A Media Titan Shares Stories of Mentors Who Impacted His Life

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You can use your extra care card to shop the lowest prices of the season with new deals each week. This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show. And one of our favorite subjects to talk about are leadership and mentorship. And what they really mean, not just the jingoistic use of these words, but real-life mentors, real-life leaders, and what we learned from them. Up next, a story from Ray Cole, the president of Citadel Communications and himself a leader and mentor. Ray is the author of a new book called Hangin' With Winners. And today he shares with us the stories of the people he considers to be his greatest mentors.

Take it away, Ray. I've had two outstanding mentors in my life, very blessed in that respect. In fact, I had three. I was a junior in college. My school was starting an internship program for the first time in its history.

Because I was working in my dad's grocery store while still going to college, I didn't sign up. And the chairman of the department pulled me aside and he said, Ray, we're starting an internship program, it's really important that we get our best students placed in business across the community here in Sioux City. And I need you to do an internship.

If you can do this confidentially, I'm going to give you the list of businesses and I'll even let you pick which business you get to go. Everybody else was going to be given assignments that were rather arbitrarily given. And so I took the list home and I looked it over and there were some great companies on that list in the Sioux City area. But the one that caught my attention was KCAUTV, an ABC affiliate that I had grown up watching. I liked the on-air talent.

The product was terrific. And I went back the next day and I said, you know what, you have a deal. How can I pass this up? I can do an internship for 10 weeks at a TV station. I'll get three hours of college credit and you're going to pay me the minimum wage at that station. And I can't remember what the minimum wage was back then. Maybe it was two bucks an hour.

It wasn't very much. I did the 10-week internship and at the end of that 10 weeks, the general manager of that station, a gentleman by the name of Bill Turner who passed on just a year or so ago, he was very involved in the broadcast industry, very respectful. At the very time, he was serving as chairman of the board of governors of the ABC Television Network. He was not your typical small market television GM. Bill Turner, at the end of that internship that junior year, pulled me in and he said, we really enjoyed having you here so much so we're going to offer you a full-time job right now that will be waiting for you one year from now when you graduate from college.

I was dumbfounded. I said, yes, I would love to come back, do another 10-week internship at the end of my senior year and then move right into that full-time job you're offering and that's what happened. And so for me to begin in the business under his watchful eye was very meaningful and it was really, really gratifying some 30 years later for me to be elected to serve in that very same position. I was elected to the ABC Board of Governors in 2004 and I was elected chairman and I served in that capacity of the board of governors from 2006 to 2008.

And then I remained on in an emeritus capacity, chairman emeritus capacity. So I had a 15-year run on the board of the ABC Television Network's affiliates and that was among the most gratifying aspects of my career to engage network executives in news and sports and that eventually became ESPN as ABC Sports was morphed into ESPN, but news and sports, entertainment, and then all of the business aspects of the network affiliate partnership at a time that we were seeing sweeping, consequential changes on the horizon as it related to digital television. And so that's how I started. That's sort of where I wound up.

Like a lot of things in life, there were more zigs and zags than there were straight lines, but it has been a truly rewarding career that I value. And through all of those experiences, I was able to forge a myriad of relationships. The first mentor I had was the person that I worked for during my internship in 1976. His name was Claire Giles and he was the business manager at that station. And he signed the original license application that was filed with the AFCC when KCAUTV, previously the call letters at the time he signed it on were KVTV. That's how long he'd been in the business.

He signed the original license application in 1953 and he had a long history in radio, a powerhouse radio station in Yankton, South Dakota called WNAX. And so he had a great background in radio and then television broadcasting. He was my first mentor.

And then in 1985, mentor number three came along, a gentleman by the name of Phil Lombardo. And Phil had a burning entrepreneurial spirit. He had been running a publicly traded company called Corinthian Broadcasting, which was a division of Dun and Bradstreet. And they had big, pretty major market stations around the country from Indianapolis to Sacramento to Tulsa to Houston and other markets. And he wanted to go out and start his own company and that's just what he did.

And KCAU in Sioux City, Iowa was the third station he acquired under his own banner, which was Citadel Communications. And he became the mentor of all mentors for me. And together we went out and acquired more stations and we remain partners to this day. He's a great friend, more than a mentor to not only me, but to my family. And I wouldn't have achieved anywhere near what I did without the guidance offered and provided by all three of those mentors. I think the overriding advice sort of transcends all three of those mentors. And that's a philosophy of, as a broadcaster, the need to do good in order to do well.

You have to serve your local community. You really have to do good in that community if you're going to do well from a bottom line profitability standpoint. And I think that is what they deeply instilled into me is that philosophy.

No doubt about it. And a great job by Monty Montgomery on the piece, You've Got to Do Good to Do Well. The theme we hear over and over again as it relates to entrepreneurship.

It's not theft doing well in business, it's service. Ray Cole's story about his mentors here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American stories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

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