BARR SHEETS, THE fellow who had hired me as an usher, had a brother by the name of Dale Sheets, who to this day is one of my oldest and dearest friends. Dale is a few years younger than me, and, at that time, he was an assistant head usher making about $35 a week, as compared to being a regular usher who was taking home about $15 a week. Dale soon moved up and became the film buyer for KTTV, and he wanted me to get into television with him. At that time, I really wasn’t that interested in television. Radio was still on my mind and I felt television was too new and not yet stable enough. I had still not finished school, but he suggested I take a semester off and see if I liked it. I took him up on his offer.
Dale Sheets, friend, writes:
“After I left Times Mirror, I went to work for KTTV in Los Angeles. At that time it was owned by the Times Mirror and CBS. One day I received a call from Bob asking if I knew of any openings at the station. A sales job was open. He applied again and he got the job. That was Bob’s first position in television broadcasting—at $37.50 per week. From there, as we all know, he became the best in the broadcasting business, and it couldn’t have happened to a better human being. My wife Joan and I consider Bob and Marjie to be our best friends, and that friendship has lasted over 60 years.”
As soon as I set foot in the world of television, I loved it. It was for me and I instantly knew it. I soon interviewed again for the position of Assistant Service Manager and got the job. When I started at KTTV, a guy by the name of Val Conte had just been promoted to Sales Service Manager and I would be working with Val at a starting salary of $55 per week. Ironically, Val’s salary was $65 and the secretary’s was $75. How was this even possible? I made a note to myself that there was something definitely not right with this picture. My thought was that I better stay at this job for only a short time and move on fast. What kind of place is this if the secretary is making more money than the boss?
Working at KTTV at the time were account executives Jim Aubrey, Bob Wood, Dick O’Leary, Chuck Young and Les Norins. All of these guys were older than me. I was about twenty-four, and they were all around twenty-nine to thirty-one and making a lot of money. The natural progression was for Val to become a salesman and for me to take his spot, but I could quickly see that Val really liked his sales service job and had no intention of moving on to another position. It seemed the only way my career was going to move forward was for me to go around Val, or over him, or to somehow get miraculously promoted.
The sales manager was Bill Whiting and someone I hardly ever saw during the work week. I wasn’t even making $3,000 a year, and the sales guys were making somewhere between $20,000 to $30,000 a year. I was hungry and I wanted a job with a salary like that. In fact, it seemed that everyone in the world would like to have one of those jobs. On the weekends I was selling cars to make ends meet, but I was really focused on my sales career and how to move up the ladder.
What I really wanted was Jim Aubrey’s job. The rumor going around was that Jim would be leaving soon for the CBS sales manager’s job, so I knew I had to make some kind of move and fast. Of course, my chance of landing Jim’s job was like somebody suddenly saying, “I want to be the coach of the Oakland Raiders.” It was never going to happen. At least, that was what I believed at the time.