by Ted Turner
I had never put any real effort into shining my own shoes, but after a year at Georgia Military Academy and my time at McCallie I’d seen enough to know how it was done and worked the leather on those shoes until they were absolutely perfect. Standing at attention in drill line, I waited for the inspecting officer to make his way down to me. When he looked up from my beautiful shoes to find them attached to my body, he nearly fell over backward!
From that point on I became completely gung ho. I got good grades, I stayed out of the bullring, and I had a ball in the process. I had plenty of energy and since my dad had instilled a strong work ethic in me, instead of using mischief as my outlet, I now channeled my drive into being the best cadet I could be. I’d gone halfway through my sophomore year and was still at the level of private, but because of my turnaround they nominated me to be a corporal and I passed, managing to get back to the level of the other top classmates. By the end of my junior year, I was completely in high gear, winning the Linus Llewellyn Award for the school’s neatest cadet.
The headmasters at McCallie were really pleased with what I had done. They never gave up on me and eventually their system had won me over. I fed off their positive reinforcement and started hitting my stride as never before.
My love of reading began at an early age and most of my intellectual energies went toward books. Students with a B average or worse—my early pattern—had to do four hours of mandatory study hall. I could get through my assignments in about two hours so that left about two more to use however I wanted. Reading was always my choice and I checked out nearly every book in McCallie’s library that had anything to do with history—particularly naval history. At my reading pace of fifty pages an hour I could read 250-page books in just over two days so I finished about two books per week. Between academic years we had to read three or four books for school and my father made me read another book a week on top of that. So for the summer I figured I read a book a week and during the school year it was more like two and a half on top of my regular study load.
When it came to books, I couldn’t get enough. In addition to military literature, I read a lot of the great classics—many for school but several just for fun. From Dante’s Inferno to War and Peace and Les Misérables; you name it, I read it. I also got into memorizing sections of poetry, and I wrote and memorized some of my own poetry as well. I wrote one called “Indecision” for a school assignment and I can still recite it to this day:
While great Caesar lay yet dying
Brutus had the chance for the glory.
Had the future lain before him
His would be a different story.
At the feet of Hannibal
Like a ripe plum Rome once lay.
Oft he put the time of conquest
To a later, better day.
Hamlet’s course was laid before him
All he had to do was act.
Yet he lacked the inner courage
To make his deep convictions fact.
Shortly after First Manassas
Fate knocked at the door of Lee
But he failed to take advantage
Or a different country this might be.
Many times through the ages
Like as not the chance appears
But because of indecision
Man’s fond hopes are drowned in tears.
In addition to receiving an A+ grade, I’ll never forget my teacher’s comment. He wrote, simply, “That’s a poem!”
This kind of feedback motivated me and I looked for other ways to excel and to be noticed. I joined the debate team and quickly became its star performer. My junior season, I had a memorable experience that would be a precursor to some of my future success in business.
Every year debate teams from all over Tennessee were given the same subject and there were affirmative and negative sides that you’d have to defend. The statement that year was “Resolved: Governmental subsidies should be granted according to need to high school students who qualify for additional training.” At that time the government was contemplating whether it should have a role in providing financial aid to students, so everyone interpreted the question as asking if the government should grant aid to students according to the need of the students. After studying the statement long and hard and reading it back and forth, I concluded that the question could be interpreted differently; that the government should decide whether or not to grant subsidies based on the need of the government. Our team agreed to reinterpret the question completely, but to make sure we were on solid ground I consulted the head of the University of Chattanooga English Department, who agreed to state in writing that our interpretation of the terms was legitimate.
My team was on the affirmative side so we went first and established the terms of the debate. We established that aid should be provided to high-potential students to satisfy America’s need for more scientists and engineers. That way we could compete with the communists. This was the 1950s and we were deep in the arms race and scared to death of the Russians. I began the presentation with one short sentence, delivered dramatically in Russian. “I greet you in the language of the future if our position is not accepted.” I shifted back to English and then explained that if the government targeted promising scientists and engineers for scholarships, it would be no different than providing free tuition to train military officers at West Point or the Naval Academy. If we can do it for soldiers, why couldn’t we do it for the students with the best abilities in engineering and science?
Nobody had looked at the issue this way and we caught everyone completely unprepared. I remember one time after we defined the terms the two girls on the other team broke down and cried. We mowed down every school we faced and finished the season undefeated. Our team took McCallie’s first state championship in thirty years and I won the school’s oratory medal. Winning debate championships didn’t bring me the same prestige as being a star football or basketball player, but this was my first and greatest award for academic achievement.
My training in debate would later provide a great foundation for my career, and looking back on the way we reinterpreted that resolution, I can now see the roots of the way I tackled many of my business challenges. Confronted with a problem I’ve always looked for an unconventional angle and approach. Nothing sneaky, nothing illegal or unethical, just turning the issue on its head and shifting the advantage to our side.
