by Ted Turner
That summer he had a new Plymouth Fury. This was the fastest production car built in the United States at that time, able to reach speeds as high as 150 miles per hour. One night I was driving back roads through rural South Carolina, in a hurry to get to Savannah for a debutante party. I was going about 120 mph when I approached an unmarked railroad crossing. I’d gone this way a bunch of times and had never seen a train pass, so I assumed it was just a side track. This was back in the days when many crossings didn’t have blinking lights or gates or other markings.
Slowing to about 90 to cross I noticed an elderly black man standing on my side of the road and when he saw me he started going crazy—waving his arms and jumping up and down. I didn’t understand what he was doing until he was in my rearview mirror. Looking into that mirror as I skipped over the track, I saw a train flying through the intersection! I was going close to 100 mph and it had to be doing 70. We missed each other by a flash of a second. Once I was on the other side and realized what had just happened, my heart was beating out of my chest. I made it to the debutante party on time but when I got there my hands were still shaking. I came really close to dying that night—and I’ve driven more carefully ever since!
I don’t remember us talking much about it but by the time I headed back to school that fall—for what would be the second half of my junior year—it was clear that my father would not be supporting me financially. My life savings at that point were about $5,000 and even back then that wouldn’t get you far in a private college like Brown. I made some spending money working in the school cafeteria but I could never earn enough during school to make my room and board payments. I met with people at the admissions department to see if some kind of financial aid or academic scholarship might be possible. They were polite but made it clear that Brown University did not make a practice of extending these sorts of opportunities to the children of wealthy parents. I doubt they had ever seen a situation quite like mine and found it hard either to understand or sympathize with my predicament.
I managed to pay my bills those first few months and threw myself into my schoolwork, sailing, and partying.
I was proud to have been named captain of varsity sailing as a junior. I led the team to a successful fall season, but that campaign ended with a Thanksgiving regatta in Chicago. The trip there would turn out to be a low point in my life.
The school didn’t provide transportation to these sorts of events. There were four of us heading out but the one car among us was a little Volkswagen. After cramming in all of our luggage and gear, we realized that only three of us could fit in for the ride. Rather than debating the solutions, as captain of the team I decided to let my luggage go with them and volunteered to hitchhike to Chicago.
Relieved by my gesture, the other three wished me luck and sped off. Without the money to do it any other way, I headed down the hill from campus prepared to hitchhike halfway across the country on Thanksgiving weekend. I was wearing an oxford shirt and tweed jacket and I had one of those tacky old raincoats that’s “weather resistant” but not really waterproof. It started raining almost immediately and by the time I was picked up outside Providence I was already soaked. My first ride got me all the way to New York City and after standing in some more rain there I was able to catch a series of lifts that took me across New Jersey and onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The next ride dropped me off at about 2:00 in the morning in the middle of the Pennsylvania Mountains—miles from anywhere. Still soaked, I stood there with my thumb out as the temperature dropped. The rain turned to snow—it was freezing.
I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to die out here.” It was as simple as that.
Adjacent to the exit where I’d been dropped was a sign that said “Next Rest Area 10 Miles.” After standing there for more than an hour I grew desperate and decided to start walking those ten miles. About five miles into the walk a truck pulled over.
“Where’s your car?” the driver asked.
“I don’t have one,” I told him. He said he couldn’t pick up hitchhikers and I said, “Well, I’m going to die out here. Would you please take me as far as the rest area?”
He was kind enough to do that and when he dropped me off at the rest area I was the only person there. It was kind of like a Howard Johnson—it was comfortable inside and I just sat at the counter, trying to dry off and warm up. Eventually, another guy came in and sat down and I told him that if he were heading west I’d really appreciate a ride. He took me as far as Ohio and I made it to Chicago later that next day. I really thought I might freeze to death that night and was about as down as I’ve ever been. After we competed in the races that weekend, I volunteered to head back alone—but only after we had pooled together enough money for me to take a bus.
Those final weeks and months at Brown I was like a tragic character. I knew the end was near but I couldn’t figure a way out. I burned the candle at both ends. I was drinking, chasing women, staying up late, and hardly going to class at all. It was all coming to an end but there are two commonly told stories about my final days at Brown that I’d like to clear up. One is that I burned down the Homecoming display and the other is that I was kicked out for having a woman in my room. Both of these tales are only partially true.
As for Homecoming, we did burn something down. Each fraternity built stationary structures outside their house for a school-wide competition. On Sunday night, after Saturday’s judging was over and everybody was taking their exhibits down, some guys and I did get a little carried away and instead of dismantling ours in an orderly fashion, we set it on fire. Regarding having a woman in my room, it is true that I was caught and suspended (it was against the rules back then but they allow it today—I was ahead of my time on this one!). What’s not accurate is to say that this was the reason I left the school. I’d already run through nearly all of my savings—I knew this would be one of my final nights on campus so I figured I might as well make it a fun one. I got caught and suspended, but I was already preparing to leave.
