Argus-Leader from Sioux Falls, South Dakota • Page 11

Ann Landers 2 -Bulletin Board 6 Argus Leader, Sioux Falls, S.O. Thursday, October 3, 1985 ilj KELO's Joe Floyd: From usher to head of entertainment empire tic MW 4K Argus Leader photo by LLOYD CUNNINGHAM Joe Floyd, president of Midcontinent sits with his trademark cigar in his office at the KELO-TV station. I'm Joe Floyd. Profile: Name: Joe L. Floyd.

Date of birth: Oct. 3, 1911. Hometown: Minneapolis. Occupation: Board chairman, KELO-Land stations; president, Midcontinent and a "helluva salesman." Experience: Sixty years in the entertainment business, selling everything from vaudeville folly to video cassettes. Education: Attended the University of Minnesota.

Activities: Honorary doctorate in humane letters, 1985, University of South Dakota; USD's Citizen of the Year, 1976; South Dakota Broadcasters Hall of Fame, 1984, South Dakota State University; American Advertising Federation's Silver Medal Award, 1982. Interests: People, photography, reading, flying, deep sea fishing. Family: Wife Donna two daughters, Susan Floyd Dempster, Sioux Falls, and Nancy Floyd Thomas, Englewood, son Joe H. Floyd, Sioux Falls. Date's four-year run) as broke as when I went out." His last stab at big-time theater had been the forgettable musical Ramshackle Inn with Zazu Pitts.

"It opened in Boston and closed in Boston, all in the same week." Upon his return to Sioux Falls, Floyd received a call from showman Herman Levin, who had produced Ramshackle Inn. "He calls and wants a fast ten grand," Floyd says. "I said no. So he said, 'How about five grand or one "I told him I was never going to get into that business again." A year later, Levin's next musical opened. It was called My Fair Lady.

"That's the one I turned down!" Floyd growls with disgust. The turn of events probably was fortuitous for Sioux Falls and South Dakota. Had Broadway success lured Floyd back to the Big Apple, the history of television in the Sioux Empire would have been different. Floyd was made a partner in his movie theater business in 1946, ostensibly to keep him in Sioux Falls, concentrating on the theater business. "Eddie recognized that Joe had a very rare talent for promotion, and at the same time Eddie was expanding the theater operation," Larry Bentson, Ruben's son-in-law, says.

"He cut Joe in on a piece of them because Joe was a very perceptive guy. When you've got somebody who's real good, sometimes you make them a partner." It didn't work. Soon, a new entertainment medium, television, commanded Floyd's attention. Television could ruin the movie business, he reasoned. If he and Ruben were to survive, they'd better get into television.

Floyd wanted Midcontinent Broadcasting Co. in Sioux Falls, which owned KELO radio and a television license it hadn't activated. Floyd wanted to buy it, but Ruben was apprehensive. "Eddie was very cautious," Floyd has said. "I don't think there's ever been a venture that we've ever gotten into that Eddie didn't object to, and didn't want to go into it, and that I didn't push him into it.

"By the time I got him to go, brother I had all the negatives that there were ever to have, which was very good, because sometimes I would realize through this maneuvering where I was exposed." The Floyd image Floyd, who'd enlisted Bentson, as an ally in the television proposal, said his conviction was so great, he'd go it alone, if necessary. Benston sided with Floyd, and reluctantly, Ruben gave his consent. After the acquisition in 1952, "we immediately started to work on how we'd run a television station," Nord says. He was KELO's general manager then. "At that time, there was no question if we'd do it, but how we'd do it and how we could afford it." Floyd, whom the partners put in charge of the Sioux Falls station, faced the greatest selling job of his life.

He also faced a paradox: There were fewer than a dozen television sets in all of By FREDERIC J. HRON Argus Leader Staff Joe L. Floyd is a helluva salesman. His friends and business associates nationwide attest to that. They are sold on the charm and chutzpah, the vigor and vision of Floyd, the man who introduced South Dakotans to television and has helped build a multimillion-dollar entertainment and communications company called Midcontinent Corp.

During his almost 60 years in the entertainment business, people always have been willing to buy whatever Floyd has had to sell, from vaudeville folly to video cassettes. "He has always had a promotion up his sleeve," Evans Nord, the president of KELO-TV, says. Nord met Floyd, who is 74 today, in the 1940s when he was selling radio advertising and Floyd was managing theaters in Sioux Falls. "He'd dream something. up, then head to the radio stations.

He'd say, 'I've got a couple who are going to be married in an airplane 5,000 feet over the city. Why don't you broadcast Or, he'd have a guy sitting on top of the marquee at the Hollywood Theater for umpteen days." This hucksterism developed early in life. For a time during the Great Depression, the teen-age Floyd made his living auctioning clothes off a live model. The auction stopped when the model was down to her bathing suit but the audience didn't know that. Perhaps Floyd's greatest promotion was the game show GI Blind Date that he developed in the early 1940s to draw theatergoers into the Hollywood and Granada theaters.

