It was an exciting journey going from lifeguarding to journalism, then up to nosebleed executive levels at not one, but two major television networks, then on to launching my own international, award-winning PR firm, TransMedia Group.
After setting up headquarters in The Big Apple, I would land as my first client what was then in 1981 the largest company in America, AT&T. The Federal Government was trying to force Ma Bell to divest its operating companies, charging it was a monopoly. And who did she turn to for help? Yours truly!
I was honored to serve and while coaching senior executives how to respond to federal allegations I arranged back in the early 1980s the first picture-perfect takeoff of AT&T’s new visual teleconferencing network.
Academy Award Winning PR?
I would get then Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences President Fay Kanin to make the inaugural call from LA to simultaneous news conferences in New York, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., all linked by satellite so everyone could see everyone else. How novel was that? Back then!
The kickoff was sensational. Pictures were clear. The service was a bust. Apparently then few companies wanted Picture Phone Meeting Service. Years later, a different, more addictive version would Zoom onto everyone’s laptop globally. Talk about being ahead of your time, back then I was lugging around one of the first brick-size cell phones. Definitely ahead, but almost blew it all.
Before all that, something occurred that would put all my upcoming accomplishments, my memorable PR achievements, publicity breakthroughs in jeopardy as if they never happened. Why did this epic journey have to have such a traumatically scary start, a near death experience?
Why did all these breaks that were to come in business have to start with a break that nearly grounded me for life or put me underground forever?
Breaking News!
Why did it have to happen before the climactic highlights of my career would unfold, beginning with my becoming Vice President, Assistant of to the President of NBC, who was then the TV programming genius Fred Silverman. Fred would take me, only me, with him from ABC. Together we jumped ship over to 30 Rock where he would take the reins as CEO of NBC with me as his Sancho Panza sidekick. My name would bounce onto the front-page of The Wall Street Journal.
Why did it have to happen before speeches I would write for the Chaiman of Kellogg Company would be published in The New York Times during a tense time when government tried to break up the three major cereal companies, charging they were an oligopoly. In speeches I would write for then Kellogg’s CEO Bill LaMothe, I would ask rhetorically why they wanted to break apart poor Tony the Tiger. But now here I was, before my illustrious career could even take off, with a key part of me broken, my neck!
Yet maybe it was the event that started me on this episodic zigzag course leading to my creating the Planetary Lifeguard™ to blow the whistle on what’s causing today such havoc worldwide and killing so many poor Tony-the-Tiger souls–climate change.
Think Before You Dive
First, there’s a lesson here. When diving into an ocean, please be careful. Beware that lurking beneath seductive surfaces may be such a deadly menace as a sandbar. This one masquerading, pernicious, seditious sandbar came out of nowhere to attack me, or was it me who attacked it when I carelessly dove.
Those beguiling ocean waves can sparkle with fun and adventure and look so inviting yet be dangerously deceptive and take you within an inch of paralysis from your neck down or fatally like you’re a Boeing gone bats. So, I found this out the hard way! Clunk!
It was a day my arrogant carelessness resulted in my fracturing and dislocating my fifth and sixth cervical vertebra. When? Who in his right mind would want to remember such a horrendous date! Why? To celebrate Happy Broken Neck Day?
Careless Cool Off
After work one sultry hot summer day in Atlantic City, NJ, I decided to take my lifeboat out to go for a cool swim. I was a lifeguard in the resort then known as “The World’s Playground” where I was a kid growing up not far from the blue Monopoly properties, Boardwalk and Park Place, the real ones.
It was then a magical resort where my dad conducted his orchestra on Garden Pier on weekends and played his sweet violin weeknights at the Traymore Hotel, that one day I would watch blown apart, broken into tiny pieces and carted away. That classic hotel bordering the Boardwalk hit a sandbar called obsolescence.
Own those two blockbuster blue properties, Boardwalk and Park Place, and you would bankrupt anybody who landed on them, making your gamer life all peaches and cream!
I loved to dive into that ocean from my lifeboat for just as the famous song’s lyrics, there where the saltwater air brings out a lady’s charm, it also brought out the showoff in me . . . in enchantic romantic Atlantic City.
Tarzan Applauds
It was an exquisitely perfect Johnny Weissmuller dive that would have made my heroic Tarzan proud, yet unbeknownst to me were merely a couple feet of water covering something ominously awaiting . . . my head. The sultry but sneaky sandbar greeted it like a sledgehammer.
Somehow, I was able to make it back to the lifeboat holding up my head with my two hands to relieve excruciating pain.
When the boat finally drifted ashore, an attractive young lady on the beach who said she was a physical therapist offered to give my neck a twist to relieve what she surmised was a kink needing loosening. Thinking I’d better get a second opinion as this felt more like a clobber than a kink, I managed to walk back to the lifeguard tent with my hands still holding my head up so it wouldn’t fall off.
From there my dear college buddy Glenn Kray who loved beach, books and horses took me in his car to the emergency room at Atlantic City Hospital where I was told to sit down in the waiting room as they were very busy, and it might be a while before a doctor could see me.
Electric Chair Cometh
Not wanting to be any more of a pain in the neck than I was feeling, I sat waiting patiently as I could.
Then a serious looking intern came out pushing a wheelchair toward me that looked more like an electric chair. He told me to take a seat, which I managed uncomfortably to do, then whisked me to the X-ray room to receive my sentence.
After returning to the waiting room, Glenn and I sat wondering what I might have done to myself when suddenly two anxiously looking doctors rushed out and came over to me to give the news I was dreading.
“Son, sorry to tell you, but you have fractured and dislocated your fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. You’ll have to be admitted. You may need immediate surgery.”
OMG . . . Happy Birthday!
Ups and Downs
Well, in me a writer would soon be born. It turned out I didn’t need surgery. They drilled holes in my head into which hooks were inserted. I would lie in hospital straight out in a revolving Stryker frame bed for eight interminably long weeks suspended in traction keeping my neck stretched so my vertebra could reunite.
To keep my lungs from filling up with fluid, every few hours with my neck still stretched they would turn me upside down like I was the ham in a ham sandwich. From facing the ceiling, I would go upside down facing the floor, then in a few hours back to facing the ceiling again. And on and on went my revolving life.
While facing the ceiling, through prism glasses I would read books resting on my chest and this is how I read the complete works of George Bernard Shaw and other authors and in the process, developed a love for writing.
I’m so Lucky?
When my parents and my aunts and uncles would come to visit me, I hated to hear them say how “lucky” I was. But for a couple inches, I could have been paralyzed from the neck down. Congratulatory talk like that depressed me.
Somehow lying there in traction for eight interminable weeks, stretched out and being turned over and over like a ham sandwich, I didn’t feel lucky! Grateful, yes. Lucky, no!
Six months later, after donning a series of shrinking body casts, thank God, I recovered completely. And years later, another lifeguard would be born.
Planetary Lifeguard™ would emerge from me to help save a warming world from fracturing and dislocating by educating, enlightening and blowing the whistle on what’s causing such an atmospheric ruckus, climate change, that’s affecting and endangering millions of people worldwide.
So, Happy Birthday Planetary Lifeguard™!