he’d worried that there were no new worlds left to explore. Now it was clear that the unexplored frontier he’d been waiting for was up above, in the heavens. That’s when he began to think of himself as a modern Christopher Columbus. Who knew where the skies might take him?
* * *
Ted called his sales staff to order. He’d just reserved his own earth station by writing a check to Scientific Atlanta for $750,000, admonishing Topol not to cash it for a few days while he figured out how to raise that sum. On the conference table, he placed a model of a satellite in the center of the table, a small piece of square-shaped metal that looked as if it had wings. Someone whispered that it looked like the wreck of a car. Ted paced around and around in circles, like a wild tiger, unable, as usual, to sit down. He moved so swiftly that attempting to count his rotations around the room proved futile.
“This is how we’re going to become a national network and compete with ABC, NBC, and CBS,” he announced confidently, pointing to the sorry hunk of metal. Super 17 was soon to be a Super Station.
The staff looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking Greek. Even those who loved him agreed that Ted was nuts, but this cinched it. A satellite? A fourth network? Channel 17, with a bunch of wrestling and reruns and old movies and a goofy middle-of-the-night comedy newscast? Transmitted over a twisted hunk of metal shot up into the sky?
Look at what they’d built by linking up to cable, he told them. That distribution system could take channel 17 only so far. This would allow all of America to tune in, crystal-clear! Here was their chance to become “the superstation that served the nation,” to give every television viewer in the nation a choice. When they got up on the satellite, he proclaimed, “ABC will shrink down to a puddle like the witch in The Wizard of Oz.”
Having said his piece, he looked around the table, in search of a positive reaction that didn’t materialize. Relying on cable operators outside of Atlanta to import their signal to other markets had been a strange enough concept for most of his team to grasp. TV wasn’t supposed to work this way. The networks were based in New York and provided programs, over AT&T lines, to affiliated stations around the nation. Together, they dominated the television roost. Then, there were the independents, like channel 17, that cobbled together their own programming and hoped for the best. Other attempts at turning a string of indies into a network had failed. Television had been this way for the twenty or so years since it became commercially available. What Ted was proposing made no sense. It had no precedent.
A couple of guys bravely piped up with concern. Colleagues in the business disparaged satellites as bunk, a fad. Many believed HBO was unsustainable—their battle with the movie companies alone, for the rights to air films, would squash the service! HBO, at least, had the backing of a big corporation. How could little channel 17 possibly hope to compete?
Ted,
chief inhabitant of Planet Hope, didn’t want to hear one negative word.
“You guys take your lunch and get out of this room!” he shouted. “The only people I want in this room are people who are going to help me.”
1 The station began broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, on August 19, 1974.
2 Some believed Dead Ernest was played by Ted Turner himself, but this was not the case. See E-gor’s Chamber of TV Horror Show Hosts for a lively discussion: https://egorschamber.com/tvhorrorhosts/hostsd.html.
3 Tush wasn’t alone in co-hosting the news with an animal. The Today show famously featured monkey co-host J. Fred Muggs. Even Walter Cronkite appeared with the lion puppet Charlemagne, manipulated by Bill Baird, on CBS’s Morning Show in the mid-fifties.
4 Pike spent the rest of his career working for Ted, ultimately traveling the world to assist in negotiating the carriage of CNN internationally.
CHAPTER FIVE
Captain Outrageous
It was bad enough that the carpetbaggers who owned the Atlanta Braves had deigned to award the broadcast rights of the beloved team to a crappy, fourth-rate television station. In the sacred year that marked the two hundredth birthday of America, word came that the group of businessmen in Chicago were selling the team to the owner of that very station. So eager were they to dispose of the cellar-dwelling drain on their finances that they allowed the cash-strapped Ted Turner to buy on an installment plan, like a car or a BarcaLounger. Fittingly, when the news first leaked out that an “Atlanta advertising executive and internationally known yachtsman” was about to seal the deal, where was the mysterious newest owner in Major League Baseball to be found? Off sailing.