IN THE DOLDRUMS
“For a short while I was in the doldrums trying to get something going.”
I have stated that I’ve have always been self-employed, and that I’ve never had a job working for someone else. Well, that is true for nearly all of my life but once, for close to a year, I did have a full time job working as the Director of Special Events for Seattle’s morning newspaper, The Post Intelligencer. My job, under the PI’s aegis, was to secure contract rights to market and promote public events such as the Seattle Home Show, Auto Show, Sports and Recreation Show, etc. The PI, of course, would be the exclusive print media sponsor. I was given a comfortable private office and a full time secretary; and I might have kept the job if Ric Trent, the PI executive who hired me had stayed with the paper. It was Ric’s and my grand strategy to go forward with our new business plan. I worked at the PI for nearly a year and was then hired as general manager of a new Seattle sports franchise, a professional volleyball team, The Seattle Smashers.
It was a new venture to market professional volleyball on the west coast, and it didn’t fly. The Seattle franchise was undercapitalized and the concept of watching volleyball as yet another pastime for sports buffs was ill-fated as well. I flew here and there, met with other franchise owners, wrote a management plan and was beginning to pull it all together but it wasn’t long before the folks in Seattle ran out of money and my contract was terminated.
