Walter M Windsor - Life Story: Forks in the Road

Forks in the Road: Chapter 11

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

Influential friends in the industry warned me not to get restless unless I went six months without a good new opportunity. But I got antsy in less than half that time. I wrote letters by the dozen. I made phone calls all over the country. I assembled a package of letters of recommendation that was very impressive. My resume was widely distributed. Friends at the networks and national sales organizations were beating the bushes in my behalf. But I was drawing a blank on any serious prospects. I wanted very badly to be wanted, and I made the mistake of jumping too quickly when a job beckoned in Lexington, Kentucky.

I had visited there years before, negotiating with the owners of WLEX. I didn’t get the job at that time, but the owners, Guthrie Bell and Doug Gay, became friends of mine, and we compared notes and enjoyed one another’s company over the ensuing years. The 1967 call, however, came from a man who was in the process of buying WKYT from group operator Taft Broadcasting of Cincinnati. Yes, those Tafts. Garvice Kincaid owned several radio stations, including AM and FM in Lexington, and he was eager to get into television. He invited me to Lexington for an interview.

Danger signs should have fired a warning shot across my bow as Kincaid came across as a peculiar duck. I was going to some pains during the interview to explain what had happened to me in Lubbock.

“Were they Jew boys?” he broke in and asked.

I acknowledged that they were Jewish, whereupon he needed no further validation. It was obvious he was a bigot, but I didn’t let that stop me. He impressed me when he took me to his office and handed me the books for each of the six radio stations. I had so little access to the records at any of my previous companies that this meant a great deal to me. He offered me the position of Executive Vice-President of Bluegrass Broadcast Group, which would put me in charge of AM and FM in Lexington, AM in Louisville, AM in Marathon, Florida, AM and FM in Orlando, and the Channel 27 acquisition in Lexington.

The terms were not as generous as in Lubbock, but I felt the potential was there to be realized through performance. I accepted, and Kincaid, through his bank, his real estate company, and his insurance company, made it possible for me to acquire a lovely large home in Lexington without waiting for the Lubbock house to sell.

I began work while the family remained in Lubbock, trying to sell the house there and awaiting Tony’s graduation from Monterey High School. Billy had graduated from Monterey the year before and was in his freshman year at college, which began at the University of Texas in Austin but soon transferred to Texas Tech in Lubbock. Kincaid showed me the figures for all the stations and asked me to study them and write beside them the figures I was prepared to deliver for the ensuing year. I gave this a lot of thought. If I were too conservative, he would question why he needed me. If I were too ambitious, he would expect me to deliver. I settled on a middle course, representing a worthwhile gain, and I handed him the report. He looked at it, grunted, drew some large and much higher numbers with a red marker on the page and threw it back at me.

“Here’s what I expect you to get. Get it honest if you can, but get it!”

The inclination was to immediately walk away. But I now had two houses, a large new mortgage to his company, and a family set to move. I swallowed my resistance and went to work. I was involved with the closing of the purchase from Taft, having the pleasure of handing over the multi-million dollar check for the cash purchase. I visited each of the stations. Louisville was in bad shape. Marathon didn’t amount to much and badly needed a new tower. Kincaid told me not to bother the Lexington radio stations, that they were well-operated and thriving. In Orlando, I met the local manager, Ron Nickell, who was Kincaid’s son-in-law. He was badly miscast in his job, but I figured that was something I could do nothing about.

Orlando, however, made a tremendous impression on me. I stood on the balcony of my room in what was then the Robert Meyer Hotel and looked out over downtown’s lovely Lake Eola on a balmy May evening, and told myself, “This is the place!” I envisioned Bluegrass acquiring a TV station in Orlando and moving the headquarters there. Walt Disney was getting ready to build his World there, and it looked like truly a land of opportunity.

History repeats itself again. Taft’s manager stayed with that company and moved to one of their larger markets. But there was a sales manager named L. C. Redman, who had been led to anticipate his appointment after the sale as general manager. He didn’t expect to have an Exec V-P looking over his shoulder, yet Kincaid assured me I was to have the true authority at the TV station and Redman, as Station Manager, was really to be my assistant. This made for a very awkward situation.

