For a 43-week run stretching from mid-1983 to April 1984, the best show in the Jacksonville, Fla., broadcast area wasn't on syndicated radio or network television but, strangely enough, in the pages of a magazine devoted to local TV listings. The publication was a free (now defunct) weekly called Jacksonville Cable TV Magazine, and the 10-month miniseries was an autobiographical column called "By The Way . . .," written by 65-year-old publisher Wilson L. Harrell.
On the face of it, Harrell's "publisher's notebook" was a dubious candidate for media stardom. For one thing, its breathless, first-person prose style often read like a marketing manual crossed with pulp science-fiction. For another, the author himself was not a famous personage in his hometown. Although legendary in certain marketing circles -- not to mention in the archives of Procter & Gamble Co., a company he once taught the true meaning of the word "gamble" -- he was mostly a mystery man to his North Florida neighbors.
What Harrell did have -- and what enthralled his 86,000 readers, week after week -- was superb material, the raw stuff of myth. Country boy, hobo, war hero, entrepreneur, TV producer, mad marketeer, friend of the famous and scourge of the powerful, Harrell had at his fingertips a hundred stories of improbable triumph and at least as many of inglorious defeat. Once those stories started spilling out of him in print, there was about as much chance of stopping them as there was of the author quietly retiring to a tent by a trout stream. Harrell wrote as he has lived: like a man possessed. It was as if the impulse toward autobiography had been there forever, waiting for any available transmission line.
Take, for example, the column dated December 12, 1983. "Last week I gave you Chapter One of the Toasta-Pizza story," began Harrell.
To summarize, Art Linkletter and I had joined forces with The Peavy Co. -- a large and wealthy flour milling company -- to introduce a [frozen] consumer pizza product. . . . We knew that once our test market began that one or more major food companies would "read" our test results. If the results were good, they would proceed to copy the product. In February or March they would be ready to introduce their product at the same time we planned to "roll-out" of the test markets. [We had] to devise a strategy which would allow us to survive against our giant competitors who would be waiting with fangs bared and sharpened claws.
Brainstorming a new product, campaigning to bring it to the marketplace, feeling the cold threat of competitors closing fast from behind -- all were familiar themes to regular Harrell readers. So was the emphasis on "reads" and perceptions, indispensable tools to a master salesman. Even his old buddy Linkletter, no slouch of a shill himself, calls Harrell "the greatest salesman I've ever met," and the Toasta-Pizza saga would not disprove that. Great salesmen love great challenges, and mass-marketing a piece of pizza you could toast at home was surely one of those.
Harrell continued:
Our plan had to be designed to make major competitors think that we were going to do one thing while in fact we planned to do another. Big companies are predictable and meticulously follow standard marketing rules. To be successful, we had to take advantage of our maneuverability, be prepared to do the unexpected, and dare to be different. . . . Let me add that "risk-taking" is the term used when you are successful. If you fail, it's called "stupidity."
And if you write it down, it's called confession. For as Harrell went on to explain, Toasta-Pizza proved to be a marketing miracle -- and a manufacturing disaster. Everything about the campaign mocked conventional wisdom: the November launch, a risky time for any new food product to hit the shelves; the 20-city, nationwide blitz after no test marketing; the use of independent food brokers to do all the hard selling. Despite these long odds, retail enthusiasm for Toasta-Pizza was so great that Harrell's team soon projected their $10-million investment into a $100-million bonanza. Harrell himself loved every minute of it -- especially the accolades he received from stunned competitors.
His moment of glory came and went swiftly, however. Unreported problems at the manufacturing plant delayed product shipments long past the date dictated by scheduled advertising. When the trucks finally did roll, they rolled with 40,000 cases of tiny pizzas so badly mangled that about all a toaster could do kfor them was burn the evidence. While Linkletter fed his grandchildren Toasta-Pizza on network TV, the company's consumer hot line hit meltdown temperature. By the time the smoke cleared, Harrell said in the column, $9 million of Peavy money and a nice hunk of Harrell capital had followed Toasta-Pizza to the bottom of the freezer.
Such a setback might have daunted -- or at least silenced the typewriter of -- a lesser man. Not harrell. Every week his column delivered another tale of personal derring-do. Instead of windy essays on civic issues, he wrote of bribing his way out of Saudi Arabia with a passport full of U.S. money, and of how, in 1976, he blew $1 million in seed money trying to being to the market-place a (no kidding) three-pound shrimp. Opposite movie blurbs and recipes for Betty's Coleslaw, he detailed his close friendships with Hollywood notables Linkletter and Dan Blocker, and his establishment of one of the largest and most profitable food brokerage companies ever to service American military bases worldwide. In the waning weeks of Jacksonville Cable's existence, Harrell even revisited World War II France, where, having been shot down during a suicide run against a Luftwaffe squadron, he was hidden from the Nazis by French Communist Resistance forces. Every day, they buried him alive under their corn crop, his only lifeline a garden hose stuck into his badly charred mouth.
