Hi! I Don’t Remember Your Name. Must Be Auto Show Season.

North American International Auto Show Held In Detroit

On Jan. 12 and 13 more than five-thousand members of the international media will crowd into Detroit’s rejuvenated Cobo Hall for the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS). It’s much easier to say “Detroit Auto Show,” and some take that convenient shortcut.
They come for several reasons. One, they think they’ll get free stuff from the automakers after a new vehicle is unveiled. Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s free and they want it. Some grab a few of whatever it is and sell it on eBay to someone who is willing to pay for something that someone got for free.
The main reason they come, however, is to see how many people’s names they remember whom they haven’t seen since the last auto show. The game of “media credential eye dip” is always fun, especially when you catch someone who forgot your name dipping his/her eyes down to your badge so they can fake remembering you. That’s why I turn my badge around. The panic is delicious.
I attended my first NAIAS as Detroit Bureau Chief for CNN in 1990. Things were different back then. The first press event of the two days of media previews was the Pontiac brand. Being early in the morning they served us a breakfast  that yielded more natural gas than fracking. Sausage, eggs, bacon, biscuits, and lots of coffee. It was wonderful.
The highest point on the floor was the Oldsmobile tower and photographers vied for a spot on the small platform to try to grab a panoramic view of the floor but ultimately failed since the platform was barely 10 feet off the ground. It did afford, however, excellent views of forklift drivers delivering carpet to each stand.
But OK, I lied. Of course the reporters all come to see the new vehicles and to interview high-ranking executives of the auto companies in hopes of scoring an exclusive.
It can be a little tricky, especially if an executive at an automaker doesn’t talk to his boss often enough.
This happened when a marketing chief at one auto company told me about a new incentive program to soon be launched. When I later interviewed the CEO for the AP and asked him about it, his face turned red and then redder when I told him who had given me that information. Apparently the marketing chief hadn’t given his boss the same scoop. The marketing chief wasn’t around for too many weeks after that. Oops!

For a few years CNN produced a special program on the auto show. It took different forms over the years from a series of long pieces to having a couple of our anchors come to Detroit to both complain about the cold in Detroit and introduce various segments.

One year, however, the president of the network decided I should do 6-8 minute walkarounds of featured vehicles with the CEO or top marketing exec. That didn’t always go so well.

After walking around the vehicle 3 times the CEO of that particular automaker stopped, gave me a pitiful look and said, “that’s all I know.”

On the other hand there was the case of then GM CEO Jack Smith who was stymied, but only temporarily, thanks to his smarts and good sense of humor.
I’d always had a good rapport with Smith and he went along with this idiotic scheme. Our segment with him featured an orange Chevy Silverado pickup truck. We walked around the thing 50 times and he told me everything he knew about it until I appeared to have stumped him. “I know the truck looks orange, Jack,” I said. “But you know how it is. You guys always come up with some crazy name for your colors. What do you call this?” The look of panic on his face lasted just a second until this very smart man recouped, cracking a triumphant smile and replying, “well Ed, I think we’ll just call it Orange.” His PR guy stopped crying from inside and the day was saved.

How nice a guy was Jack Smith? After I got laid off from CNN after 20 years…along with many others, I covered the GM holiday party for the Associated Press. While all the other beat reporters were around Jack greeted me warmly and said so everyone could hear, “biggest mistake CNN ever made.” Don Lemon was still 5 years off.

Can’t wait for this year’s auto show. If you’re going. Please turn your badge around.

The Night They Killed the 60’s

timessquareI have to admit I’ve given no thought at all about how to celebrate turning the calendar to another cold month. There was a time when this was important to me, but even then I had no capacity to plan for it because there’s never a surprise involved. December, and therefore the current year, ends and January, and a new year begins.
The surprise comes with a certain degree of spontaneity, such as what happened to me and a few of my friends when we were home from college for the holidays.
It was December 31, 1969. We couldn’t bear the fact that the swingin’ 60’s were about to come to an end.
We were mainly 11 and 12 years old when the Beatles led the British Invasion, a year or two later our voices changed, the girls we knew grew things the boys, um, noticed, and we graduated high school vowing to make an impact on whatever college campuses were lucky enough to welcome us.
In my case, it was whatever college was desperate enough to let me in since I spent most of high school screwing off, majoring in hanging out at Lorenzo’s pizza on Union Turnpike in Queens.
So it was hard to let go of the 60’s, but we HAD to do something.
There it was, 11p.m. that New Year’s Eve and six of us were feeding our pimply faces with Chicken Delight, a Long Island delicacy. I forget who piped up, “this sucks, let’s go to Times Square!”
We immediately licked our fingers, got in my ’63 Rambler my father had bought for $35 and beelined it for the subway and grabbed the E train bound for 42nd Street. Halfway to Times Square all the lights went out in our car and we were sure we’d made a bad mistake and we’d end up on the front page of the New York Daily News with the headline, “New Year’s Shivved!”
Didn’t happen. We got to Times Square by 11:45 and were immediately sucked into the crowd. There was no security back then, just a few dozen NYPD blues unfortunate to get stuck with that duty.
Our bodies moved on the wave of the crowd as we circumvented the famous crossroads. A guy said he was Puerto Rican stuck a joint in my mouth, smiled and wished me the happiest of new year. Good start! Then he yanked it out and gave it to someone else. You don’t bogart even on New Years Eve!
Someone else poured beer down our throats and another just laughed at us.
Then a million heads tilted up at the Allied Tower, as it was known back then. The ball slowly descended until the giant “1970” lit up. 60 seconds to kill the 60’s.
The crowd got quiet. There was nothing left to do but descend into the subway and take the E train home knowing there was no turning back. It was time to grow up. Ha! Not a chance.