Despite my father’s assurances, the truth is he didn’t support me through all four years at school. My college career was over.
4
Billboards
With my college career over I’m sure my father assumed I’d rush home to work for him once and for all. But I was in a state of rebellion and couldn’t bring myself to do it. Peter Dames, my best friend and fellow mischief maker at Brown, had decided to take a leave of absence and we planned our next move together. It was just after Christmastime and turning cold in Rhode Island so we got the idea to head south, all the way to Florida. I bought a beat-up old car for about $100 and we packed it full of our belongings and hit the road. We stopped by my dad’s place in South Carolina for a good night’s sleep and a couple of meals and he was cordial, wishing us luck in our travels. He probably figured I’d be back before long. I might have been angry and rebellious, but I was also broke.
A TED STORY
“It All Sounded Good to Me”
—Peter Dames
Our idea was that we would pass through South Carolina to pick up Ted’s Flying Dutchman sailboat. We’d sponge a few free meals off his old man, I would get to see his father’s place, then we’d continue down to Florida where we would both get jobs and earn enough money to make his boat seaworthy so we could sail it around the world, get laid everywhere we went, and be the toast of every continent. I was brought up in New York and didn’t know anything about boats other than the Staten Island Ferry but Ted was a good salesman, I was very gullible and it all sounded good to me. We stopped at my parents’ house in Queens on the drive down and they weren’t very happy with me. They were immigrants and the thought of me being educated was the most important thing in their lives; now here I was blowing it.
When we arrived at the plantation Ted’s father was very gracious. We pulled up in that old jalopy and he met us in his smoking jacket. We had drinks and dinner with his father and his new wife. Ted was never much of a drinker and he
wanted to get up early the next morning to go frog gigging or something so he went to bed early. Mr. Turner’s new wife excused herself after dinner but the old man felt like talking so he and I stayed up and drank and talked into the wee hours. He gave me a lot of great insights.
By the time we left a couple of days later, our plans had changed. Right before we got to South Carolina a hurricane had come through the area. It was almost like the hand of God came down and the better part of an oak tree fell across Ted’s sailboat and destroyed it into splinters. So that killed the original sailing-around-the-world idea. Now we had to get to Miami, get a job, and make that much more money so we could buy an even better sailboat.
For the first several weeks in Florida we lived out of our car like bums, completely down and out. Eventually we managed to find a cheap room in the Cuban section of town. Castro was still in the hills at that time but there was already a sizable Cuban population in South Florida. To save money, we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches off reused paper plates and ripped pages from public pay phone books to use as toilet paper. Work was hard to come by and the highest paying job I ever got was selling Miami Beach Sun subscriptions on commission. For one thirteen-week subscription I got $1.50 and on my best day I sold four. A $6 per day income just wasn’t going to cut it.
We were low on cash and short on options. Dames decided to give up and go back north to New York for a steady job as a bank clerk. I then got the idea that now would be a good time to fulfill the two months of reserve time I owed the Coast Guard after leaving them that past summer. I could either attend evening meetings once a week for two years or go full-time and meet the requirement in just two months. Given my situation, the latter was the clear choice. Not only would they pay me $100 a month, they’d put a roof over my head and feed me three meals a day.
I was stationed in Fort Lauderdale on a search-and-rescue vessel called the Travis. The work was interesting but conditions on the ship were rough. We had to limit our possessions to what we could fit in our sea bag—a duffel that hung from a pipe. Sleeping quarters consisted of metal-rimmed canvas bunks stacked four-high. As a reservist and the newest guy there, I was given a bottom bunk beneath the fattest guy on board. His weight stretched his canvas down so low that I had to lie flat on my back all night—I didn’t even have room to roll over.
I was comfortable being back in a military setting and I worked hard on every assignment they threw at me, but this time around I spent a lot more time contemplating my future. I realized it was time for me to stop delaying the inevitable. My father and I had a complex relationship but I loved him. I had a great opportunity in front of me and I really did enjoy the billboard business. If I could play by his rules, I felt that things would work out just fine. In the spring of 1959, when my two months were up in Fort Lauderdale, I went back to Savannah to begin my full-time career with the Turner Advertising Company.
By this time I’d spent eight full summers there and, given my range of responsibilities, I really understood the business well. From the age of twelve I’d been a water boy, gofer, and pole digger for the construction crews. I’d posted bills with the bill posters and painted signs with the sign painters, but my strongest skills became evident when I started working in the leasing department at age sixteen. I could handle the physical jobs, but once I had the chance to use my mind, my heart, and my salesmanship, I really started to shine. The job of a billboard lease man is to search the territory for the best sites for new signs—the ones with the most traffic going by, best sightlines, and so forth. You then have to convince the property owner to let you install the billboard in exchange for about $25 a year. Some of these sales were tough, and none more so than when I tried to lease a location from a lady whose house was in the middle of the Sears Roebuck parking lot.
