Chapter 10: Preparations

While the compilation of war materials was ramping up to full swing, it almost came to a screeching halt. It soon became apparent, that I was not generating the capital to realize my ambitions. Despite the enormous wealth Abram had brought to the table, I was spending it faster than I was taking it in. That had to change, and change quickly! I couldn’t wait until after the war started, to get the funding I needed now.

Away from the Compound, the wives were discovering the lack of many modern conveniences.

The young people in school pointed out there was no new music, no television or movies, no Teen Beat or Seventeen magazines or their equivalent. In short, a little entertainment that had been a part of their everyday lives.

Hell, more problems. They seemed rather non-urgent at that, while I required capital to keep building.

I knew we were planning a big show in the upcoming Expositions. But without content, what good would they be? Even I realized that unless something was entertaining on the radio, I wouldn’t listen to it. It would just sit there, doing nothing.

Then an old historical photo came to mind of a family all gathered around their... radio! They were listening to some program. Those radio broadcasts were a business, generating profits in a big way, plus they had other advantages other than a marketing tool, and news outlet. From radio, it was just a small step to television.

The Depression Era was a time when America was starving for entertainment. In many cases, it didn’t even have to be good, and people would still listen.

There were a few broadcasting networks already out there. With nothing prerecorded, and broadcasts being live, they couldn’t afford to be on more than a few hours. What could I offer that would draw the public to my network? Digital sound, for one. Sound recording was still in its infancy, anyone from my time could attest to just how bad those early records were. Just as Digital sound had nearly killed vinyl recordings, I could do the same with radio, followed by so-called experimental television. To that end I had my people gather those that were already involved with it.

But the key to it all was providing content people wanted to hear and see. I had content in spades, just one problem with it. It was primarily from late 20th and early 21st century. I couldn’t use it! Or could I?

However, I did have the means to record both the video and audio of any program that would let me do so. Would the radios of the time play digital sound? A quick test showed they could. However, it didn’t sound any better over those old sets, than the analog recordings. Okay, build and sell radios that used FM, AM and for digital modulation schemes. That wasn’t a problem, I could make them cheaply, but would they sell?

It would be a crapshoot, but I was going to go for it. I got broadcasting licenses for San Francisco and Los Angeles and sent my people out to record everything they could for our new stations.

For print media, I found I didn’t need to start a paper as the Family already had interests in several. I gathered it was more to control what was reported about them, than with any real interest in anything else. Still, it was a money-making opportunity. It was also a short step from the newspapers to printing those magazines the younger people had been asking about. I even had some of those kids running them and making the editorial decisions on content. They were being overseen by Teachers that wouldn’t let them get too carried away.

In those times, kids didn’t have a lot of disposable income. So, what was offered, was aimed at what they could afford.

Starting a broadcast network had its problems, but we soon overcame them and were offering 24/7 content. Other broadcasters thought we were crazy, offering live shows twenty-hours a day. They didn’t know that not all the content was live! Due to that fact, we had less blow out from dead air, as fewer things went wrong.

We had to fit what we had to that. Announcing that we would soon be offering a new clearer sound for radio, we started placing ads for the new radios at “introductory bargain prices.” Upon beginning those broadcasts, the radios began selling like hot cakes. As more people started buying those sets, word of mouth took over. When the sound and quality programming became known, it took off like a skyrocket. We became a household word, literally overnight, and not a moment too soon. We were quickly swamped with orders, and with that, we could increase the prices. More importantly, we started selling premium-priced advertising time slots. It wasn’t long before we were becoming the preferred listening medium, by default advertising.

Ads meant dollars. Of course, with advertising washing machines, there was the soap, and with them came the ‘Soap Operas.’ Not being slow, we were manufacturing both, and one led into the other. Creating new brands, and promoting them, we introduced - one after another - those things that the wives had said they so dearly wanted from our own timeline. In short, an entire range of domestic household appliances and devices.

It didn’t take long to line up advertisers, and with our growing listener base. We soon had more advertisers and could command better pricing for ad placements. Broadcasting more hours of the day, meant we had more hours to sell. It was all hitting full stride as the deadline of the many of the National Expositions loomed closer.

We needed our own brands to be ready! To that end, we called for all the appliances that had been stored at the Compound to be shipped over to us. We would use the Expositions to display them.

Yes, you could say we were cheating, but desperate times called for drastic measures. We went into the small and large home appliance business. We bought into a few brand names that were doing well - Kenmore, Whirlpool, etc. - and introduced our modern appliances, soon taking over the companies, and the brands. Expanding quickly, we built or expanded the factories, all the while plugging our own product on our private broadcasting stations. (We did some rather creative bookkeeping, forming LLC’s to keep the IRS off our back.) We opened the greater marketing hubs: New York, Chicago, and the greater east coast cities. Ever expanding. We were right on time when the many Expositions opened throughout the country.

