Lawrence H. Rogers II
In the world of television, they don’t come much bigger than Ted Turner and Pat Robertson. And while Lawrence H. Rogers, II is a television pioneer and was in business for over thirty years, his name is scarcely a household word, except to TV executives. Yet this is the story of how Bud Rogers fought Turner and Robertson to acquire a TV station and, against all odds, was successful.
Orlando Shoot-out, told by Bud Rogers himself, provides a revealing look at just how things are done in televisionland. Courtroom drama, high finance, and executive dealings abound. Exciting enough to be a novel, this book instead is real life that reads like fiction. If you are an insider, you will be, by turns, amused, incredulous, and intrigued to learn the inside story on just one of the many deals that have been engineered in the big game of acquiring TV stations. If you are just a concerned citizen, here’s your chance to gain a little insight into the inner workings of one of the biggest businesses in America today. And guess what, folks? The little guy sometimes wins!
Lawrence H. Rogers, II earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University and served as a captain in Patton’s army in World War II before building his first television station in West Virginia, where he worked from 1946 to 1959. Mr. Rogers then became chief operating officer and president of Taft Broadcasting Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, in which capacity he served until 1976. He also was chairman of the board of the Cincinnati branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and president and CEO of Omega Communications, Inc., of Orlando, Florida. Earlier, he had designed and constructed the first privately owned long-distance microwave relay transmission system in the television industry and personally brought an end to the FCC ban on editorializing by radio and television licensees.
IT WAS JANUARY, I WAS looking out the window of my office at the bleak gray scenery: the grubby hills of Kentucky across the sluggish slate-colored Ohio, the foreground dominated by the twin spires of the new Procter & Gamble world headquarters under construction in downtown Cincinnati. The “Dolly Parton Towers” some wag had already nicknamed the sprawling new edifice that would replace the square-windowed shoebox on Sycamore Street that had served as home office for the Queen City’s principal industrial giant.
Only the day before I made the announcement of my forthcoming early retirement as president of Taft Broadcasting Company – as the release put it – “to seek other business ventures.”
The only difference between the euphemism and the thousands of others that sounded just like it was that it was true. I had done all there was for me to do at Taft, and Hub Taft’s son, Dudley, was right on hand to fit into the vacancy my departure would create on the first of April. Charlie Mechem, the lawyer who had been brought in by the Taft family as my “keeper,” was beginning to enjoy his active chairmanship, and I was becoming increasingly restless with him as my boss. No matter that he was always courteous and considerate and left me almost entirely to my own devices, I had actually been the boss long enough that I wasn’t going to be happy playing second fiddle to anybody.
As chief operating officer of the company for sixteen years, more than thirteen of them as president, I had had a very satisfactory –and satisfying—second career.
The company had a net worth of $6 million when I joined it; sixteen years later it was something like $660 million. I had bought the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and acquired enough stations that Taft was the first broadcaster to have the then full “bag limit” of stations under the FCC regulations. The company was well known on Wall Street and in the trade as the one with what that old dingbat Katharine Graham had called “obscene profits.” It had been a ball, just like being the ringmaster of a three-ring circus, and I had loved it. The risks were never commensurate with the nearly certain rewards, and I was well known and respected throughout the industry. Having been, literally, the one person who pioneered the broadcast editorial, I had also for nearly thirty years been a participant in virtually every innovation in the television industry.
But now things were different, probably because the company had grown so large. Instead of doing the creative things I loved so well, I could usually count on being in a conference room full of accountants and lawyers by ten o’clock in the morning—usually to tell me why I couldn’t do what I was I had decided to do next. Those endless conferences drove me right up the wall. It was clearly time to move on.
I had just finished reading the Wall Street Journal, with special emphasis on the “Who’s News” column, which had carried the notice that I would be retiring as president of Taft as of the end of the fiscal year on 31 March 1976.
No sooner had I laid the paper aside to stare out the window when Karen came in with coffeepot in hand and said, “There’s a Mr. Atkins on the phone for you. Do you want to take it?” That dizzy broad just could not get it through her pretty blond head that I did not play games like that. The telephone was there to communicate with, not to see how many people you could insult by pretending to be too busy to talk to them. God, how I missed Margie! She’d been my secretary for about fifteen years, before she retired to move to Fort Lauderdale. That was still another reason I wasn’t having so much fun anymore. Margie Farfsing had become practically family. She knew me better than I knew myself.
So I picked up the phone and said, “Hiya, Orin. How the hell are you?” confident that the only Mr. Atkins likely to be calling me would be the chairman of Ashland Oil. He’d been Suzanne’ best beau when I first visited her in Huntington, West Virginia, at Christmas of 1942. She had had to break a New Year’s Eve date with him because her father insisted I stay over a few days. She’d have gladly wrung both our necks!
“Saw your ad in the Wall Street Journal this morning. So what the hell are you going to do? Nobody ever believes that ‘pursue other business interests’ crap!”
“Well, this time it’s true, Orin,” I replied. “Frankly, I am bored here now, and there’s a great big exciting world out there with other things in it. To tell you the honest truth, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but it’s not going to be until the fall, whatever it is. I’ll still be here for another three months, after which I am going to sail a sixty-foot sailboat from Palm Beach to Bermuda to meet the Tall Ships. Then I am going in the Tall Ships Regatta from Bermuda to Newport and after that to New York for the Fourth of July bicentennial celebration. I’ll be back off the ocean by Labor Day, which will be plenty of time to get down to work—whatever it is.”
“You’re nuts!” was his reaction. “Listen! I have an idea that I want to have you take on for me, so why don’t I just come down and see you? I have a Sabreliner that only takes about twenty minutes to get to Cincinnati; I’d like to hop down there and see you this afternoon.”
“Better yet,” I said, “why don’t you come for lunch? I’ll meet you at Lunken, and we’ll go to the Maisonette.”
“I’d love it, but I can’t. I have a meeting. I’ll come this afternoon and grab a cab. See you about four o’clock.”
Has his own Sabreliner, I mused, has an inside track to the Shah’s Iranian crude oil, and he can’t get out of a stupid meeting to come for lunch.
Well, I thought, that’s exactly why I am retiring from this rat race. I want to go back to doing exactly what I want to do when I want to do it!
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So Orin flew to Cincinnati and walked into my office with his executive assistant in tow: a quiet, nervous balding young man named Paul Chellgren. Paul is now president of Ashland Chemicals and is well up in the top echelon of the corporate hierarchy.
Paul sat on the very edge of a side chair, bolt upright in this three-piece navy suit, clutching his briefcase as if he feared it would get away. Orin, on the other hand, was his usual laid-back, easygoing self, underneath which he was hard as nails. He would have had to be to come up through the ranks from junior house counsel to the first CEO outside the founding Blazer family. He had been Rex Blazer’s right-hand man and was his hand-picked successor.
He flopped into the leather armchair on the other side of my antique English partners desk and put his feet up upon the desk. I did the same thing on my side, to the evident astonishment of Karen, who appeared at that moment to ask if Mr. Atkins would like a cup of coffee.
“No thanks, honey,” he drawled to her obvious discomfiture at the invidious sexism. “If I know your boss, there’s bound to be a bottle of scotch around here somewhere, and it’s already after four o’clock!”