The takeover occurred, and faced with offers of affiliation from both ABC and CBS (it had been ABC under Taft), I made the recommendation that CBS be chosen. This was difficult as I had many good friends at ABC, some of whom had recommended me highly for the job. But Kincaid was enthralled with the prestige of CBS and made it quite clear that I was a dunce if I did not agree with his choice. My friend, and now my competitor, Guthrie Bell, had told me of some of his problems in dealing with Kincaid in the past, but he did not want to influence my decision on taking the job, so he refrained from filling me in to any great extent on my new employer. Kincaid soon made his true nature quite clear. He held management meetings, always on a Sunday, bringing in managers from far and near to hear him rave and rant in the most obscene terms in criticizing them and their work. I had never met such an uncouth person in my life. Beside Kincaid, Shanbaum and Carp seemed like a couple of Boy Scouts and Hussman looked like a kindly uncle. One of his strange quirks was that he chewed Luden’s menthol cough drops, constantly. He bought boxes of them by the gross. I guess it was for him the equivalent of chain-smoking.

He wanted to build a beautiful new building for the station. He had a plot of land, that was itself worth a small fortune, which he had reserved for this purpose. He instructed me to work on a plan for the building. He had visited a new station in Louisville, WLKY, and was favorably impressed with its installation. He told me to obtain the same architects and get busy. The project began to take shape. He wanted tall white columns, to make it look like Tara in Gone with the Wind as a monument to himself, but every time he was shown a design that incorporated his latest idea, he rejected it. One day, he called me in and asked whether the architects were Jewish. I honestly did not know, but said I would find out. When I reported that one of the two partners was indeed Jewish, he told me to fire them. They were dismissed, and the last I heard from them they were still trying to collect for the work they had performed. The monument was eventually built, long after I departed.

There was one really memorable event during our time in Lexington. Our twentieth wedding anniversary looming on November 29, we decided we would like to celebrate by going back to Hotel Roanoke, where we had spent our wedding night. Accordingly, I made a reservation and requested the same room that we had occupied in 1947. The hotel advised they no longer had the records and could not determine which room we had used, but they were so taken with the idea of our returning that they offered us the bridal suite - and at the same rate as a single room. Needless to say, we enjoyed the substitution, recalling that we could not have afforded the bridal suite twenty years before.

Tony entered the University of Kentucky, where he became one of its greatest basketball fans but fared not so well academically. At one point he decided to join the Navy, but we managed to talk him (and the recruiting officer) out of it.

One day I was in Kincaid’s office when he placed a call to his son-in-law in Orlando. He was livid with anger, and I guess he had some reason to want me to be a witness, because he had me on the extension.

“I’d rather pay you forty thousand a year to be a stud for my daughter than have you (screw) up my radio station!”

Then he fired him, replacing him with a man who had formerly managed for Guthrie at WLEX but who had been ousted in a series of events which involved some financial shenanigans. This was Kincaid’s kind of a guy, so he was sent to Orlando, and I was instructed to leave him alone and let him run it.

About this time, the Lexington radio stations, the ones Kincaid said were so well-operated, ran afoul of the FCC, which investigated some spurious billing practices and set the licenses for a revocation hearing. If WVLK-AM & FM were revoked, it stood to reason all the Bluegrass stations would suffer the same fate. I had seen and heard enough. I began seeking another job. It was well known that if Kincaid found one of his employees looking for another job, he or she would be fired on the spot. So I resorted to a covert plan; I sent out generalized letters under an assumed name and rented a post office box in Cincinnati, regularly driving up there to check the mail. I followed up in person on the few worthwhile leads. One was with the Cincinnati home office of a large group owner. The interview seemed to go well, but just hours afterward Kincaid knew about it, called me in, and my employment was terminated.

After several months, Kincaid’s lawyers managed to get his licenses renewed with a fine and a reprimand, and without Garvice having to testify, which surely would have done him in. He died a few years later. He tried his best to take it all with him, creating a committee of his associates to run the various business interests and keep them from coming under the control of his estranged widow and daughters. This was eventually overturned. I can honestly say that Kincaid was the only person I had ever known that I was glad to see die.