Call Me Ted

by Ted Turner

  Our next purchase was also in Tennessee, this time in Knoxville. This was a much smaller deal than the Chattanooga one but the details were pretty colorful. I can’t remember the original owner’s name but after several years of mismanaging the business, he passed away. Like a lot of billboard markets, Knoxville was a two-company town and for years the guy’s competitor, run by an Air Force reserve colonel named Tom Cummings, had been cleaning his clock. It was widely assumed that once the company came up for sale, Cummings would be the only interested buyer and could easily take it at a low price. But since Knoxville would be a logical addition to a company that now owned signs in Atlanta, Richmond, Roanoke, Savannah, Charleston, and Chattanooga, I felt like I should go there and check it out.

  The company would be sold at auction out of the deceased owner’s estate. I figured that Cummings assumed he’d be the only bidder, and not wanting to disabuse him of this notion, I did everything I could to make sure my Knoxville visit went unnoticed. I rented a car under an alias and drove around the town to check out his signs and locations but never went near the offices for fear of being spotted. The company clearly needed some work but it looked to me like an opportunity worthy of at least a lowball bid. Our Atlanta attorney found a Knoxville lawyer to represent us at the auction and I gave him explicit but unusual instructions.

  “I want you to put on the crummiest suit you have,” I told him, “and right before the deadline you walk in there looking like the poorest guy in town. Drop the bid on the lawyer’s desk just a few minutes before the noon deadline on the final day.” When he asked me how much I wanted to bid I had to think about it a little. I can still remember staring up at the ceiling in my office. This was a one-time, sealed bid auction so I thought it might help us to bid an uneven amount. I also figured that Cummings wouldn’t go in for more than about $50,000, so I picked the number $50,300 out of the air, wrote it down on a piece of paper, and handed it to the attorney.

  Sticking to our script, our Knoxville lawyer walked into the auctioneer’s office just before noon, dressed in a cheap, unpressed suit and scuffed-up shoes. Cummings was sitting there in the lobby with his lawyers, and thinking they would have no competition they had yet to submit an offer. When they realized that this scruffy-looking guy was walking past them to submit a competing bid, they panicked. After a flurry of activity between him and his team, Cummings scribbled down a number, stuffed the paper in an envelope, and handed it to the lawyer for the estate.

  A few minutes later the bids were unsealed. Sure enough, Cummings had offered $50,000. He had lost by $300 to Turner Advertising of Atlanta and he was stunned. He called me later that afternoon screaming bloody murder. He told me he’d pay me $110,000 for the business—doubling my money in a matter of hours. I let him know that I was serious about the Knoxville market and wouldn’t sell to him for anything less than $250,000. He said that was too rich for his blood and he passed. Once we took ownership I sent Peter Dames to Knoxville to run the company and he turned things around, expanding the business from three hundred signs to four hundred. We had a lot of fun competing with Cummings and quickly became a serious player in the Knoxville market.

  Our business was hitting on all cylinders and I was really in my stride. Outdoor advertising wasn’t the most glamorous business but we did manage to be creative. I remember one time when a marketing person at Coca-Cola declared that billboard advertising was old hat and that they were going to redirect their dollars into television. They were one of our biggest customers and probably had about a hundred signs in Atlanta alone.

  By coincidence, around the time they made this announcement, rumors were circulating that Coke was considering moving its headquarters to New York. Their executives vehemently denied this but the stories wouldn’t go away. That gave me an idea. I went to our creative department and told them to draw up a simple billboard design that said, “Goodbye Coca-Cola, We’ll Miss You!” I figured this would stir up some controversy and when it did, it would prove to Coca-Cola that people really did pay attention to billboards! Our lawyer at the time, Tench Coxe, convinced me that this was not a good idea. We argued about it and even though we’d already had several signs printed, those boards never did go up. (The lawyer was probably right. Coke never did leave town and they remained great clients of Turner for the next forty years.)

  We continued to grow our billboard, but I wanted to expand into new lines of business. By the mid-1960s, outdoor advertising was increasingly under attack. While her husband was president, Lady Bird Johnson actively promoted a variety of environmental initiatives. One of the most high-profile of these was the Highway Beautification Act, which called for the banning of billboards from all federal highways. The billboard business had taken off during the 1950s when the federal highway system was built and losing these signs would be a devastating blow to Turner Advertising and the entire billboard industry. As it turned out, the law as it eventually passed was watered down significantly. It continued to allow signs in commercial and industrial areas along the highways and offered compensation to companies whose signs were removed.

  Still, this pressure at the federal level, combined with constant threats from local municipalities, made me think I didn’t want all my eggs in the billboard basket. At the same time this legislative pressure was building, more and more advertisers—like Coca-Cola—began to see television as more glamorous than outdoor signs. I was trying hard to stay focused on the road ahead and to me it seemed pretty clear that the medium with the brightest future had to be television.