I was on summer vacation from McCallie. For years, the two billboard companies in Savannah had been pursuing this elderly woman who had wound up owning a home right in the middle of the Sears Roebuck parking lot. Years before, when she refused a sizable cash offer to move out of her house, the developer simply built around her. She was a strong, stubborn woman, and after refusing a lot of money to move, a little money from a billboard leasing agent couldn’t convince her to allow for a sign that would cover up all the windows on one side of her house.
But I made it my mission to be the one to finally make this deal. I decided to start by getting to know her. She was a widow and that summer I spent a lot of time with her, almost like I was her adopted son. When I explained that we figured out a way to build the board so that it would cover only the windows on the upper floor of her two-story house, she was still unmoved. I had to come up with an angle that no one else had thought of. Spending all that time at her home I discovered that it had poor air circulation, and being surrounded by an asphalt parking lot in the middle of a Savannah summer, the place got really hot. I talked it over with my father and he agreed that in addition to the usual cash offer, I could tell her we’d pay for and install an air conditioner for her. Pleased by my thoughtfulness and partly as a personal favor to me, she finally said yes.
I learned a great deal during those summers. My dad had some unusual ideas but he was a very clever businessman. He was also as ethical and honest as the day is long. (Before he got into billboards he owned a little car business and he called it “Honest Ed’s Used Cars.”) There were many days when he’d drive me to and from work and the entire ride he’d only talk to me about business. We’d cover everything from detailed accounting principles like depreciation to broader concepts like motivation techniques and the importance of hiring and motivating good people. As a boy I saw firsthand the value of hard work and customer relations. It was almost as though he gave me the business degree I didn’t get in college. Oftentimes he’d punctuate his lessons with funny stories or memorable expressions. Once, to drive home a point about the difficulties of attracting good, loyal employees, he told me, “Heck, Jesus only had to pick twelve disciples and even one of those didn’t turn out well.” One of his favorite mottos was one I’ve used myself ever since: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise!”
He also impressed upon me the importance of good community relations. Local advertisers were the lifeblood of the billboard business and he worked hard to be on a first-name basis with every business owner in town. The industry was also frequently under attack, challenged by everyone from local municipalities changing zoning ordinances to environmental and beautification groups blocking us from developing new sites.
For all these reasons, my father made a point to be involved in the community and he passed that practice down to me. But as hard as he worked to make friends, his drinking helped him earn an occasional enemy. Unfortunately, when my dad drank he could become a different person, turning angry and insulting. I didn’t frequent the bars myself so I never witnessed the arguments he got into, but on occasion I’d run into people in town who refused to do business with him because of insults exchanged in a bar. I remember pursuing a billboard sale one time with a Savannah business owner and before I could get the conversation going the man asked, “Are you Ed Turner’s son?” When I told him I was he said he would never do business with him. When I asked him why, he said, “Go ask your father,” so I did. My dad was honest but embarrassed to tell me of an argument he’d had with him after several drinks. It was difficult for me to see my father struggle with this but it taught me a great lesson about not only the importance of making friends but the negative impact of making enemies and what damage drinking could do.
A TED STORY
“We’re Going to Show the Flag”
—Peter Dames
Ted and his father persuaded me to leave my banking job in New York and come work with them at Turner Advertising. I was a salesman in Turner’s Charleston operation when Ted’s father came in for a visit. He went to the Carolina Yacht Club his first night in town and got drunk. This was a very exclusive club back then and somehow he got into a c
onversation with one of the members about his heritage and how his name, Robert Edward, comes from Robert E. Lee and how he had a plantation in South Carolina with a family tree on the wall showing where Robert E. Lee was and where Edward Turner was.
Eventually, he and this other guy got into a fistfight and he punched the guy out. Well, in Charleston you just didn’t do that sort of thing. So the word was all over town by the time he showed up at the office the next morning and he was chagrined and hungover. He asked the manager to go to lunch with him and he said, “Oh, I have an appointment,” and when he asked the sales manager it was the same deal. They were suddenly very busy. Finally he looked at me and said, “You, come on, we’re going to have lunch. We’re going to show the flag.” So we went to the Colony House, which was kind of the place at that time so that he could show that he wasn’t embarrassed. Why else would he want to be seen with me? I figured he just wanted to be seen with somebody having lunch in polite company.
When I made my decision to join my father I decided I would approach my work with him just as I had after my turnaround at McCallie. I was going to try my best to do everything right—I’d work the hardest, follow every rule, and seek excellence in everything I did. My father had made it clear that he wanted me to run the business one day and I was determined to show him that I was capable. As the boss’s son, I made a point to impress the other employees by being the first one to arrive every morning and the last to leave at night. I was based in our Savannah office, working primarily with the sales and leasing departments. While we worked to grow revenues in our existing businesses, my father was on the lookout for new billboard companies to acquire and he purchased several small operators throughout the Southeast. With his major operations in Savannah and Charleston, my dad worked mostly out of his plantation home in South Carolina, halfway between these two cities.