Ted turner who is

Ted Turner: They were with me. Ted Turner: Right. We got knocked down repeatedly, knocked right down flat, but we came back up because we had a lead keel on the bottom of the boat. I knew I had a strong boat, but we hit the waves so hard that when the race was over and we inspected for damage, we found that the whole front of the boat, all the welds had cracked and broken.

So the plates were floating. The hull plates were floating on the frames. All the welds had broken in the front part of the boat, and we had to take the boat out of the water and completely re-weld it in the boat yard. Ted Turner: From society.

It started with my father. I went to military school — boarding school — for a number of years. Ted Turner: Pretty good. I was a pretty good student. I was a B-plus student for the most part. That was the best I ever did. Ted Turner: At one time.

I was going to a religious school when I was in high school. We were exposed to a lot of evangelists and I got converted to Christianity. Ted Turner: I was. At boarding school, we had required study hall, and I was usually able to get my homework done in less than the two-and-a-half hours, and I read the rest of the time.

I did some reading, just for information, on my own. Ted Turner: When I was young, mainly I read history. I was fascinated by history, and I read a lot about animals and birds. I was fascinated by nature, but I really was interested in lots of things.

I was interested in movies and somewhat in sports. I was interested in just about everything. Your interest in the Civil War has been demonstrated by a number of your films and TV shows. Was that an interest when you were young as well? Ted Turner: When I studied history, I was perhaps most fascinated by military history. Growing up in the South, and having moved down from the North, the Civil War was all around us. I went to school for six years in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Missionary Ridge, where one of the great battles was fought.

So there were monuments all around. World War II, because my father fought in that, and I was alive during it, even though I was a young boy, I remember it vividly. The Civil War probably drew my interest a little bit more than some of the others. Ted Turner: Not really. I would have rather been home because it was pretty confining. Ted Turner: I was a mild problem kid. The usual things. Were there any books that particularly meant a lot to you when you were growing up?

Ted Turner: Sure, lots of them. Lots of them. When I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek — and to a lesser extent Roman — history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil.

I enjoyed Gone With the Wind and history books, as I said, of all types. I was fascinated by naval history. Then I ended up, you know, spending a good bit of my time racing sailboats, and when I did that, I fancied myself a modern Horatio Nelson. Did that have an influence on your own love of the land? Ted Turner: Yes, no question about it. My father loved land, too, and so did my grandfather, and I love the outdoors and nature and flowers and trees and plants and everything from insects to elephants.

Ted Turner: Yeah. He lost his business and his farm, my grandfather did, and my father had to drop out of college. He never did declare bankruptcy, but he lost everything in the first year of the Depression. Ted Turner: No question about it. He hated to see his father lose everything, and he was tremendously afraid that that would happen to him, too.

He had an almost paranoid fear of going broke. Ted Turner: He got into it while he was in college taking traffic counts for the billboard company that he was working for, counting the number of cars that passed their billboards in certain streets. You stand there with a clicker, and you click every car that comes by that has a chance to see the billboard.

You do that for an hour. Ted Turner: Oh, yeah. He went into business for himself later on. I worked for him in the summers starting when I was 12 years old. Ted Turner: I would have rather been able to play, but I was working a hour week when I was 12 years old in the summer. The rest of the time, I had to work.

I think he started out paying me ten cents an hour. It was below the minimum wage; I remember it was 85 cents an hour. What good would that do? I started as a bill poster, constructing billboards and painting them and maintaining the billboards.

I did that for about five years. Then, when I got to be about 17 years old, I put on a coat and tie and went out with our sales manager to learn sales. Around that time, you started at Brown University. Could you tell us about your experience at Brown? Ted Turner: Brown is in the Ivy League. My dad wanted me to go to an Ivy League school, if I could get in. I did get in there. And you declared classics.

I believe your father disapproved of the classics study. But Brown was a liberal arts school. Like the economics courses, I took several of them, but they were all theoretical. I was in the liberal arts.

The following year, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. In October , the company merged with Time Warner Inc. The company later changed its name back to Time Warner Inc. He is the chairman of the Turner Foundation , founded in , which supports efforts for improving air and water quality, developing a sustainable energy future to protect our climate, safeguarding environmental health, maintaining wildlife habitat protection, and developing practices and policies to curb population growth rates.

Turner and executive producer Barbara Pyle launched the animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers in He took over the roles of president and chief executive officer at Turner Advertising, renamed Turner Communications in the late s as the company bought several radio stations.

By , he had achieved the distinction of owning the biggest advertising company in the southeastern United States. Turner eventually expanded into television, purchasing the rights to old movies and situation comedies. The decision proved highly profitable. In , Turner made a strategic move to reach an even larger audience through the use of satellite technology.

During the late s, he conceived the idea for an all-news network. Also in the s, Turner began coloring films but eventually decided the cost was impractical. Over the course of his successful career in broadcasting, Turner married and divorced three times. His most famous marriage was his third, to actress and activist Jane Fonda. The couple married in and divorced a decade later over a disagreement on religious beliefs. Young Ted spent eight years at a Tennessee military school its motto: "Honor - Truth - Duty" , developing a love for the classics, an aggressive streak as a sailor, and a grasp of history.

His depth and tenacity would later surprise those who saw him only as a boor or a philanderer -- "Captain Outrageous" or the "Mouth from the South. Superstation After his father's suicide in , Turner -- whose maverick personality harbored outsized ambitions -- took over the family business.

He jumped to television broadcasting , buying a failing Atlanta-based UHF television station. He turned it around with "family" fare: old movies, sports, and sitcom reruns.