That was where we introduced television, and not the primitive sets of the day, either. Though, for our part, they were not the best we could offer. They were tried and true, and so would be relatively easy to reproduce without taxing the production of more demanding devices. We couldn’t afford to appear too far ahead.

To make a higher impact, we had gotten different Drinking Establishments and the finer Hotels to place our sets. Maybe creating the first sports bars ... Starting early on Jan 25 we televised the fights of that day with the highlight being the Joe Louis vs. John Henry Lewis fight for the heavyweight boxing title. It was a shame that that fight only lasted a few seconds, but we had made our point. Other sporting events followed.

On Feb. 18, Golden Gate International Exposition opened on Treasure Island, and we were on hand to televise, live, the opening ceremonies. We were in full color, as we were not going to take any half measures. We kept up a daily appearance, with our display booth directly across from RCA. It was to become a bitter feud. With somewhat disastrous results for RCA. I didn’t take any pity on them, they had been formed as a Quasi-monopoly by a group of influential industrialists and military for the sole purpose stopping competition. They had success with that on my own timeline. However, I couldn’t wait while they stumbled along stealing another people’s work and trying to figure out how it worked. While patenting it as theirs.

I had my people seek out as much as I could those inventors that had done the original work, lumping them together. Telling them whatever they came up with was theirs, all I wanted was results, and the sooner, the better.

Later that month, continuing on with live televised events, we showed live Lou Thesz versus Everett Marshall in St Louis, as he won the National Wrestling Association World Heavyweight Championship, winning the world heavyweight title. We got more orders from other Bars and Hotels. Greatly infuriating David Sarnoff.

RCA closely identified with the leadership of David Sarnoff, who was general manager at its founding, became company president in 1930, and remained active, as chairman of the board. Named a Reserve Brigadier General of the Signal Corps in 1945, Sarnoff after that was widely known as “The General.” Even before that, he ran the company as it was initially conceived as a Quasi-monopoly.

Among our other activities, we were instrumental in having Glamour magazine begin publication March.

Later in March, we were there to televise NHL record 10 goals in 1 period-NY Rangers (7), NY Americans (3) & a record 26 points in the 3rd period.

It all went on with us broadcasting for more hours than anyone else.

David Sarnoff though RCA tried to shut us down, getting the fledgling FCC to pass regulations that were for the most part bogus. Fighting back, we nearly had them shut down, for not being able to abide by the rules they had put in place.

However, there was nothing to stop us from appearing to leapfrog ahead quickly. People were prepared to be amazed, and amaze them we did. I can tell you we didn’t make many friends with our competitors. I felt somewhat bad about that. They, after all, had done the pioneering work in their time. I made it easy for them to buy licenses to build our products under their own names. Actually, that worked out very well for us. The licenses made us more profit than the manufacturing, and marketing, and selling the items would have; freeing us up to move in other directions. At the same time, while they didn’t know it, were paying us to advertise their products.

Speaking of which, while I was not a big fan of Fast Food, the rest of the nation didn’t share my disdain. We made MacDonald’s look like pikers in terms of early expansion, and that was not the only fast food line we went after.

You would have loved it! Instead of the five + dollar burger, we were selling a plain burger for a dime, and a cheeseburger for 15 cents, a whole meal for less than a quarter: burger fries and a Pepsi or shake and still making a hell of a profit.

We started out by selling Pepsi soft drinks. Of course, Coca-Cola saw this and wanted in. They tried to make a deal on their terms that we rejected, counter-offering they would become our exclusive soft drink company for all our restaurants for a 10% share of their business. They came back with an offer of 1%, we counted again saying 5%, and when they balked, I picked up the phone and started dialing Pepsi to make them the same deal. Pepsi offered 2% over the phone. Coke offered 3%, Pepsi came back with 4%. Coke witnessing everyone that bought a burger also purchased a PEPSI, clearly didn’t like the idea. They must have seen our aggressive franchising approach as well. Coke finally offed 4.5%. It was too much for Pepsi.

It held true for all the fast food lines. Needless to say, they were a big hit at the Expos, and every fair we took them to. We introduced franchises for those, and then turned around and sold them promotional advertising on TV, radio, and newspapers at a discount.