The show allowed young soldiers, who were in Sioux Falls to attend the U.S. Army's communications school, to get dates with local girls. The girls would sit on one side of a partition and ask questions of the soldiers on the other side, then make a date based on their answers. "They'd meet each other, get a kiss, and off the stage they'd go. The audience loved it," Floyd says.

GI Blind Date was so popular that Floyd promoted it all the way to New York City and a four-year stint on the NBC radio network, with Arlene Francis as host. Today, the show has been reincarnated for television as The Dating Game. At the height of GI Blind Date, Floyd was earning $4,000 a week and traveling between New York City, where he worked on the show's script during the week, and Sioux Falls, where on he managed the theaters of his future partner, Eddie Ruben, and his own Sport Bowl on weekends. A rare failure Since the day in 1928 that he first donned an usher's uniform at the Minnesota Theatre in downtown Minneapolis, Floyd had been smitten by the stage, so the outlet for his newfound fortune came in backing Broadway shows. For one of the few times in his life, success eluded Floyd.

"I put my money into bum shows and lost i every dime," he says today. "I came back I CONSIDER MYSELF A HELLUVA SALESMAN! I believe I could 'mr and sell nny bloomiu' product ever made. who erected lofty towers to attract signals from Minneapolis and Omaha. Without viewers, Floyd didn't have anything to sell advertisers or the networks. And South Dakotans weren't likely to buy television sets to pick up a station that had no programming or advertising.

Locally, Floyd arranged a deal with the television distributors in town. If they'd commit to buying advertising on his station, he'd give South Dakotans a signal worth buying a television set to receive. His challenge in selling the networks and national advertising accounts was much more difficult. Floyd camped out in New York City for months before KELO's airing in May 1953. And although he put in 16-hour days calling on ad agencies and making social contacts, he had little to show for his efforts until friend Clifford Gill created "the Floyd image." Gill had been a friend from Floyd's 1920s days in the movie houses in Minneapolis.

By 1953, Gill had established a career in advertising. He felt Floyd could make an impact on Madison Avenue if he advertised in a local trade publication, Advertising News of New York, using a layout Gill had put big cigar jutting arrogantly from his mouth, under a headline that boasted: "I'm Joe Floyd. I consider my myself a helluva salesman." Floyd was reluctant to go with the ad because he thought it was too egotistical, Nord says. "I thought, it's like saying I'm a helluva guy," Floyd says. "But Gill insisted." The ads did the trick, and Floyd's fortunes began to change.

He became a celebrity in advertising circles. Everyone wanted to meet the fellow with the big cigar. "It was the most successful ad campaign of any television station in the country," Nord says, and the station used it for almost two decades. "We merchandised his face with the cigar on cigarette lighters, money clips and tie clasps. We'd give those to advertising executives instead of a business card." Floyd once said, "People would say, 'Let me see that crazy guy with the It was the greatest door opener in the world." The most important door it opened was to the office of George Laboda, the advertising Salesman See 5B Joe Floyd in a KELO advertisement.

'It was the most successful ad campaign of any television station in the country. We merchandised his face with the cigar on cigarette lighters, money clips and tie clasps. We'd give those to advertising executives instead of a business Evans Nord KELO president Sioux Falls, those bought by enthusiasts (to bioux hails, at the end or GI Blind together, it featured a picture of loyd, a Floyd foresaw potential for television in South Dakota Out of this seemingly defensive By FREDERIC J. HRON stations in the country, Floyd wor thing coming, instead of being company, but acknowledge that it new FM radio station Midco put on threatened, his attitude was, How can we get a piece of The Midcontinent story begins with Eddie Ruben, now 87. His father, a pioneer in the movie business, had formed a chain of about 100 theaters.

In the 1920s, the chain was sold to Paramount studios; Eddie, following in his father's footsteps, became a vice president in Paramount, working out of New York City. But the Ruben family fortune, thought secure in Paramount stock, crashed with the stock market in TelevisionSee 5B posture has grown a communications and entertainment behemoth, Midcontinent or Midco for short. The privately owned South Dakota company has 22 active subsidiaries divided among four divisions; its holdings include movie theaters, broadcasting, cable systems, computer processing, telecommunications and a host of smaller but related businesses scattered from North Dakota to Florida to Arizona. Midco employs 450 full-time workers, and part-timers and seasonal employees keep the payroll around 600. Tne partners won't reveal any financial information about the ried about another competitor on the horizon: cable television.

Would the import of foreign signals and the proliferation of channels bleed network television to death? Floyd and his two partners from Minneapolis, E.R. "Eddie" Ruben and N.L. "Larry" Bentson, didn't wait to find out. They plunged into cable, collecting franchises for communities in South Dakota and five other states. Today, video recorders and video tape rental threaten to realign the entertainment industry.

