WVIA pledge drives

Back in the day when the company was fresh out of the blocks, the general managers that came before my wave lived and died by the following credo: Good food, good service and a clean atmosphere.

It was simple. And I like simplicity.

But by the time I became a GM, the corporate mentality from 1,000 miles away had already inserted plenty of mission creep into the job descriptions of what I'll call "my generation" of GMs.

No longer were the GMs expected to work a 40-hour week and provide the big 3: Good food, good service and a clean atmosphere. Once the little company that could was acquired by the big company that thought it could, 50-60 work weeks were the norm. And a day off would normally involve getting caught up on paperwork, phone calls up the poop shoot (pre-Internet & cell phone), PENNDOT meetings, City Council meetings or whatever far-flung thing some self-important corporate suit thought might affect your unit.

Oh, and the higher-ups were real big on community service, volunteerism and all of that feel-good, sounds good, publicity-generating malarkey. So the way I saw things at the time, if we had to do some volunteer work, we might as well  have had some fun while we were at it.

Enter WVIA TV...
 

L to R: Paul Grillini, MC, Monica Bloom and Virginia Lupton


 This picture was taken in 1988. During the WVIA pledge drives, my Kidder St. employees and I would man the phones on one night. And then we also donated 25 Hambo platters on one of the other nights. Yes, the volunteers always fed the other volunteers. And if you've never had a Hambo sandwich, you have missed out on one of this area's lost treasures

We may not have helped to educate young minds by way of public broadcasting, we may not have helped to financially prop up yet another season of Star Trek or Monty Python, but we did have us some fun.

Mark