Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [5]
BILL RASMUSSEN:
Al had been talking about us buying a transponder on the satellite for nightly stuff on an hourly basis, but then he said the fateful words: “We used to have another one that was twenty-four hours a day, but no one bought it so we took it off the market.” We all just looked at each other for a moment. So then I asked him what that would cost. He said, “$34,167 a month.”
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
I was only twenty-two at that point but I could figure out that $1,143 for twenty-four hours was a better deal than 1,250 bucks for five hours, so there was no question we should sign up for the full service. We were able to send a satellite signal around America for less money than it cost to send the same signal around Connecticut via landlines.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
Before Al got in his car, Scott said, “We should get three of those,” and I said, “We don’t have the money to buy even one.” But we called Al the next day and said, “We’ll take one.” And Al says, “You’ll take one what?” We said, “We’ll take one of those twenty-four-hour ones that you’ve never sold before.”
AL PARINELLO:
Bill’s first goal was to convince me, as the representative of RCA, that I should go back to corporate and recommend this new venture as a viable candidate, and I was convinced. I was absolutely blown away by these two. They were good people. They were smart. They were savvy. And they listened intently. I went back to the home office and said, “I think we have good people here who we can trust. I can’t vouch for where the money’s coming from, but if we don’t have a check by X date, we’ll throw this deal away.” It was that simple.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
What we didn’t know was that there was going to be a column in the Wall Street Journal the day after Labor Day saying the wave of the future was satellites at RCA. They got a ton of applications after that, but we already had our transponder reserved.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
All of a sudden we had this distribution technology, but we had no idea about anything else.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
It was August 16, 1978. Scott and I were driving to the Jersey shore from Connecticut. We were on our way to see my daughter, who was working down there for the summer. It was her birthday; we couldn’t miss it, we had to go. So we had a blue stick-shift Toyota, no air-conditioning. It was going to be a hot day, so we started driving early in the morning because we had to drive at least four hours. And as we approached Waterbury, just east of route 84, traffic just stopped. I bet I could place us within a hundred feet of it if we were driving right now. We were just sitting there in traffic and it was real hot. So we started doing a lot of brainstorming.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
Putting the two of us in a car was a sure recipe that all we were going to talk about was the business and what we were going to do with the transponder. We were having arguments, creative arguments, and they got pretty heated. At some point—we were on I-84 in Waterbury—I just got really fed up and turned to my father and said, “I don’t care what you do with it, show football all weekend, see if I care.” And for the first time all morning he didn’t yell back at me. He said, “That’s it! Not football, but sports!”
From that moment on for the rest of the day I was scribbling notes on a pad. We showed up at the Jersey shore but ignored my sister on her birthday. We were coming up with all kinds of ideas, estimating cable penetration, and trying to figure out how many people we would need. We talked about the cable subscribers and what kind of deal we could offer them. We talked about coming up with programming, and that we’d have one anchor sportscaster and then hire a bunch of other people for next to nothing. I probably filled every piece of paper on that pad. That night we couldn’t even get to sleep.