A Sales Call to Remember

Selling is like shaving: if you don't do it every day, you're a bum ...

So said the sign on the wall at the New Jersey Regional Sales Office for Ampex Corporation, my employer in the late 1970s.

Ampex, a great American company, employed very few bums, as I remember it.

The founder of the company, a Russian immigrant named Alexander M. Poniatoff, was certainly no bum. Using his initials, AMP, he added the suffix EX, for “excellence,” and started a small company that initially supplied aircraft motors for our military during WW II.

During the war, an American GI named Jack Mullin was stationed in London, assigned to the Signal Corps. He became very experienced with sound recording; he would monitor German propaganda broadcasts during the day and, for entertainment, would listen to their classical music stations at night. He became fascinated by the superb quality of their recorded radio broadcasts. The Germans must have some kind of outstanding new audio recorder, he imagined.

Immediately after the war ended, Major Mullin and a Lt. Spickelmeyer were sent over to Germany to investigate reports that the Germans had been experimenting with high-frequency energy as a means of jamming airplane engines in flight.

Near Frankfurt, Germany, they came upon the studio from which the recorded broadcasts originated and discovered a German audio reel-to-reel tape recorder called the Magnetophon.

Mullin disassembled the Magnetophon and, along with some reels of tape, packed the parts up into 18 cartons and sent them back home to San Francisco as war memorabilia.

When he returned home in January 1946, he reassembled the Magnetophon and approached Ampex with this unique German recorder.

With the war now over, Poniatoff needed to look at a new product line, and the Magnetophon, he believed, had tremendous potential. Using Mullin’s war souvenir as a model, together they created the Ampex Model 200, and the first US-made magnetic tape reel-to-reel audio recorder was born.

Ten years later, in the spring of 1956, Charlie Ginsburg, also of Ampex, nearly caused a riot at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters in Chicago. Ginsburg made some opening remarks, pulled back a curtain to reveal a massive tape recorder (Ampex VRX-1000), and then instantly, to the astonishment of the engineers in the audience, played back the sound and, more importantly, the video of his just-delivered remarks. From that day forward, Ginsburg was forever known as the father of video.

In 1976, Ampex developed a new 1” Video Tape Recorder (VTR), which became the standard in the professional and broadcast industry. Most of the programs you watched on television during the late ’70s and early ’80s were likely broadcast using an Ampex VPR-2 Type C video tape recorder, especially if the programs were on ABC. In 1977, ABC had given Ampex an order for 100 machines, at a price tag of about 75,000 dollars each. Adjusting for inflation, that 7.5 million dollar order would easily be the equivalent of a 20 million dollar order today.
But I was only a pitiful, lowly salesman for the magnetic tape division, and brown-tape was often thought of as the red-haired stepchild of this prominent, innovative American corporation. Added to that, Ampex videotape was of very poor quality, to put it quite mildly.

My sales territory was the “Garden State” of New Jersey—also the brunt of jokes and usually considered the red-haired (polluted) stepchild, especially when compared to our big brother: the great “Empire State” of New York.
There were only a few UHF television stations in New Jersey in the late ’70s. We did have quite a few corporate video facilities within what was called the Bell System, or Ma Bell, and a lot of pharmaceutical companies with internal video studios, like Hoffman-La Roche, Schering-Plough, Johnson and Johnson, and Merck.
But it was tough selling them videotape, since our product wasn’t very good.

Nonetheless, I was a hard-working, persistent little bugger; I didn’t want to be like the bum on the sign, who didn’t shave and didn’t sell. Besides, I really needed the money. So I’d be sure to put on a suit and tie, and usually I could fake my way into accounts by just saying I was from Ampex, conveniently leaving out the magnetic tape division part, of course. This would at least get me through the front door.

Conversely, our audiotape was considered an excellent product and widely accepted.

Our only competition in audio was 3M (Scotch), and we were usually the preferred choice of professional recording studios.

So selling audiotape was fun, profitable and I didn’t have to use tricks to get in, and perhaps I'd get to see a celebrity or two at the studios.

It was a beautiful Thursday afternoon back in late October, 1979. I thought I’d take a ride and visit a recording studio in a town called Long Branch, NJ, in what is generally referred to as Jersey Shore, not all that far from where Bruce Springsteen makes his home today.

The studio I was going to see was named GT Recording, and the engineer a young man by the name of Tom Elliott. The name GT, I suspected, meant cool, sleek, like the sexy GTO car of the 1960s. Like most of the recording studios in New Jersey then and now, they are often part of the owner’s home.

I arrived at the studio mid-afternoon and without an appointment. Tom wasn’t at home, but a very nice gentleman welcomed me in—something I craved, after having to fake my in to so many places. He shook my hand and said, “Hi, I'm George—Tom’s father.” George seemed happy to have a visitor, especially from a respected company like Ampex.