My time at McCallie was key to my development as a person and a leader. I gave them hell in those early years, and they gave me some back. Still, they never lost faith in me and when I finally decided to become a model cadet, the positive reinforcement they provided spurred me on to want to keep striving for more achievement. My turnaround there also gave me the credentials to apply to highly competitive colleges, something my father openly encouraged. To this day I’ve continued to stay involved with McCallie and several years ago pledged them a major gift.
A TED STORY
“Sure, I’ll Help You Out”
—Rody Sherrill
(RODY SHERRILL WAS A CLASSMATE OF TED’S AT MCCALLIE.)
Ted and I spent some time together as seniors when we were made captains of Companies E and F. The big guys who were leaders in the senior class were made captains of A, B, C, and D Companies and the littler captains were put in charge of the smaller kids in Companies E and F. We used to get our little guys together and Ted and I would march them around and teach them how to salute and do arms and all that stuff and he was good at it.
I really got to know Ted better many years later when I did fund-raising on behalf of the school. I’d usually call him about once a year and say, “Ted, we’re a little short on our sustaining fund and we need about $10,000.”
One year he might say, “Sure, no problem,” and another year he’d say, “Rody, I’m too busy for this kind of thing!” and BAM—he’d hang up the phone. On those occasions, I’d just wait a few days and call him back and he’d respond with, “Hey, pal, how ya doing? Sur
e, I’ll help you out, no problem!”
One year McCallie set off on an ambitious $30 million capital campaign. We had yet to contact Ted when I got a call from our headmaster. He said that Ted contacted him and wanted to see us that afternoon in Atlanta. So the headmaster, the head of fund-raising, and I got in the car and made the two-hour drive to Atlanta. I’ll never forget Ted’s office—all those Academy Awards and other memorabilia all over the place. Anyway, before we could even mention a request—which at the very most might have been for a million dollars—he sat us down and told us he’d decided to give McCallie $25 million! It was an incredible thing—very generous and a total surprise.
3
College and the Coast Guard
During my senior year at McCallie I wasn’t sure what to do about college. I’d grown accustomed to the discipline of a military-style education and considered applying to the service academies but my father ruled this out. His billboard company was growing and he made it very clear to me that he wanted me to take it over someday. He was eager for me to get a college degree but didn’t like the idea of the academies’ mandatory service requirements keeping me away for so many more years.
While I had grown comfortable living in the South and considered staying there for college, I’d become a product of an environment that stressed achievement and I definitely wanted to pursue as prestigious an institution as would accept me. With the military academies ruled out, I set my sights on the Ivy League. Unfortunately, my academic about-face at McCallie had come too late for me to graduate with as high a grade point average as these schools would have liked. Harvard, my first choice, rejected me but I did manage to get into the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University.
Brown was a school I might not have applied to had it not been for the influence of one of my father’s business colleagues. His name was Miles Standish and he was a direct descendant of the famous Mayflower soldier. A loyal Brown alumnus, he owned a billboard company in Providence and he and my dad became good pals through industry functions and conventions. In addition to singing the school’s praises, Standish assured my father that since he lived close by, he could keep an eye on me. Despite this support, my father still didn’t have a preference between Brown and Penn.
As a result, this choice became one of the few decisions he ever let me make on my own, and it wasn’t an easy one. On the one hand, I was drawn to the notion of getting the business education that Penn’s Wharton School could provide, but downtown Philadelphia didn’t hold much appeal for me back then. On the other hand, I was beginning to show promise as a competitive sailor (more on that later), and Providence was right there on the Narragansett Bay and Brown’s sailing team was much better than Penn’s.
Sailing became the deciding factor for me, but before I could commit to Brown, I felt the need for a serious conversation with my dad. My lifetime savings to that point amounted to about $2,000, so I’d be counting on him to pay my way. Given his concerns about a military commitment, I had to know that he was comfortable with me being away for four years and that he would be willing to support me financially. He assured me that he would.
It was now the fall of 1956, and nine years after entering Georgia Military Academy as a scrawny “Yankee” from Ohio, I was now considered a “southerner,” enrolling at one of the North’s most elite institutions. As many of my classmates had graduated from prestigious New England prep schools like Exeter or Andover, coming to Brown fresh out of a Tennessee military academy cast me as a bit of an outsider once more. This perception probably wasn’t helped by the fact that Jimmy Brown was the person who drove and dropped me off at school. I’m sure a lot of my classmates figured that this southern black man must have been my servant or something, but I didn’t think anything of it. By then, Jimmy was a jack-of-all-trades for my parents and with my dad busy with work and my mom unable to leave Mary Jean, Jimmy had been taking me to McCallie for years, so the trip to New England seemed perfectly natural to both of us. But looking back, I can understand that it must have seemed a bit odd to my classmates.
A TED STORY
“We Didn’t Know Shit”
—Peter Dames
(PETER DAMES WAS A CLASSMATE OF TED’S AT BROWN. HE WENT ON TO BECOME A CLOSE FRIEND AND BUSINESS COLLEAGUE.)