  Looking around the industry I found two companies that I could try to model myself after. The first was Metromedia, run by John Kluge, and the other was Combined Communications, headed by another entrepreneur named Karl Eller. Both of these companies had diversified beyond just one medium. In Metromedia’s case, Kluge started with TV and radio and later added billboards, while Eller’s company went the other way, beginning with billboards before moving into television and radio station ownership. Their strategies made sense to me, but I would need greater access to capital, or have to wait and accumulate cash from operations if I were to diversify Turner Advertising beyond its current base of business.

  Up until this time, our company had remained private. My father had always owned a majority of his shares and I inherited these holdings when he passed away. In addition to using our stock to help finance acquisitions, we also allowed employees to purchase some as well. That worked fine but whenever we let our people buy stock or when an employee left the company or wanted to sell shares, we had to negotiate with them over the valuation. I always felt like I was selling our stock too cheaply and buying it back too high. It seemed to me that by going public, we could raise the capital we’d need to diversify while allowing the market to decide what we were worth. But I was advised that now would not be the right time for a public offering, so given our limited resources and the high price of television stations, we decided to start our diversification efforts by going after radio properties. Our hope was to take advantage of efficiencies in sales and promotion by buying or merging with radio stations in markets where we already had billboards.

  Around this time a guy named Peterson had recently beaten me to the purchase of an AM station in Chattanooga. Since he also owned billboard properties I decided to meet with him to discuss the possibility of some creative combinations of our various holdings. He had a struggling outdoor operation in Norfolk, Virginia, and said he would agree to sell me the Chattanooga radio station if I would also purchase his Norfolk company. Wanting to get into radio and confident that we would be able to turn things around in Norfolk, I made the deal. Shortly thereafter, a South Carolinian named Chuck Smith agreed to merge into our company three of the radio stations he owned: two in Charleston, South Carolina, and one in Jacksonville, Florida. Both Peterson and Smith sold to us for stock and a small amount of cash.

  While it was fun moving into a new business, I never developed a passion for radio the way I later woul
d for television. It had been hard enough selling billboard ads against one competitor in a market, but in radio you competed with a dozen or more stations. We also had a lot of personnel issues at the stations we bought. At this point of the 1960s drugs seemed to be used heavily by a lot of the disc jockeys. A low point came when one of our on-air guys in Chattanooga got caught taking an underage girl across state lines and wound up going to prison. This all gave me a pretty bad feeling for the new business and I determined that radio would not be the final stop for Turner Advertising.

  With my professional and sailing careers continuing at a breakneck pace and with a young child at home, things were hectic for Janie on the home front but she worked hard at it. After helping raise me, Jimmy Brown had transitioned into helping out Janie and me around the house, and he served as a caretaker for Rhett. We were also fortunate to have Jimmy Brown in our lives, especially as things were about to get significantly more complicated.

  In the spring of 1967, when Laura and Teddy, now five and three years old, came to Atlanta for a customary Christmas holiday visit, something was clearly wrong. Laura was obviously unhappy and young Teddy was covered with bruises. I took them to the doctor and it didn’t take us long to conclude that the children had been physically abused. Teddy had been taking the worst of it and there was evidence that he’d had some broken bones, including one in his arm that hadn’t been properly set. It was terribly sad for me to see my two young children in this condition and there was no way they could go back to Chicago. Judy had remarried by this time and when I called her she explained that her husband was the abuser. Apparently, he had battled with drugs and mental problems and for whatever reason took out his frustrations on his stepchildren. (He was a very troubled person who eventually spent time in jail and committed suicide.)

  Judy knew this was a serious problem and as heart-wrenching as this was for her, she offered no protest when I told her the children had to remain in Atlanta. She would later say that when she put Laura and Teddy on that flight to Atlanta, part of her knew that they were not coming back. After a few months, being away from her children became so difficult for Judy that she impulsively flew to Atlanta to try to take them back. That was a very difficult scene at our home. I never would have let the kids go back with her anyway but when seven-year-old Laura outright refused, it was clear even to Judy that this couldn’t happen. She knew her visit had been a mistake and after seeing Teddy and Laura in their new environment, Judy decided that the best, least confusing thing she could do for her children was to let this become their home once and for all. Judy returned to Chicago and had very little contact with her children from that day forward.

  But knowing that taking care of Laura and Teddy was the right thing to do didn’t make the job any easier for Janie. Already tending to young Rhett, who was by this time just a year old, she now had to look after two older children from another marriage. Less than a year later, in January of 1968, Janie gave birth to a second boy, Reed Beauregard Turner, whom we called Beau. Thirteen months after that—February 17, 1969—marked the arrival of our daughter Sara Jean (or Jennie, as we called her), and at this point we had five children under the age of eight living under our roof. It was all very difficult for Janie, and frankly it was also tough on my two older children, whom she would always have difficulty treating as her own. Jimmy Brown and I did our best to try to balance the equation, but varying forms of unequal treatment would be an issue for our kids for years to come.

