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 conversation 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.
Despite how busy his work kept him, and perhaps due to his excitement to finally have me officially under his wing full-time, my father became involved in my private affairs. Not only did he expect a full accounting of my activities on the job, he also wanted to know about and have input into every aspect of my personal life. He wanted to know who I was dating, what family they were from, where we went, what we did—
everything
. I was accustomed to my father taking an interest in me but this was getting to be too much so I worked up the nerve to talk to him about it. My desk in our Savannah building was in an open area directly outside my father’s office. Late one afternoon, I knocked on his door and said, “Dad, do you mind if we talk for a bit?”
“Sure son, come on in.”
Taking a deep breath, I said, “Dad, all these years you’ve said you’re going to leave the business to me and that’s great. You didn’t want me to go to the Naval Academy because you wanted me here right after college. I couldn’t finish Brown so I came here even sooner than we had planned. I’ve been working on and off in this business since I was twelve. It’s not always easy being the boss’s son, but you know I love you to death. I’m glad to be your son and I’m proud and I’m doing everything I can to make you proud of me.”
Having his full attention, I said something next that he didn’t expect.
“You always say you’re going to leave your business to me—but have you ever considered the possibility that what you really want to do is leave me to your business?”
He sat up straight in his chair. To his credit, he listened carefully to what I had to say and rather than respond immediately he said he wanted to think about it overnight. First thing the next morning he called me into his office and told me I was right and that he’d do his best to step back. I thanked him, and feeling a new confidence I said, “Dad, it just gets tough when you’re involved in every aspect of my life. You tell me where I should live, who I should date. I’d just like you to consider letting me be myself a little bit. In my business life I’ll do anything you say, but please try not to bug me so much about my personal life. When I want advice I’ll ask for it, but if not, please let me try to work it out myself.” He said that he understood, and things between us really did get better after that.
As I worked to become my own person, sailing also helped. The billboard company was my father’s and as long as I worked there I’d be Ed Turner’s son. But sailing was mine, and on a boat I could be Ted Turner and earn a reputation on my own merits. The sport also played an important role in Savannah society and being good at it helped me establish myself there.
While I was still shy of my twenty-first birthday I decided that now that I was out in the real world, it was time I found a wife and settled down. At this point I’d not had any long-term relationships with women. Attending an all-boys military academy didn’t help matters and during my wilder years at Brown I tended to have dates with several women as opposed to going steady with one. Living in the small town of Savannah I felt that I knew just about everyone there and I concluded that I’d have to look elsewhere to find a mate.
Given the increasingly important role that sailing was playing in my life, I figured that marrying someone who shared that passion would make a lot of sense. My thoughts turned to a woman I had met at a college sailing regatta. Her name was Judy Nye and she was a champion sailor on Northwestern University’s team. Judy was very bright and fun-loving and so was her father. He was also a champion racer and after inheriting his father’s tool-and-die business, he went on to start his own sailmaking company. I remember the first time I met him was after a Chicago Bears game and he came in wearing a fur coat, a drink in hand, and laughing it up. Recalling these memories I gave Judy a call. We got together once or twice and got along pretty well. Looking back I don’t think we were ever really in love but we were young and impulsive. After dating long distance for a while I called her up and proposed to her over the phone. She said yes, and began planning for a Chicago wedding in June.
That December, between our engagement and wedding, my sister, Mary Jean, died. She was just seventeen years old and it was a sad ending to a long ordeal for everyone involved. My mother had done all she could to keep Mary Jean stabilized and healthy but for many years it had been a question of when, not if, she would succumb to her illnesses. Since moving back to Cincinnati with my mom, Mary Jean was in many ways already out of my life, but that didn’t make her passing any easier to take. And of course, the death of their only daughter was absolutely crushing for my mom and dad. Even now, it’s painful to think about, and I’ve blocked all memories surrounding her death—how I learned of it, the funeral, the wake, my parents’ behavior—I don’t remember a single detail.
After that dark winter, our summer wedding was a welcome respite. Judy’s family reserved a private club for our reception and it was spectacular. My father was my best man and very proud of his son that day. With our brief courtship, my sister’s passing, and our June wedding, those months were a whirlwind. Judy and I settled into our first home together—a rented one-room apartment in Savannah—but we were only there for a few months before my father bought a billboard company in Macon and we had to relocate there. We found a nice little apartment but I’m sure that going from Chicago to Savannah to Macon was a tough transition for Judy. Frankly, deep down, I think we both had concerns that rushing into our marriage had been a mistake.
Even worse, once we got to Macon, I really threw myself into my work. My father had purchased Jones Poster Service earlier that year and their previous owner—Johnny Jones—stayed around for a while to help me out with the transition. He was beloved by everyone in town but he wasn’t the greatest businessman. An elder in the Presbyterian Church, he was a fine, principled man, the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Unfortunately, his spirit of generosity often caused his business to suffer. When he sold us the company he was beginning a battle with cancer and wanted to get his affairs in order. He had no children to whom he might pass along the business, and was happy to sell to my father, who by now had earned a solid reputation across the industry.