I met Ted very early on in our freshman year at Brown. I roomed in a dorm called Littlefield and there was a fire escape between that building and the next dormitory, Maxcy Hall. Several nights in a row there was this clatter of people running up that fire escape and every time they reached the top, Ted would give a loud rebel yell. They weren’t drunk—they were just being loud. I was trying out for the football team and needed to get some sleep. One night I’d finally had enough and when Ted ran by my open window I reached out, grabbed him by the throat, and pulled him halfway into my room. I said, “Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
He said, “Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!”
I said, “Well I’m trying to sleep here and every night you’re out there clattering around. Don’t they have a door in front of the dorm that you can use?”
And he said, “Yeah, but this is more fun.”
We got to talking, and once it was established that I wasn’t going to punch him out we became fast friends. It turned out that we had both gone to military high schools—mine was in upstate New York—and we were both fairly out of place at Brown. We didn’t know much about women, and we didn’t have all the social graces that the guys from Choate and Lawrenceville had learned. They all had a five-mile head start on us. They had their little leather patches on their elbows, the right jackets and the right ties, and we didn’t know shit.
During my first several days there I really did feel like a fish out of water. After years of following a military dress code I wasn’t even sure what to wear. The one place I felt like I fit in was out on a boat and, fortunately, trials for the freshman sailing team began right away. I had begun sailing after our move to Savannah. My father had joined the local yacht club and when they expanded to include a junior program, he signed me up. There were about fifteen dads involved and they bought a fleet of Penguin dinghies—one for each of us. I was about ten or eleven and was thrilled to have the boat but there was a catch. If I wanted to keep it I’d have to race it each and every weekend. I remember not liking the idea of having to do anything every weekend but it wasn’t long before I fell in love with the sport and that commitment became a pleasure. Like most boys, I’d tried all the more popular sports like baseball, football, or track but I really wasn’t good at any of them—I just didn’t have that kind of athletic ability. At McCallie I was good at boxing, not because I had great reflexes but because I could take a lot of punishment. Unfortunately, I never earned a varsity letter since they eliminated boxing the year after a kid at one of the schools was badly injured in the ring.
Still, I hungered for athletic competition so sailing became my outlet. It didn’t require physical skills like running or throwing a ball and I loved the outdoors and being out on the water. That’s not to say I was good at it right from the start. In fact, I flipped my boat so many times that first year that the kids started calling me “Turnover Turner” and “The Capsize Kid.” But the teasing made me want to get better and I learned from each and every failure. At McCallie, one of my favorite teachers, Houston Patterson, used to take me out on a lake some weekends and he taught me a great deal, too. Through eight years there I never managed to win the Savannah club championship but I came closer every year.
Sailing also gave me some opportunities to spend some time with my dad and to have some pretty amazing adventures for a little kid. One particularly memorable time my father let me join him, Jimmy, and three other guys on a trip from Savannah to the Bahamas and back. We sailed down to Miami then went across the Gulf Stream. I used to get seasick back then and the ride back was so rough I stayed in my bunk for about thirty-six hours straight. I spent so much time hanging on to that bed that the rest of the gu
ys called me “Sack Leech!” It was rough-going but an unforgettable experience.
By the time I entered Brown I had probably logged more hours on a sailboat than most of my classmates, and at freshman trials I won every single race, quickly earning the number one slot on the team. We had four regattas and a championship in the fall and another four more regattas and a championship in the spring. We won every regatta we entered and I did well enough to become one of only two sophomores to make the varsity the following year. Successful fall and spring sailing seasons provided bookends to a freshman year in which I really was “Mr. Straight Arrow.” After the intense discipline of McCallie I didn’t find the college workload very challenging. I studied hard and my grades were pretty good.
That first summer, however, was difficult as my parents’ marriage ended in divorce. Their relationship was never easy. My parents were an unlikely pair to begin with, and my father’s drinking and philandering were hard for my mother to tolerate. His harsh treatment of me was also a bone of contention. Still, my mom fully believed in “for better or for worse” and she did her best to stick it out and maintain some level of harmony.
Ultimately, it was my sister’s worsening illness that took the greatest toll. Having emerged from that initial coma with significant brain damage, she could barely communicate and meaningful interaction with her became difficult. Along with her mental challenges, the increasing severity of her underlying lupus symptoms made matters worse. As often happens to people stricken with a severe case, Mary Jean’s body literally started fighting itself. This caused extremely painful inflammation in her joints, and as her pain increased she would sometimes bang her head against the wall. The most difficult times for us were when she’d scream, “Please God, let me die!” As hard as it was for me seeing Mary Jean during the holidays and summer, for my parents, her illness was an everyday ordeal. My father was overwhelmed by her suffering and after visiting every medical expert he could find, wanted his daughter institutionalized. My mother refused, insisting that the best person to care for Mary Jean was her own mother and she’d make it her full-time responsibility. My dad had made most of the family’s big decisions in the past but this was one where my mother drew the line. It was a breaking point for my father and they separated.