A few lines about edLINES.co from ed

garstenmugThere was this snowflake. The snowflake caught the jet stream and traveled around the world before melting into a flyspeck of a puddle on a some guy’s foot in Ecuador…who promptly drank it. The story of the adventures of this fictional and ill-fated snowflake changed my life…and I was only in second grade!

My teacher, a cute little smile factory named Mrs. Kantor, wrote all sorts of complimentary things on my paper which gave me enough encouragement to think writing was something I might like to pursue. I was too young to think about it as a career, but not too young to think I could come up with good stuff to write on school desks, bathroom walls and autograph books.

After that I also caught a jet stream but to no place in particular. At first I wanted to follow my older brother’s footsteps to become a doctor, but I when I saw how hard he had to study I quickly ditched that idea. My idea of studying for an exam was to crank the stereo, put my feet up on my desk and breeze through my notes and textbook for, oh, a good, hard, fifteen minutes.

After playing the Cowardly Lion in the 5th grade presentation of “The Wizard of Oz” and getting rave reviews for the way I swung my tail, I wanted to become an actor. So I majored in speech and theater in college at Oswego State in upstate New York. Guess what? I couldn’t memorize lines so the hell with acting.

During the first month of my freshman year an upper classman with whom I shared several drunken binges decided I’d be perfect for a job as a DJ at WOCR, the campus radio station. Incidentally, Al Roker also worked there. He was three years behind me. So my buddy dragged me down to the student union where the station lived, told the guy on the air they should give me a shift and the guy told me to come back on Saturday where I would be on the air from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

The first record I ever spun was “Jean” by Oliver. It was sappy as hell but a giant hit. The first word I ever spoke on the radio was, “uhhhhhhh.” To make a long, long story short, it launched a broadcasting career that took me from some little radio stations in Central New York as an afternoon and morning drivetime announcer, to Tucson, Arizona , where I earned my Masters in Journalism at the University of Arizona while working as weekend weatherguy, producer and reporter at KGUN-TV, while holding down announcer jobs at two radio stations, and ultimately to CNN as a founding producer at CNN2 which became Headline News (which became dreck) and finally as bureau chief and correspondent at the CNN Detroit Bureau.

After the purge of 2001 where hundreds of us were laid off from CNN, I freelanced briefly at the Automotive News, then was hired as National Auto Writer at the Associated Press where I spent 15 months before I was recruited by The Detroit News to be their General Motors beat writer. After three years there, Chrysler hired me to launch their first blog which was basically the company’s very first foray into social media.
After a year there, a team was created around me within Corporate Communications which melded social media, broadcast media relations, the media website and video production.
I’ve led that team, now called FCA Digital Media since Oct. 1, 2006 and have been blessed with three original members remaining from the ten I started with and five who came later and are just wonderful and talented people. Our team is unique in the industry and I’ll write more about it as we go along.

The one constant in my life, besides my great family, is writing. Believe me, I’m no TV hunk so it was my writing that kept my career alive. Figuring out how to make the transition from broadcast to print wasn’t easy, but with some help from kind and patient editors it was a success. Now, writing for social media and videos for Fiat Chrysler, the ability to put a few words together has kept me going 41 years into my working life.

Writing is never work, it’s recreation. I believe I’ll write for the rest of my life. In fact, the only thing I’d ever want on my tombstone is “he was a decent writer.”

So this website is all about the writing. Some of it will be observations on life based in truth, some will be anecdotes from my crazy worklife, some of it will be totally fiction, but the goal of every single piece will be to give my readers a little verbal oasis where you can hopefully sip a little levity and crack a smile or a grin.

I’d hate that snowflake to have melted in vain.