around. i don t know how to quit. it s not in my genes. surprisingly, the mouth of the south, robert edward turner iii was born in cincinnati, ohio. the eldest child of robert and florence. he was beautiful. he was just loved beyond all else. there was a vacant lot, a hollow down the street with virgin trees in it and a little creek ran through it. i would catch crayfish and put them in a jar. mischief was always around the corner. yes, yes. mischief, yes. we got a call from the house saying, grandma mccoy in the middle of the night walked into her bathroom and screamed, oh, my gosh. ted brought an alligator and put it in the bathtub. but there was also trouble at the turner household.
really not so fun, that were pretty tense. let s put them in the other room, please. run the tv games upstairs, okay, not downstairs. goodbye. he had three kids in military college. very buttoned up. a semblance of order. when jane came along, there wasn t this order any more. she knew more about us than our dad knew about it. she did her homework. our time together was a happy time for everybody. it was kind of like camelot. ted s family life was thriving. and business was booming. when he hired a los angeles times publisher to run cnn. i worked for some really some unbelievably powerful people. ted rattles my cage. i need amman, i need saudi arabia, i need the white house. things were about to get even more intense.
the first ten years. he was one of us. i mean, he would be in his house coat down having breakfast in the hard news cafe. despite his efforts, critics called cnn chicken noodle news. i ll just go ahead and talk about some sports right now. and the white house would not even issue cnn press credentials. lift off of the 25th even so, from the start, ted knew what he wanted. oh, my goodness. ted didn t care as much about ratings as he did about being the most trusted name in news. and being a network that had truly global impact. what he was doing was going to affect every state in the nation and every nation in the world. cnn took turner to cuba, to
race, and bought a bankrupt tv station. it was a broken down uhf television station in atlanta. television at its basest form. hello, i m bill teish. what next? using that little station to launch a huge idea. he began to tell me about how he was going to transform uhf television into this new world of satellite television. we changed the name of turner communications to the turner broadcasting system. ted renamed the nation wtbs. it became the nation s first superstation. and was one of the first channels of what would evolve into a cable universe with thousands more. this is wtbs, atlanta, georgia. in the early days of the superstation, programming still was at a premium. and we didn t have as much as we needed. and that programming didn t give the small station the national footprint ted wanted.
way of that. he got crushed in the america s cup in 1974. so it was kind of the ultimate comeback for him. it is close. it s always close. the year was 1977. ted took the helm and navigated his team to victory after nearly two decades in the sport. his yacht, aptly named courageous, totally dominated its competition. winning every race in best out of seven series. we finally won. big hoopla, thousands of boats coming in, thousands of people on the shoreline. champagne everywhere. and ted turns to me in the middle of the melee and said, hey, wasn t that fun? then he said, this will change your lives. because we have proven to people, that if we can do this, we can do many other things. when we return ted turner changes the landscape of tv news forever.