The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [3]
My humanities interests in college also took me into the debating society, extemporaneous speaking, and eventually the performing arts, where I was “discovered” and asked to host a live closed-circuit event at the university medical school. The live event was an operation being performed on a sick animal, beamed over the circuit to TV sets in the large lecture theater. Unfortunately, it was not live for very long because the poor animal died early in the procedure, leaving me with a lot of empty airtime to fill until another animal was brought in. Thank God, it was only closed-circuit television and there were probably only a few people in the hall. Frankly, I think it made me a pioneer in “reality” TV. Even though hooked on communications, I took some law courses and gave the law a chance to captivate me. Ultimately, however, I returned to communications.
While in school, I received a media scholarship, which gave me the opportunity to become an intern at WOW-TV. As luck would have it, my first assignment was to be the play-by-play announcer on the first-ever TV transmission of a live professional football game west of Chicago. It was a National Football League preseason game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New York Giants being played in Omaha. The usual sports announcer had taken one look at the newfangled medium and passed on the assignment while remarking to anyone who would listen that televising sports events would never work.
The Rams-Giants game was not the highlight of my life. The field was a converted baseball stadium and the broadcast booth was high behind home plate, which put me in front of a microphone in the deepest reaches of the end zone. The stadium was poorly lit, I could see only half the field, and my spotter, who was to help me identify the players, showed up drunk. I was less than articulate. At one point I said, “The ball is on the one-inch line.”
The coverage of the game was a prelude to WOW’s live telecasting of the University of Nebraska’s home games later that year. The common mantra is that Husker football is the state religion. There were only a few hundred television sets in all of Nebraska at the time but that did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of the management of the station, who saw and believed, presciently, that the new medium would soon sweep all before it. Ultimately, it did.
After my inauspicious beginning with the Rams-Giants game, however, I was allowed to go on to cover all the Nebraska games that year. I had to help lug all of the equipment up to the tiny broadcast booth, but it was worth it. I was rewarded with the princely sum of fifty-five dollars a week. For that salary I also did a daily talk show called Keough’s Coffee Counter, which was directly followed by a much more professional and funnier program hosted by another young man starting out in the new medium, Johnny Carson. He also made fifty-five dollars a week. Johnny and I became lifelong friends.
While the broadcasting business was interesting, the sponsor of my talk show, Paxton and Gallagher’s Butternut Coffee, offered the more generous sum of seventy-five dollars a week to join their company. Paxton and Gallagher was a regional food wholesaler headquartered in Omaha. The new job meant a bit more money, less time traveling, and more time at home with my new wife, Mickie, so I made the jump into the corporate world in late 1950 and never looked back.
In 1958, Gilbert and Clarke Swanson, fresh from the sale of their hugely successful Swanson Foods to Campbell Soups, bought Paxton and Gallagher from the Gallagher family. They renamed it Butternut Foods and had great expansion plans. So I entered a new chapter in my business life. The Swanson brothers, by the way, had made their initial fortune in the 1950s on an extremely simple product with new freezing technology that combined two consumer desires of the time