I actually liked Pepsi more and started a whole new chain of Burger restaurants, that would sell Pepsi, I even broke down and tried one, judging them so-so. After all, when you have a chef of Cook’s caliber, most everything seems to pale in comparison.

I was glad I had listened to the wives of my researchers and the kids. It convinced me, and many of the others as well that there were thousands of modern twenty-first-century domestic products that were worth introducing. They turned out to change the course of the war more than the tanks did.

To that end, we created retro looking ... to us ... of the twenty-first-century prototypes - well not prototypes but copies - of the Analog looking devices with digital age components, from clocks, radios, black and white televisions, telephones, microwave ovens, induction stovetops, washing machines and frost-free refrigerators. There were countless others as well that I will not take up time cataloging.

In the west, we were able to create the first modern supermarkets and Malls. Just more places to sell our goods.

It was, in many ways, illuminating as to how many peacetime products could be converted to wartime applications. A glaring one was the microwave oven. I believe the story arose from a man observing how radar waves seemed to heat nearby objects. For us, we found we could use the same factory to produce both large and small Radar units, plus our microwave ovens.

The supermarkets gave us an outlet for canned goods, and other convenient items, justifying the costs of building canneries that would feed us in the long haul of being cut-off by the Japanese when the war came. To top it all off, we were putting people to work in a big way!

All this helped when I finally went to seek the ear of President Roosevelt. We had missed a great opportunity when RCA televised FDR at the opening of the New York World’s Fair. We covered it and recorded it, but RCA got the credit for it. It didn’t stop us from making our own pitch to him.

I had to be careful, as the man was no fool. We talked about his New Deal and how it was working and not. Then I discreetly asked about Franklin’s paralytic illness. He didn’t want to talk about it. It was not widely known that he was paralyzed from the hips down. He didn’t want it to make him appear weak. I replied that a weakness of the body is not a weakness of the mind or soul. That if I was allowed to, I might be of some small aid, in at least in the lessening the appearance of a weak body.

Adam’s scan of Roosevelt’s body showed the braces I had brought with me would fit. (I had to thank the little man for creating those ‘glasses’ I was wearing that had made it possible.) I had Nick bring them and the therapist in. Roosevelt at first was hesitant and skeptical, but he had been looking for a way to walk for years, and that overcame his reservations.

Upon showing them to him, just the fact they were much lighter than any brace he’d previously seen, made him agreeable. He wanted to try them on at once. Without being powered up, they were much the same as his old braces, but far lighter and easier to manage. That alone might have earned me his undying gratitude. Then the therapist checking for the best locations for the sensors placed them and turned the powered on.

The therapist asked him to stand, and when Roosevelt hesitated, the therapist asked, “How are we going to learn if they work or not if you don’t try them?”

So, with just a little assistance from the therapist, Roosevelt stood ... the expression of joy that it had been so much easier was easy to read on his face. (I had to admit that the little man hadn’t failed me there as well.)

“Okay, let’s try taking a step.”

Roosevelt did so, and again he found it much easier. You could easily see the look on his face, ‘How?’

The therapist explained that with therapy he should be learning to take steps unaided. He could be without the need for a cane or other assistance of a person beside him in a month or so, depending on the amount of work he was willing to put into it.

Roosevelt looked at the man as if he was crazy as he said, “What do you mean, ‘the amount of work I’m willing to put into it?’ Young man, I’ve been working on trying to walk for years with little effect. Now you have me standing in minutes, and saying that in a few months I could be taking unassisted steps! Of course, I’m willing to put as much effort into as it takes!”

The girls took great delight in bobbing up and down with small clapping and giggles of approval over Roosevelt’s standing and taking a step.

He turned to look at me and said seriously, “Young man you have an open door to my office, whenever you wish it.” I thought to myself, So much better than a political contribution.

That was all I wanted to hear. It wasn’t long before many of the political obstacles were pulled out of our way. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased Abram was to hear about it.

The therapist was as good as his word. FDR was no longer tied to his wheelchair, he was able to walk a few steps across a room within a month. In a year, with the fine tuning of the braces, you hardly knew he was paralyzed from the waist down. We worked on therapies to remove the paralysis, but we were only able to restore feeling to the thighs, and some to his toes. It was a case of the damage being too old to repair fully.

We had not arrived in time to effect a cure. I was finding myself thinking that a lot lately, about a lot of things. Being ‘too late,’ just didn’t sit well with me. ‘So, thinking, I fast-tracked a ‘Polio vaccine for the rest of the country.’

We started our fledgling internet network on the west coast, hooking up various schools and the most forward-thinking businesses. With the establishment of hubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, it wasn’t long before we moved to the east coast and mid-west. The schools loved it, and big business was getting onboard.

