In my time here at AR, and at other sites, I've tried to offer whatever I've gleaned from my experience in the industry to those who might find such information useful and helpful. I hope I've been successful in that endeavor.

There's another side to this industry though, and it's not particularly pretty. It's the proliferation of ego-maniacal, and often drug-crazed idiots who, regrettably, ruined company after company. I'll list just a few in my own history.

LAFAYETTE RADIO

Lafayette Radio was a hugely successful ($110 million/annually), 50+ year-old company that was put out of business in the amazingly short span of about 3 years by one individual - Arthur Blackburn - who was brought in as the company president in 1976. Blackburn not only systematically replaced all the long-standing Lafayette buyers and store managers with his pals from J.C. Penny (from which he came) but actually purchased $15 million (at cost) of obsolete 23- channel CB equipment which he knew would arrive on U.S. shores after the FCC's edict that only 40-channel equipment could be legally sold. Blackburn stupidly believed that everything would fall into a cycle: if that item was not successful at one time, then just put it away in the warehouse for a few years, and when it's popular again, bring it back out and sell it. This was the philosophy he used with the 23-channel CB equipment, and it bankrupted the company.

Most of Lafayette's long-standing buyers were Jewish folks from New York. Blackburn, an avowed anti-semite, actually had the temerity to state one day, "I'm going to clean house of all these aging Jewish shop-keepers." It's susrpising he wasn't shot!

PICKERING

Pickering and Stanton, whose products were identical, and were made with the same parts and on the same assembly lines, were still two fiercely competitive companies, each owned outright by Walter Stanton. Stanton surrounded himself with about 8 or so "yes-men," who all but swore blind allegiance to him, and who Stanton himself trusted implicitly. God help the poor salesman who defied some of the presposterous logic of these yes-men, and tried to tell Stanton the truth. Such people earned the title of being "negative," and, while not always fired outright, were ordered to stay away from the factory for long periods of time.

Fortunately, PIckering made a good product that sounded good, worked well, and held up under abuse. PIckering (and Stanton to a large degree too) was a company that succeeded in spite of itself, especially in light of the view of these yes-men that then newcomer, Audio Technica, was "a flash in the pan," that "would be gone in two weeks."

Pickering had its "Dustamatic Brush," and Stanton its "Longhair Brush" both of which were subject to decades of industry ridicule. The fact was that the brushes actually were highly beneficial in helping the cartridge/tonearm play warped records, in keeping clean records clean and in damping low frequency resonance, but instead of informing the buying public of these benefits immediately, it took me (with the help of some of the company's top engineers) to print a pamphlet, "The Do's and the Don'ts of the Dustamatic Brush Assembly," in 1977, to finally try to put the record straight (no pun intended). By then, however, the damage was all but irreversable.

ESS

ESS had the Heil Air Motion Transformer to its credit, and when I joined the company in 1979, I truly believed the company had a vast potential to be the single largest speaker company in the country, with the best sales story too. Unfortunately, the company's head officers played dirty little games with money. They often stiffed their suppliers, which then put them on credit hold, and put the company in the untenable position of not being able to manufacture speakers for which they had orders, since they didn't have the parts in the first place! Bouncing employees' expense checks didn't encourage much admiration either.

What can you say about a company when the Chairman of the Board, in a sales meeting to all ESS sales personnel, says, "Every dealer is out to screw me, and I'm going to screw them first!" This person declared he wanted to be the center of his own empire (he actually used the word, "empire!") and invested the company's profits in no less than 13 entirelly divergent enterprises, all of which did nothing other than drain the coffers. That the company didn't delcare bankruptcy long before it did is a wonder.

ONKYO

Working for Onkyo was my first experience working for a Japanese company, and my indoctrination to the Japanese work ethic of "business as war." I learned all too quickly that "honor" meant absolutely nothing to the Japanese at Onkyo, and that all of us American "round-eyed infidels" were nothing less than expendable commodities.

In 1982, those of us in the sales department put on a series of dealer pre-shows, at which we invited key dealers to come to various hotels in which we'd rented suites, to show them prototypes of the new line of product the company was planning, and to get their opinions. The results of all of these shows were unamimously negative: the dealers thought the prototypes looked "cheap," or "cheezy," or were at the very least, "non-competitive." We reported all of this back to the Japanese at the company, but nothing whatsoever was done to them, and the new product line that fall arrived exactly as the prototypes had appeared. Sales plummeted from $27 million annually to $18 million, and I'm sure no one reading this needs to guess who took the fall for that.

I learned very quickly that the Japanese in a Japanese-owned company were "beyond reproach," and that "honor" meant absolutely nothing to them. They never admitted to any mistakes, and always blamed us Americans instead.

That's it for this time. Based on the reactions I may get from this thread, I'll either print lots more of these "gory details," or just stop here. 'Hope you enjoyed reading this stuff.