Remembering August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon

A few months back a friend of mine suggested that I might write a book titled "51 Cards!" When I questioned her on this title, she said: "51 Cards" is the title Kevin (her husband) proposed for your yet to be published autobiography. It alludes to your lamentation that the Baby Boomer generation is "not playing with a full deck" due to the emotional scars inflicted by such events as the Vietnam war, the assassinations of MLK, JFK and RFK, etc." I think the title is perfect and I have often said that people of my generation lived through many life changing events in our formative years. This is not an excuse, but an explanation of what we are about. And so today, I am remembering August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon. It was on this day, 35 years ago, that the President of the United States (POTUS) Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation as a result of the Watergate Scandal.

On June 15, 1974, I received my BA degree from California State University, Los Angeles. What I recall most about my last year in college were the Senate Watergate hearings. These hearings ran from May 17, 1973 through August 7, 1973. The hearings were televised, but remember I was working and going to college full time, so being able to watch the televised hearings was a luxury. The university was nice enough to set up televisions in the library so that the actual social network of students could stop by the library in between classes to watch the hearings. Remember now, this is when we still only had three networks...NBC, ABC, and CBS. Oh, and yes we did have our newspapers. According to Wikipedia "Each network maintained coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned in to at least one portion of the hearings." The Senate issued its seven volume report on June 27, 1974.

Within a few weeks of my graduation I went to work for a small financial corporation. Every evening I would go back to my little apartment and turn on the news. But on August 8, 1974, I hurried home as Richard Nixon was going to address the nation at 6:00PM PST. We had learned this from listening to radio news that afternoon. That evening I watched intently as Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation. That was 35 years ago today and I invite you to listen to part of this speech here or visit the Miller Center to hear the whole speech.

The next day I went to work, but I brought my television with me. At 9:00AM PST, August 9, 1974, all of the employees gathered around this little 12 inch Zenith black and white television to watch Gerald Ford become our 38th president. It didn't matter which political side of the aisle you were on, this was, hopefully, a once in a lifetime event. If you want to learn more about this time in our history, I invite you to read "All the President's Men" by Woodward and Bernstein and "Blind Ambition" by John Dean.

It is funny, last evening I happened to catch Lewis Black on HBO. It wasn't a new bit, but I listened again to him as he described how "our" young lives were ruled by fear during the cold war. We practiced for air raid drills, nuclear bombs, hid under our wooden desks, and watched some of our parents waste their hard earned money building bomb shelters. "51 Cards", indeed!

"There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."

The benefit of being a "blogger-in-chief"?

It was 1986 when Dennis and I purchased a country inn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Our goal at the time was to live the lifestyle of Bob and Joanna of "Newhart" fame. You may remember this television show which takes place in Vermont and follows the goings-on of the innkeepers, their guests, employees, neighbors, and contractors (think Larry, Darryl and Darryl). We owned and operated Cranmore Mountain Lodge for eleven years. Someday I might write a book about our experiences as innkeepers, but today I want to discuss how marketing our inn would have been easier, if only we were able to communicate instantaneously via a blog. Keep in mind when we first purchased the inn our only means of immediate communication was the telephone line (and in this small town you "dialed" four numbers to call your neighbors). We did not own a personal computer, in fact, most people in 1986 did not own personal computers. We owned a standard typewriter!!

As the years went by we did purchase a PC and a dot-matrix printer! Around 1990, I came up with the idea of creating a newsletter. It was called Inn-Ovations. I was the reporter, editor, photographer and publisher. Twice a year we would create the newsletter with the assistance of a local graphic arts company, Express Graphics (but there was nothing express about the turn around time). When the newsletters were printed and ready to mail, we would struggle to print the mailing labels, debate first-class mailing vs. bulk mailing, and then we would gather with our employees to prepare the newsletters for the post office. Our usual distribution was around 2500, with the postage cost (first class) ranging from $700-$800 and after printing and prep costs each distribution totaled about $2500. And hopefully we reached 2500 American households!

While our newsletter served us well at the time (our repeat guests loved the newsletter and would actually call us to check when they could expect the next issue), the bottom line is that this process was time consuming, expensive, and really not timely. Today I am wondering how our stint as innkeepers would have been enhanced if we were to have had a "blog", that is, a way to instantly communicate, interactively, with our guests and prospective guests. I can only imagine.

If there is any question as to the marketing efficacy of having a blog, I invite you to watch a video of the July 21, 2008, NBC Nightly News segment called "Bloggers-in-Chief."

And in the meantime, I can report that many of our clients now have blogs and the Google page rank for these blogs quickly jumps to a 3 or 4, in short order. Some clients use their blog to share news about their businesses, some for commenting on local or national news items, some to post short and timely articles about their field of expertise. I regularly read some of our innkeeper clients' blogs and I have come to learn the award winning Lodge at Moosehead Lake is "going green" by installing an outdoor wood furnace which will greatly reduce innkeepers Linda and Dennis Bortis' dependence on heating oil; Alice and Len Schiller, owners of the Inn at Stockbridge, just completed their 14th summer as innkeepers and over at Hartstone Inn their sous chef, Zeph Belanger, was named first runner up in a state-wide Maine lobster cooking competition, while innkeepers Michael and Mary Jo Salmon celebrated their 10th anniversary as innkeepers this past May. All great stuff from these innkeepers, each a blogger in chief.

Since I am Webconsuls' Saturday blogger, I like to provide you with some lighthearted humor. In preparing my blog I decided to see if Cranmore Mountain Lodge's present innkeepers have a blog. Guess what? They do. But after reading it, I have decided their blog is an example of how not to use a blog. Enjoy!