With the schools, we introduced scholarships in semiconductors, electronics, mathematics, and engineering at all levels. We gave seminars on computer sciences, something few people had ever seen before.

It was one of our most sincere efforts, developing a curriculum that would jump-start Silicon Valley. We could have simply copied our 2037 designs, but I wanted more. I wanted a generation of young people that understood these machines and would then become innovators. I wanted William Hewlett and David Packard type, people. As it turned out, I got them. With ‘the little man’ and my leadership, we took the cream of Stanford University, San Jose State, and University of California-Berkeley grads and undergrads, and formed the nucleus of Silicon Valley, thirty years ahead of its time.

There was some debate within us for the advanced HDTV flat screen sets. We would be using them, but it was agreed that they were too much of a wartime asset to let Japan and Germany know about them. We indeed wouldn’t be selling them to the enemy! Let them find out about them, too late. Even if they stole one, it would take years for them to duplicate them. I didn’t plan on the war lasting that long, but you never knew.

We found out just why AT&T was allowed to monopolize long-distance. It turned out they had been snooping on all the calls! The government was interested in this, and a Monopoly was easier to control than a lot of different little companies.

It was a sort of semi-open warfare not with just them, but with everyone we were confronting, with our new line of products and tech services. We were cutting into their profits, and they were not going to take that lying down. It was industrial warfare and espionage. I was a bit naïve with this part of the family business, but Abram wasn’t. He took control of that facet with Nick’s assistance and the tools of our 21st-century intelligence division. We soon had an operational plan on it, not that we didn’t have problems.

There seemed to be one individual that we just couldn’t get a handle on. He or she was just too good, and it might not be only one. It was debated that it might not be someone of this timeline, but perhaps someone we had brought back with us that was not happy with the idea. I felt confident I could rule out family; but Nick, being Nick, wouldn’t rule out anyone. We were still troubled who had might have come back with us of the 12^th. Still, that got us no closer to this individual. With others, it was a different story. I was inclined to rule out one of ours as it been harder than hell and without the family’s support of this timeline, we would still be wondering where our next meal would be coming from.

I had thought we had secured our ability to prevent the theft of some of our electronics. That proved not to be the case. We had limited our adversaries access, but there is always someone out there that enjoys the problem of stealing the unstealable.

Not patenting a proprietary process was one way to keep others from figuring out how to duplicate something. But it didn’t stop people from trying. We found someone had stolen one of our monitors and workstations. We were able to track it and again learned just how far our competitors were willing to go. In this case, it was one of the other families using government help.

Reverse engineering was always a worry, but it must have been frustrating for them running into a series of integrated circuits! Semi-conductors and transistors were still in their infancy, and it didn’t help with those black chipsets that defied investigation. Still, it was a problem we needed to put an end to. They didn’t have anything we wanted, but we crashed their programs anyways. But that was not deterring them.

There was not much more to do but go after their core products, and key personnel and hit them in the money belt. We created a program to ruin them, first attacking their stocks, planting negative information about the status of their corporate operations, short selling of their stock, hostile takeovers of their vulnerable assets and suppliers. Undercutting their pricing on goods and services. Hiring away those that were key to their operations. Where we could, we tried suing them for whatever our legal team could come up with. Lastly getting the goods on their political clout and neutralizing them, and even forcing their politicians to work for us. I was playing hardball now, with a war on the horizon, I couldn’t afford to waste time.

It was not the way I wanted to do business, but they didn’t seem to understand that, so I had to play hardball. One by one I singled out a player of a rival family and ended him socially and business-wise. By increments, I undermined those of the rival families that seemed to be causing the most trouble. Eventually, the heads of those families got the message and put out the word to stop their activities against my family.

We were now no longer a lesser family, having risen in the ranks to the degree that we were not to be bullied with impunity, the other families were a bit slow to realize that. Abram couldn’t have been happier. It cemented our relationship, and the rest of the family was falling inline with him.

I did let up somewhat and held out an olive branch, making agreements that in the end we would license out some of our patents to them at a fair price. Some of my group felt it was only fair as they had been the original holders in the first place. We figured we had saved them years of research and development, and in that way, earned our cut.

We still couldn’t find that one individual and the other families were not giving up that information. It was a clue that whoever it was, was still providing them with valuable assistance. We would have to up our game and watch out for any interesting developments. Nick was reinstating 2037 security protocols, as we had gotten lax. Such a person could build a new family from the ground up. Whether that be a good thing or not, only time would tell.