  A TED STORY

  “Janie Really Was Not Happy”

  —Laura Turner Seydel

  Janie really was not happy. First of all, my father was off sailing and he’d come home with his dirty laundry and as soon as things were clean he was off again. She was pregnant and now his kids from a former marriage were being shoved on her. Janie was trying but this was more than she bargained for and she couldn’t stand the situation. After all these years Janie and I have now become best of friends but back then she really couldn’t stand us. Teddy and I spent a lot of time down in the basement with Jimmy Brown and with my dad being away so much, he almost became like a surrogate father for us.

  A TED STORY

  “The Benevolent Dictator”

  —Teddy Turner

  Having Jimmy Brown around was almost like having a grandfather living with you. He was kind of strict and kept after you but he also had that tender side so where your parents might not have given you ice cream after dinner, Jimmy would. My dad was a dictator, but Jimmy was the benevolent dictator when my dad wasn’t around. And he had a big job because there were five kids and a household to take care of. In some ways he had zero authority but all the responsibility, which is a very, very difficult job but he was great at it. And Dad was gone a good bit between sailing and work but I really don’t think anybody holds it against him because ultimately he was very successful in both. It’s not like he wasn’t around because he didn’t want to be there—as a kid that would really upset you—that wasn’t what he grew up with and he was away doing big things. We were proud of him doing it and were very happy when he was around. Things were very different when he was around; there was always life and activity and buzz and schedule and stuff. Dad makes the most of every moment while Jimmy was a little more laid-back. We did a lot but it wasn’t at the frantic pace of my father. With Dad, when it was a weekend or a vacation the term was “maximum fun.” His view was that if you didn’t get it all in you’ve wasted time and haven’t had your maximum fun.

  I read a lot of books on parenting and tried to do my best as a father. Jimmy helped out with just about everything and as a team, he, Janie, and I did our best to raise children with good manners and the proper respect for their elders and each other. We taught them the importance of honesty, integrity, and hard work. I was so busy with work and sailing that I wasn’t around as much as I would have liked, but my children always knew I loved them.

  8

  Sailing Gets Serious

  By the mid-1960s my passion for sailing grew to be nearly as intense as my drive to succeed in business. This was a time in my life when I was doing everything at an increasingly fast pace. My father had enjoyed fast cars and now that I was on my own and could afford one, I thought it would be cool to own a Ferrari. I bought a used one that was still in good condition and while it was great for getting me around town, it posed a challenge when it came to getting my boat in and out of the water at the Atlanta Yacht Club and the other places I sailed in the area. I owned a Flying Dutchman, which was just a two-man boat but it was heavy for a Ferrari. I couldn’t see the practicality of buying a four-wheel-drive truck just to tow my boat so I took the Ferrari to a mechanic and had them install a trailer hitch to the back of it. I may have been the first person ever to trail a boat off the back of a Ferrari and this made for quite a scene whenever I drove down the highway or pulled into a boatyard but I never minded all the stares and laughter.

  The more races I entered the better my sailing became and, as always, I had a strong desire to move up to the next level. For years I had read about bigger boats in Yachting magazine and now, with the company doing as well as it was, I realized that I might be able to afford one. A friend of mine named James Schoonmaker, from Miami, suggested I charter a boat and enter the Southern Ocean Racing Conference, or SORC. We checked with a yacht broker and were able to find someone to lease us his Block Island 40 out of Pimlico Sound, North Carolina. At forty feet in length, she was much bigger than anything I had ever sailed and I doubt its owner would have leased his boat to me had I not had a partner with Schoonmaker’s experience. After we worked out terms and signed all the papers, Schoonmaker decided to take off for a race in Brazil. I was left on my own on the biggest boat I’d ever sailed.

  With Jimmy Brown’s help, I pulled a local crew together and Irwin Mazo came up from Atlanta to be our navigator. (He had learned navigation on a destroyer in the final days of World War II.) By the time of our scheduled departure for Charleston, the weather had
turned cold and the manager of the marina recommended we spend another night there. But it didn’t seem so bad to me and I was eager to get going so we went out anyway, motoring into the darkness singing sea chanteys. We made it between the first few sets of buoys but then somehow took a wrong turn. Thinking we were heading into a channel we were actually going full steam into a shallow bay. The next thing we knew—CRUNCH—we had run aground. We were stuck in Pimlico Sound and the wind started blowing harder.

  Waves started to lift up our boat and then would drop us down hard on the sandbar with a loud crash. Normally waves like these can help you dislodge but that night the wind was blowing us back into the shallow bay and we couldn’t get off the sand. As the waves kept pounding, Mazo grabbed the radio and started calling “Mayday! Mayday! Coast Guard!” only to discover that the radio didn’t work. We started to worry that the boat might crack up, and knowing that there was no rescue on the way, we got the life raft out and put on our life jackets. We were prepared to abandon ship but as a little more time passed we realized that the boat was not breaking up and we never manned that raft. That was a good thing because if we had set out in a lifeboat in those conditions we probably would have all drowned or died of hypothermia.