Call Me Ted by Ted Turner, Bill Burke Page A

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