Consciousness-Raising with Ted Turner

Ted Turner believes that men should be barred from holding elected position for the next one hundred years.  I guess he now feels that women are suited to positions of true professional and public leadership.  Nice to see Ted's thinking on the matter has "evolved."

Sail On, Sailor

In February of 1985, I helped my boss, President of the Washington DC chapter of Women in Cable, organize a luncheon speech that Ted headlined, where he proceeded to lecture the assembled 95%+ female crowd:

"Can't believe these girls down at CNN who go out an' have a baby and then want to come back to work after two weeks, put that little baby with a nanny?!?  It's crazy!  Now it's a fact, a proven FACT, that a baby needs its mother's love - not its father's love, not "a Parent's" love - its Mother's love!  Mama's gotta stay home with that baby!"  One of the professional ladies present politely cleared her throat and said, "Excuse me, Mr. Turner, but I would hope that - at least after they have borne a child - you would refer to these female employees of yours as 'women,' not 'girls.' "

"Naaaah, now, listen, Honey...  lemme explain..."  (Collective gasp and disintegration of crowd).  I admired his confident, self-destructive impulse.

But we'd met before.  In 1982 I was writing business plans at CTM for pay-TV sports networks, and we were trying to package a roll-up of all the regionals into SSN, the Super Sports Network.  Ted was then at war with acting Commissioner of MLB Bud Selig because of the rogue move of pulling his games out of the MLB network TV deal to feed his own channel.  We thought, correctly, that he was likely to opt out of SSN (as would the Cubs and Mets, building similar superstation deals with WGN and WOR respectively); nevertheless, Turner and our CEO Bob Schmidt were old jock buddies and Ted came by our offices in McLean, VA to learn more about the SSN plans.

Ted strolled into Bob's corner office, and I wandered by.  "Porter, get in here!" yelled Bob.  "Got someone I want you to meet!"  He introduced me to Captain Outrageous, telling him I was an up and coming second baseman or some such nonsense.  We yukked it up a bit and then Bob said to Ted, "I had your friend Bud in here last week," and pointed at the desk, where a new Rawlings baseball sat on a display stand.  Ted stared at it, scowled, picked it up an tossed it a few times in the air.

Commish Strikethrough

"Gotta pen?"  Bob pulled the Mont Blanc from his shirt pocket.  Ted grabbed it, boldly slashed a line through Bud Selig's autograph, signed his own, and handed the ball back to Bob.

In a later life, Ted launched our National Geographic EXPLORER series on TBS where it anchored the Sunday evening prime-time block, and he supported it generously for many years, always taking a personal interest, joining (and commandeering) the quarterly planning meetings, and treating us to CNN studio tours he personally led, and to Braves and Hawks tickets whenever we came to town.  He loved National Geographic like a young Indiana Jones.

Only women in elected office?  Maybe ol' Jane Fonda got through to him.

Glamour and Boldness - A Pairing That No One Could Have Predicted