Kindred Spirits
This isn’t a Jim Hiller Blog.
Jim and I are friends, but our lives have been quite antithetical. I’m peeking over the hill, sneaking up to 80 years on this planet, and my experience in grocery management and marketing—what little there is—comes from being the CEO and major shareholder of a small national company that made and marketed household cleaning products. I sold the company a long time ago, and I don’t think Hiller’s was one of our customers. I didn’t know him in those days, anyhow.
But, let me share a few of my adventures with you. While at Bosse High School in Evansville, Indiana, I won a few state-wide public speaking contests, and this new-fame got me an offer from a radio station for a job as a part-time announcer. Years later while announcing and introducing a political program, I came to the attention of one of the participants—U. S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. After the show, the Senator said “If you will put out that cigarette, young man, I would like to ask you a question.” Panic-stricken, I grabbed for an ash tray. The Senator asked me what I would like to do when I finally left this small station in this small town. Very nervously I told him that I would like to go to New York and work for The Voice of America. He replied with a very derogatory remark about this section of the United States Department of State, and then, much to my surprise, gave me a card after he boldly printed the name “Mary” on it. The Senator had a very dominating voice; he used it to tell me to phone Mary, his secretary in Washington.
Less than six months later my wife and I were driving to New York City to accept the position as the first ever 21-year-old program producer at The Voice of America. If you are old enough to remember Senator Joseph McCarthy and his constant and persistent battle with the State Department, it is not too difficult to understand that many of my co-workers and supervisors at the Voice believed that I was his “spy,” although, of course, they never called me that to my face. I understood their unspoken suspicion, and I was fearful of losing my first BIG job. I made one good friend there, Telly Savalas, and I told him of my fear. Telly said that there was a job vacancy at ABC radio. The position was Night Program Manager at their studios in Rockefeller Center. Since the Voice job was in the morning and early afternoon, he suggested that I attempt to get the ABC night job and work them both, that way I would be covered if the suspicious State Department managers fired me. I got the job.
(Writing this brings back a lot of memories, especially about my friend—now departed—Telly Savalas. Telly spoke perfect Greek and was an on-the-air voice at the Voice. He left the Voice and became a TV star with his Kojak series and followed it with a few movies. Once he took me to one of his favorite bars in NYC. He told me, the naïve Hoosier kid, that it was time to learn about the big city. We were on bar stools when an absolutely gorgeous red head walked up and greeted Telly. Telly told her to show his friend (me) what she has. With both hands she stripped off her blouse and boobly bra-less giggled at me. I damn near fainted. She began really laughing then, refastened her blouse and walked away. Her profession was obvious, but Telly told me about it anyway.)
For about a year in the early 1950’s I worked the two jobs, 16 hours a day. That is, until the famous newsman Edward R. Murrow, and a few members of the United States Senate began questioning the veracity of Senator McCarthy’s claims that the State Department was run by communists and communist sympathizers. Slowly the Senator’s influence and reputation began to slip away. And it wasn’t long after when the power group at the Voice of America thought it would be safe to terminate his young spy—me. Of course, they never accused me of being one . . . in fact, it all happened so many years ago that I don’t remember the excuse they gave me, but I wasn’t his spy. I never spoke with Senator McCarthy, his secretary or any of his staff after that day in Evansville when he told me to put out my cigarette. And I stopped smoking.
It was Jimmy’s blog on cigarettes that brought this all back . . . youthful adventures I had almost forgotten. Maybe, just maybe, if you can’t buy your cigarettes where you buy your groceries, you might stop too. You could live as long as I have.
