WILL THAULT: A dreamer’s anthem, a warrior’s creed

I joined Turner Broadcasting in early 1980, just months before CNN went live with 24/7 news, birthing a new era of television journalism.

On my first day at work, the first person I met as I walked into the lobby of SuperStation WTBS was its owner. Sporting a wide grin, below his Rhett Butler pencil-thin moustache, he reached out his hand to shake mine and said, “Hi, I’m Ted Turner. What’s your name?” I responded in kind, followed by a polite, “Mr. Turner,” to which he quickly said, “Call me Ted.”

Turned out, this was a regular routine for Ted. When in town, he’d hang out in the lobby first thing in the morning to greet any visitor or employee who happened to walk through the door. The cynic in me reasoned that it also might be to catch any of his employees coming in late for work. Maybe that was so to a certain extent, but after getting to really know Ted, I soon realized that the hands-on approach was emblematic of his bigger-than-life character.

The Ted the public saw wasn’t an act. He was highenergy, full-tilt all the time, and that exuberance was irresistibly contagious. As a culture, Turner employees not only had to, but wanted to, work hard to make Ted’s dreams come true. They became our dreams as well. We felt privileged to be on the team of the most charismatic media pioneer of the age: the modern-day Pathfinder, who was turning Cable TV, a fledgling Industry back then, into a major alternative to conventional over-the-air broadcast TV. Ted even recorded a song titled “I Was Cable When Cable Wasn’t Cool.”

It’s hard to describe the media frenzy Ted created. Perhaps all the AI excitement today might come close as a comparison to the buzz Ted generated with his radical onslaught on existing and emerging technology.

Ted passed away at the age of 87 last week and has been eulogized by many media outlets, some of whom were once fierce competitors. An ironic footnote here: While struggling in its first year, it was rumored within CNN that Dan Rather with CBS was the one who first sarcastically nicknamed the fledgling operation the Chicken Noodle Network. True or not, Rather watched CNN eclipse CBS News in credibility, reach, and influence within the decade, and now, after Turner’s death, “CBS Sunday Morning” airs one of the more substantive tributes. By contrast, CNN itself, as of press time, remains all but silent by comparison, limiting its memorials to brief fillers or “shorts” scattered throughout its regularly scheduled programming.

One hopes the network will eventually produce a primetime special that properly honors their founder.

Most of the tributes that have aired have focused on Ted’s creation of CNN, as well they should. But they fell short of revealing the true nature of the man with time-worn platitudes like “visionary” or “maverick.” To be sure, some of his offthe-cuff/off-color comments justly earned him the monikers “Captain Outrageous” (a play on “Courageous,” the name of Ted’s America’s Cup yacht) and one he really disliked, “Mouth of the South.” But I think “Riverboat Gambler” comes closer to the mark.

Think about it. He competes for the America’s Cup and wins; buys a struggling UHF TV station in Atlanta with limited capital; negotiates a leveraged buy-out deal with the Atlanta Braves, perennial losers, ultimately turning them into World Series winners; against all odds, “goes to war” with CBS, NBC and ABC, with the launch of a 24/7 television news network; follows with the purchase of MGM’s film library which nearly breaks him. The result? A gambler who plays the odds and wins. He once said during a speech at the National Press Club, “’If we fail’ doesn’t exist in my vocabulary.”

He was a man of action, asserting, “The best advice is never to do anything. You’ll never get in trouble if you don’t do anything. On the other hand, you’ll never get anywhere either.”

My role at Turner Broadcasting called for me to meet one-on-one with Ted quite often in his office my first year there. Typically, the topic of discussion would be an OTO (onetime-only) or limited series production that he had in mind. Sometimes he’d suggest an unorthodox way of covering the cost of the project, which I would think was a perfectly brilliant idea at the time.

I came to believe that he had a corner on Pixie Dust, because it’d usually fall off somewhere between the time I left his office and got back to mine. Regardless, after the “dust” had settled, the unorthodox way always seemed to work.

On one of those occasions, as a means of inspiring me, he picked up a little music box with Pinocchio standing on top, performing for Jiminy Cricket on a concertina. It chimed the tune, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” This figurine always sat on his desk, along with a mini-billboard (facing his guests) that read, “Either Lead, Follow, or Get Out of The Way.” I think both were like touchstones symbolizing Ted’s true nature: The tune from the music box was his dreamer’s anthem, and the message on the mini-billboard was his warrior’s creed.

On the last page of his 2008 autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” he joked about what he might want written on his tombstone. “These days,” he said, “I’m leaning toward ‘I Have Nothing More to Say.’”

His close friend Tom Brokaw interviewed Ted during his book tour. When it came to the question of faith, Brokaw suggested that some thought he was agnostic. Ted deflected that charge by responding, “I think God will let me in heaven. He may not let me sit on the 50-yard line, but I think I can get into the end zone.”

Maybe so, Ted. Only God knows our hearts. But, given your track record in the game of life, I like the odds.

Will Thault is a retired businessman who spent much of his career in southwest Georgia before retiring to Alabama.