Chapter 4

 Selling a product before its time

I can remember days at the service station when I would listen to radio programs such as The Shadow, The Long Ranger, Sargent Preston of the Yukon, and Wild Bill Hickox. The good guys always winning out over the bad guys. Baseball was served well by that medium. Announcers for the St. Louis Cardinals, such as Harry Caray, could make a dull ballgame exciting. The anticipation of the home run when Harry would say “it might be, it could be, it is!”. Only later as you watched a game on TV and listened to it on radio would you realize how much the announcers added to building the popularity of the national pastime. Football was just the opposite, a lousy radio sport and ideal for television. Other types of entertainment included the movies. I remember musicals were very big at that time as well as the weekly serials where each week you were left with a cliffhanging situation guaranteeing that you would return to see the next installment the following week. Costs of going to the movies ranged from 10 cents to no more than a quarter. The idea of actually seeing things on television in your home was extremely attractive to people living in rural communities. We weren’t able to go to live professional baseball, basketball, and football games or visit museums and theater like our urban counterparts. A lot was left for the imagination.  Maybe one of the reasons a lot of creative leaders has come from small, rural communities.

Television

Prior to cable, broadcast television in the rural areas was little more than shadowy figures on a snowy background. Television stations were as far away as 150 to 200 miles. My earliest remembrance was watching television beamed from Tulsa and Memphis. Generally you could watch programming from at most two different channels or networks. My father bought a Philco TV well before he started his business. Studied the opportunities. Knew he would have to be able to provide services in addition to selling TVs such as installing antennas and repairing TVs.  Early color television was limited to just a few programs such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Many times we had people come to our house to watch those shows. When a television station came on the air in Springfield, Missouri it would sign on in the afternoon and stay on until midnight.

My dad was building interest in the new medium. Getting there first with a good idea is generally more than 95% of what’s necessary to market a new idea. I think we have seen the same principal in computer software and the Internet, where software and services were given away free to build a market.

Cable TV

Then there was cable. Harrison had one of the first cable systems in the country. Many consider the cable system that originated in Batesville, Arkansas as the first. Cable in the early days was generally referred to as CATV, community antenna television. Some systems were privately owned and developed and others were built through cooperatives. From the beginning, cable TV represented a “Field of Dreams,” in that cable operators would build a system and the subscribers immediately came—there was sufficient pent-up demand to attain high percentages of viewers from the homes passed. TV viewers in remote locations were watching snowy pictures and wanted more.  My dad’s favorite golfing buddy, Bob Wheeler, started the local cable system. This relationship became important when I returned to Arkansas to start my computer service bureau business.

College

After high school, I decided to enter the University of Arkansas the summer of 1962. I was on a fast track taking a heavy load. I had the intention of graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in 3 years. I majored in mathematics in the college of Arts and Sciences. I took advantages of the Arts part of the Arts and Sciences by studying art, music, and literature in addition to science and business classes. I developed an appreciation for live theater. Today Broadway Theater is one of my interests that most people don’t know about. I have been numerous times to the theater in both New York and London.  We live close enough to Springfield, Missouri to attend most of the “Give Your Regards to Broadway” series at one of the best theatres in the country, Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts. Much of the theatre’s cost was financed through Wal-Mart money and a local developer.  

The early part of the sixties on campus was interesting with newfound freedoms. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were becoming a part of the culture. Dress was becoming more casual and long hair, the norm. Rebellion was the word. Doing your own thing was the result. Authority was under pressure to respond to change. If things had always been done a particular way and there wasn’t a good reason to continue then there was pressure to try something new. In retrospect it was much more than a rock and roll based rebellion. The change was the early stages of the shift from manufacturing to an information society. 

The early part of the twentieth century brought an assembly mind workforce and mentality. People were trained to do a specific function with no empowerment. Marketing went to a shotgun approach due to the media. Television and transportation was making an impact.

I was leaving the University library around 1 p.m. on November 23^rd, 1963, when I heard students saying that President John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. By the time I got to my house I learned that the President was dead. At this time, I was still very much a liberal and I was buying into a world of Camelot. The news to me was shattering. I couldn’t believe people were callous about his death. The University of Arkansas even decided to play their football game while many others were cancelled or at least postponed.

After three years I checked out the job market. Opportunities in the region were very limited for math majors in 1965, so I decided to teach a semester at my old high school, Valley Springs. After a semester I returned to the University to work toward the completion of my Master’s Degree. With my teaching experience I was able to get a teaching job at Fayetteville High School. Pay was much better than what graduate assistants were paid.

Marriage—

I was married to Sandra Kay Tennyson on September 3^rd, 1964. She grew up less than a mile from my house. There is two years difference in our age. During the growing up years, two years was a lot of difference. Our love interests only started during my junior and senior years in high school. I was a basketball player and she was a cheerleader. Enough said!

We were married at 10 AM on a Thursday morning. I was at the barbershop less than an hour before the wedding. The only comment that my wife’s mother made was that she should be mad at me but she wasn’t. Sandy was her baby and only 18 at the time. After the wedding we headed for St. Louis, which included a couple of baseball games, for our honeymoon. We had hidden our car to avoid all shoe polish and tin cans. Our only problem was that a couple found it and had put Limburger cheese on the motor. You can’t even imagine the smell after the motor heated the cheese up. I can still remember that rank smell today. Maybe that idea should be included in Kirk Saxon’s book as a survivalist technique to eliminate your enemies.

My wife has a very outgoing personality and has never met a stranger. I am very much the opposite. She has Elizabeth Taylor eyes and Sally Fields’ face. No doubt if she had wanted she could have been an entertainer. She can enter a room and instantly win over a crowd. Although she had very little understanding of our business she sometimes would assist me at conventions. She understood the key to sales was relationship, relationship, and relationship. In much the same sense that location, location, location is to real estate. Generally she would make a sale by starting a conversation. Often by complimenting someone’s hair or clothes.

she would never be accused of hoarding money when there is an opportunity to spend it. Since we have a 24-hour Wal-Mart Supercenter, she is available to shop, 24 by 7. (And she has been spotted there at all hours). At least she still prefers shopping at stores. I prefer the Internet. Sandy is a professional shopper. She so good she could run a consulting business for professional shoppers. After we sold our company, I was asked in a Q&A session at the acquisition’s management meeting about how I priced my products? I told them that I based it on my wife’s shopping budget. It got a big laugh since most of the management was men. My wife heard the story from several people and actually found it quite funny. I guess management thought I was kidding, Sandy knew I wasn’t.

I do remember one instance when Sandy saved some money. We were living in Washington DC. The Arkansas Razorback football team was playing on television. Unfortunately the game was not being televised in DC, but I found out you could see it in the Richmond area. Since we were just out of college and had very little money we didn’t want to spend money on a motel room, just to watch a football game. When we got to Charlottesville I attempted to watch the game at a TV store. I found out very quickly that watching there was going to be impossible. So my wife suggested that we go to a motel. She talked the manager into letting us have a room, free for three hours! I’m not sure what she told him, she said she just told him the truth. I can only imagine what he thought –how creative! I wonder what he told his friends. I do know that I could never have pulled that off.