Floyd, Ruben and Bentson again are there through their newly formed Mo-vietime Video venture. the air in August in Wichita, Kan. At the same time, he's plotting the expansion of Movietime Video into Midco's Upper Midwest markets. By now, entering new businesses has become second nature to the company. It wasn't always that way.

Floyd, a transplanted South Dakotan with an appetite for work and an eye for opportunity, brought an adventurous spirit to what was a conservative theater company. "Joe was always looking for something new and still is," Clifford Gill, an advertising executive in Los Angeles, says. He has known Floyd since boyhood days for both in Minneapolis. "If he saw some Argus Leader Staff oe L. Floyd was a theater man in the late 1940s, fascin-H ated but concerned by a new invention called television.

Though the medium was in its infancy, and many people were convinced it would never amount to much, Floyd saw its potential. And he worried. Would people still visit the theaters he owned if they could watch motion pictures in the home? Floyd convinced his partners that they had to get into television, and a couple of years later, KELO-TV in Sioux Falls was born. In the 1960s, as president of one of the strongest network television probably ranks among the 10 largest in Sioux Falls in annual revenue. "We've been very fortunate," Bentson says of the company, which has sprouted from a circuit of theaters assembled in the 1930s.

"Each of the businesses we've been in has grown and flourished in addition to the new businesses we've entered." And the company continues to grow. Bentson, the deal-maker among the trio of principal owners, says he's working on acquisitions all the time. "Call me by the end of the month and ask me about our audio group," he says, barely pausing for a breath after discussing the People From wire reports Prince Andrew is not thinking of marriage yet The current period is anything but a time of renewed conservatism, Wolfe said. "It's crazed." He said that until recently, divorce was considered a sign of moral failing. "Today if a man gets divorced, all of his friends call up to get the spelling of his new girlfriend's name," Wolfe said.

Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff and other best sellers, was in Bloomington to speak at Indiana University. Singer Roberts inducted into Hall of Fame ORANGE, Mass. Country-western singer Kenny Roberts of Acton, whose recording of Never See Maggie Alone sold more than 1 million copies in the 1950s, has been inducted into the Massachusetts Country Western Hall of Fame. Roberts was inducted at the Massachusetts Country Western Association's seventh annual awards show Monday night in Randolph, radio station WCAT, where he has a morning show, said. Roberts is a 40-year veteran of country-western music and is world champion yodeler, a title he won in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1964, the station said.

Emmy winner Daly gives birth to daughter LONDON Prince Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II, said Wednesday he isn't thinking about marriage, but if he does meet the woman of his dreams, it will come like a lightning bolt. The 25-year-old prince, appearing in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program, said he does not know what he's looking for in a wife. "I have not had any chance to think about it," Andrew said. "If I do find somebody, then it's going to come like a lightning bolt and you're going to know it there and then," he told the BBC interviewer.

"But of course that is 'if and 'if is a very big word in the English language." Andrew, a helicopter pilot who served tuith tha Dnval Nsuv Hiirino tKo LOS ANGELES Emmy winner Tyne Daly has given birth to her third daughter but the detective she plays on the Cagney Lacey television show will have to wait until next year to have her third child. Alexandra, weighing 8 pounds and 13 ounces, was born at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at 4:40 p.m. Tuesday with the help of the actress' husband, actor-director Georg Stanford Brown, hospital spokesman Ron Wise said Wednesday. "Everybody's fine," Wise said. The birth was three weeks overdue.

The couple, married for 19 years, has two teen-age daughters, Elizabeth and Kathryne. Mary Beth Lacey, the character Daly portrays on the CBS series, is not due to Ex-EPA officer says he understands Bhopal now NORTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. The head of the new National Chemical Studies Institute says he now understands how disaster can result from normal human reactions to chemical spills after living across the Kanawha River from a huge plant. Lew Crampton, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency off i-cal, moved into a garage apartment across the river from a Union Carbide plant Sept.

7 in hopes of creating a dialogue in an area divided by recent chemical spills. Kanawha Valley industrial leaders formed the institute after the Dec. 3 Union Carbide leak in Bhopal, India, which killed 2,000 people. Crampton said he was awakened one night by a siren from the Carbide plant, which sets off alarms during spills. "I didn't know whether they'd released a ton of mega-death or whether some workman had dropped a hammer on his toe.

So I did the dumbest thing in the world: I went down to the plant to look," he said. The spill turned out to be too small to require reporting to regulatory agencies, but Crampton said his reaction was just what the people of Bhopal did when the India leak occurred. Prince Andrew war jn 1982, gained a playboy reputation after a succession of purported romances made the front pages of British tabloids. He said the media has been too quick to leap to conclusions about women he has been seen with. won't be seen as conservative period BLOOMINGTON, Ind.

The 1980s will not be remembered as a conservative period in American history, despite what some social observers might think, author Tom Wolfe said. give birtn until hebruary. uacKstage ai Tyne Daly the Emmy Awards show last week, the actress said she would use padding until the TV baby is born. 4.