“Oh, so the GT stands for George and Tom,” I said, to break the ice. Not a great opening line, but better than talking about the weather. (I guess my opening lines were never very good)

There was no session going at the time, and George had been fiddling around with some wires in a drop ceiling, as I remember it. We chatted a bit and he complained about how he needed to get his studio completed by December 7th, when a crew from the local newspaper was coming to take some pictures.

I just nodded politely and said nothing.

A few seconds passed, then he said, seeming surprised at my silence, “Don’t you know what December 7th is?” he asked.

I had to think for a moment...

“You mean Pearl Harbor day?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I was the one who first noticed the planes, just before the attack.”

His name was Private George E. Elliott, Jr., and as a 23-year-old novice army radio operator with less than three months’ experience, at precisely 7:02 a.m. on December 7, 1941, in Opana Radar Station in Kawailoa on the Island of Oahu, Elliott, along with his colleague, Private Joseph L. Lockard, saw something unusual on a new technology known as radar.

What Elliott saw on his 5” oscilloscope was a blizzard of vertical white upward blips which, unbeknownst to him, was a squadron of Japanese planes, 132 miles northeast of the Hawaiian Islands.

Less than one hour later, those same planes would attack an American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and serve as the catalyst for the United States’ entry into WW II.

George Elliott went on to recount to me firsthand the story that I would never forget.

At 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 6th, Elliott and Lockard had been ordered to relieve Privates Hodges and Lawrence, who had been given a 24-hour pass. Their assignment was to operate the Radar Unit from 4:00 p.m. Saturday until 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 7th. Their orders were to report all activity to the information center at Fort Shafter, about 50 miles away, on the south shore of the island of Oahu.

Although their shift had ended on Sunday at 7:00 a.m., Elliott and Lockard were waiting for Hodges and Lawrence to relieve them.

There was no air traffic in the early morning hours of December 7th, so at 6:54 a.m., Elliott was advised it was OK to shut down the radar unit: Privates Hodges and Lawrence were on their way back to relieve them.

Suddenly, at 7:02 a.m., the large blip on the oscilloscope appeared.

Elliott, as he described it to me, was new to the technology, but sensed something was wrong.

He expressed his concern to Private Lockard who, according to Elliott, initially dismissed it as US planes coming back from California.

It couldn’t be, Elliott believed, since they were coming in from the north.

So Elliott called in his concerns to an answering service, and another Private, Joseph McDonald, took his call. McDonald told Elliott that everyone was at breakfast. Excited and nervous, Elliott relayed to McDonald what he had seen, and asked him to get someone to call them back as soon as possible.

At 07:20, a Lieutenant Kermit Tyler c alled back, and it was Joseph Lockard who picked up the phone. (My emphasis added.)

Although a pilot, Tyler had almost no experience with radar and assumed it was a flight of American planes that were due in that morning. Despite Elliott’s, and now Lockard’s, concerns that the radar showed a much larger number of aircraft coming in from the northeast, Lt. Tyler insisted they not worry about it. Lt. Tyler went back and finished his breakfast.

Elliott and Lockard continued to monitor the aircraft until they were approximately 20 miles from the Oahu, when they suddenly vanished from their radar. The attacking planes had disappeared behind the mountains at precisely 7:39 a.m.

Perhaps it was nothing after all, thought Elliott.

A few minutes later, Hodges and Lawrence returned, and so it was now off to breakfast for Elliott and Lockard as well.

On their way back to base, Elliott and Lockard saw a group of soldiers staring up at the sky, and were informed that Pearl Harbor was under attack.

“Lockard and I just I stared at each other,” stated Elliott.

The attack on Pearl Harbor began at precisely 7:53 a.m. Hawaiian time, on December 7, 1941.

On hearing the news that the attack on Pearl Harbor had been a success, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was reported to have said: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant.”

He was right. Less than 24 hours later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would appear before a Joint Session of Congress and declare, “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.”

Roosevelt went on and asked:

…that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire." (Click here: Requires RealPlayer.)

Approximately 2,400 Americans, mostly military, were killed, and about 1,200 wounded on the morning of December 7, 1941. Eighteen ships were sunk, but the three main aircraft carriers of the Pacific fleet were out at sea and were spared.

I asked Elliott if he ever lies awake at night, wondering if, had he been more persistent, he could possibly have prevented the attack and thereby single-handedly changed world history.

“No, I think the events would have played out just the same,” he said.

He went on to tell me that the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! was the most accurate of any of the films made about the attack. Here is a brief clip of how Hollywood portrayed Elliott and Lockard in that movie (requires Windows Media).
And this is also the real George Elliott in the documentary A World at War (requires Windows Media).

A member of the “Greatest Generation,” George Elliot, I learned, passed away on December 23, 2003 after a long illness.

For all Americans, December 7th was most assuredly “a day which will live in infamy” and for me, the day I made that sales call to GT Recording is one that I’ll always remember—From Here to Eternity.