Bill Tush

Sure enough the person I see when I get off the elevator is Ted.  “Bill,” he says, “What are you up to?”   “Just returning this jar, it belongs to you.”  I know he doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about but we have had conversations like that for forty years.

I then go into Suzan Tatum’s office.  Suzan is also a friend of forty years and one of Ted’s two assistants.   She is looking over Ted’s schedule and mentions that he is going over to Turner Studios to do Q&A with employees.  What the occasion was I don’t know.  I said, “I would like to go to that.”  Suzan says she would too and since we are from the original days it could be fun.

Wait, I’m wearing a shirt and jeans hardly an outfit for a company event.  I mean I would be going with the former Chairman and he was nicely dressed.  Here goes the mad dash to get an outfit.  Ted’s number one lady, Debbie is calling around for a sport coat.  She looks in Ted’s office closet, no luck.  Miss Lillian, his sweet housekeeper who works upstairs in the Penthouse saves the day. She goes up and gets me one of his blue blazers.  That’s all he has by the way, a hundred blue blazers.  Debbie finds me a tie.  Now here I am dressed and ready to go.

Suzan and I are going to ride with two other ladies in their black Lexus.  Ted is in a black SUV.  His driver Carol says to follow her.  She puts on the four way flashers and I tell the girl driving the car we are in to put on hers and we can look like a motorcade.  She does and there we are heading to Turner where we are whisked in past the guard shack and into the building with security surrounding us.

Into the green room we go, on the way I’m being said hello to any number of folks that are from the old days.  Most I recognize.  A camera crew is walking backwards following Ted’s every move.  We do a tour of the studios.  I said to Ted, “It’s come a long way from what we had?”  He says, “Empty rooms, you can’t do ideas and programming in empty rooms.”  Later on he said to me, we did a lot more in the studio we had.  He was right, all those empty rooms and nothing going on.

Well, he does his sit down video-taped interview in front of a hundred or so employees.  There were no questions and answers.  We all went to lunch in the TBS cafeteria.  I told Ted he has to pick out what he wanted.  I pointed to the pizza and sandwiches then told him that you have to pay over there at the cashier stations.  Some P.R. people jumped in and picked up the tab. 

Many of the Turner bigwigs came over to me to say hello.  They were my best pals and fans.  Ya, when I’m standing there with Ted!  When I’m there with my cup and pencils they completely ignore me.

Typical Ted, after about fifteen minutes of sitting around making small talk off we go.  Back into our mini-motorcade and back to the office.  He never did notice I was wearing his coat and tie I’m sure he was more concerned about the jar I brought back.

It was a very unexpected event and that’s what makes it all fun.  As they say you couldn’t have planned it that way.