The first event I went to was a fund-raiser for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Peter was right—there were pretty women everywhere—and one in particular caught my eye. Her name was Jane Smith and the attraction was immediate. From across the room I could tell she was beautiful and from our initial conversation I knew she had a great personality. I asked her out to dinner on the spot and our courtship began.
Janie—as most people called her—was a graduate of the University of Alabama and when we met she was working as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. Her dad was a successful executive and former president of his local Rotary Club and he and Janie’s mom seemed to have a great relationship. For me, after failing in a marriage with a northerner from Chicago it felt reassuring to be with a southerner.
Janie and I spent a lot of time together and had a lot of fun, and after dating for almost a year we first discussed the possibility of getting married. In retrospect, it was probably too fast, but I felt I had failed at one marriage, and when I fail my impulse is always to try again. So we flew to Las Vegas for a quick wedding, then settled together in a modest Atlanta apartment. Before long we welcomed our first child together, a boy we named Rhett, after my favorite fictional character, Rhett Butler. I was happy to be a new father again, and Rhett was the apple of Janie’s eye.
The company continued to move at a pace every bit as hectic as my personal life. We were generating solid cash flow and once we made our first big debt payment I was eager to expand. The first opportunity I found was a billboard company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The price was steep—$1 million—and back then most sellers expected to receive about 30 percent of the purchase price up front as a down payment. We couldn’t produce that kind of cash and still continue to meet our debt requirements, but with Irwin Mazo’s help, we figured out a way to make the acquisition with no money down. After convincing the sellers to finance 75 percent of the purchase price over seven years at a high interest rate, we found a bank in Chicago to fund the balance. The bank had been looking to expand their investments in the South and they lent us the rest of the money in return for equity in the Chattanooga company. (My father had always maintained many of the different billboard businesses as separate legal entities, in part to provide this sort of flexibility; we could offer equity in the Chattanooga company without diluting our ownership of Turner Advertising. This arrangement also allowed for periodic reorganizations to offset potential capital gains liabilities.)
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 would 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.