In the meantime, we let the others slowly buy into our companies, as we bought into theirs. They had done a good job before, we just made sure they didn’t rape the public as they had the first time. Besides we thought we would nail them after the war with cell phone service. Yes, the duty of a corporation is to generate greater profits for shareholders, but there was a social aspect and a public responsibility aspect as well. One that was often lost in the quest for more substantial earnings by any means. There was lots of money to be made. I just made sure the CEOs and corporate heads didn’t siphon off those gains. I had Abram join many of the corporate Boards of Directors to head off just that sort of thing, limiting corporate heads to a half percent of earnings. I figured if that was not enough to keep proper officers, then we could always find others to replace them. Shareholders were amazed at the returns on their shares that had once gone to CEOs. The millions they had lost out on by paying excessive salaries

We started our domestic products tech Blitzkrieg in the spring of 1939 with the New York World’s Fair. Exhibits included The World of Tomorrow, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, and the Los Angeles Exposition. With the introduction of hundreds of modern household products, we were a big hit. We even went so far as to sell them to fairgoers willing to pay our price on the spot, offering same-day home delivery. We also introduced bar coding of manufactured goods and its use as inventory control. Shipping innovations such as uniform palletizing and containerizing that was suitably interchangeable for trucking, rail movement, and shipboard transport. We also displayed other heavy manufactured goods, such as a new line of diesel engines and heavy-duty transmissions for tractors and trucks.

Separately we introduced a competing digital radio and television broadcasting system and were even offering broadcasting Franchise Opportunities. Advertising sponsors were intrigued. While they were not committed, they saw us giving away hundreds of digital transistor radios at the fairs. Since we had already had a digital broadcasting station in the fair area, they saw people listening to them in droves throughout the fair. They were made aware that as well as hearing music, or baseball games, the people were hearing promotions for the items we introduced and promoted at the fair, which were being sold at new local appliance stores we had just opened. One of the more interesting was the washing machine demonstrations with our own soap formulations. The Soap Opera wars were still in their infancy, but we all knew the battle lines were being drawn.

President Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to appear on television. He did it from the World’s Fair in New York City on April 30, 1939. While FDR’s speech had an extremely limited B&W broadcast with an RCA audience, airing only on receivers at the fairgrounds and at Radio City in Manhattan, it did make an impact. RCA had managed to beat us on that.

What they hadn’t done, was rebroadcast the speech at the other expositions across the country, as we later had and in fuller and brighter color. They never did figure out how we had done that, just that we had.

While we didn’t get to manage that for ourselves, we were quick to show off our own competing television sets. We were soon selling them as quickly as we could manufacture them. It was not hard when comparing their 5-inch circular sets, as compared with our digital 13-inch rectangular screens with exceptional picture and sound quality. For the rich, there were private showings of much superior television sets.

Setting up a remote broadcasting station at the fair was not that difficult. Since it was so new, they were not yet regulated. It attracted a great deal of attention, as anyone walking before the camera saw themselves on television, instantly. We made it seem like a more substantial camera was needed, when in fact we were just using hand-held cams within large, clumsy boxes.

People were excited to see themselves on the televisions with the background showing people walking up and down the concourse. Every so often we played ads for our products which included fast-food products, hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, assorted ice cream flavors, that we were also selling at the fairs.

Yes, we were shameless as we opened several fast-food restaurants at the Fairs; selling hamburgers and French fries, soft drinks, milkshakes, fried fish, fish and chips, and chicken, pizza, and other easily recognized twenty-first-century offerings. While we didn’t go so far as stealing the MacDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken’s (KFC), or Pizza Hut’s brand names, that was about the only thing we didn’t steal as we re-created those restaurants, and sold them under our own franchise names. You can’t steal what hasn’t yet been created.

We continued to expand our efforts with shows at every state fair, and major city. We began hiring more people to work in our factories which were manufacturing those products and putting more of them to work. We were receiving orders and finding they were buying our products almost as fast as they could be manufactured. This was where our inventory control and use of bar coding, and shipping methods paid off. We were making inroads to ending the recession. However, with the war drawing nearer, we worked to create assembly lines that could be easily converted to war use.

The family formed a national broadcasting network for television and radio, which would transmit the new digital signal. The development of our broadcasting network hit a few road bumps with the FCC and the lobbying efforts of the other networks against us, but they allowed us our licensing when we applied a little arm twisting of our own. Soon, we were in business. It didn’t take long before we became a dominant media force. While the rules would limit the number of Broadcast stations and Newspapers, we found we only needed one channel within each market city, at least for now. If we found we needed broader coverage, we would circumvent the rules with dummy corporations.